Conservation
- By: Ted Williams
- Photography by: Jonathan Oppenheimer
Suction dredging for gold, legal in most of the UNITED STATESbut especially popular in the West, is essentially a recreational form of mining. Six grand will buy you a portable gasoline-powered dredge, a sluice box, a wet suit and scuba gear, and you’re good to go (as they say). With a hose, usually four inches in diameter, you vacuum up inanimate and animate stuff from the bottom of the river, pushing away the big rocks and dislodging large woody debris. Because gold is heavier than wood, bark, gravel, fish eggs, fish fry, mussels, snails and insect larvae, it settles out in your sluice box (floating or anchored on shore). In most states you can buy a permit for less than the cost of a fishing license, but you don’t need one because there’s virtually no enforcement. In many locations the Mining Act of 1872 allows you to stake a claim to a river section and evict the public. Then you don’t even have to dredge; you can just hang out and enjoy your privatized public property.
Conservation
- By: Ted Williams
- Photography by: Donna Williams
Until 1972, when Congress enacted the Clean Water Act over President Nixon’s veto, Americans treated their rivers like Londoners treated their streets in the Middle Ages—emptying their excreta into them. The act authorized the Environmental Protection Agency to limit pollution by awarding discharge permits. Large federal grants helped municipalities upgrade from primary sewage treatment (removing solids) to secondary treatment (reducing biological content).
Personal History
- Photography by: Brian O'Keefe
Sometimes things work out. And sometimes they don’t. All right, picture this, ALMOST than 25 years ago: I’m the newly minted associate editor of this magazine (at the time, it was still called Rod & Reel, the Fly coming later). I’m newly married. I’m on my honeymoon. To top it off, my wife and I are spending that honeymoon in Belize, for our first flats fishing experience.
Angle on Art
- By: Bob White
- Illustrations by: Travis Sylvester
Travis Sylvester is the only artist I know who works exclusively in colored pencils, and I must confess . . . I know very little about the medium, or the process he’s chosen.
Conservation
- By: Ted Williams
MY FISHING BUDDIES AND I ARE BLIGHTED BY SEVERE GOUT. When we hobble into the offices of local doctors they tell us it results from our drinking habits. But we don’t believe that Ripple wine, which we never touch before 9 a.m., has a thing to do with our affliction. What’s more, we’ve consulted the sewer commissioner, the building inspector and the managers of five liquor stores. They all confirm what we suspect—that our diagnoses result from an abstinence cult among the medical profession, which opposes anything that feels or tastes good and which, in an effort to drum up business, is always trying to panic the public.
Going Solo For Wyoming Cutthroats
- By: Jeff Erickson
- Photography by: Greg Thomas
- and Jeff Erickson
You can chase cutthroats on easily accessed streams, such as the Snake, near Jackson, or head out from there to reach remote, wilder waters that are full of cutthroats and are visited by few anglers.
An Angle On Art
- By: Bob White
Most sporting art, especially angling art, has a practical purpose or function. Painters, photographers and printmakers try to capture a moment in time and preserve memories. Sculptors recreate objects cherished by anglers, be they fish or fly. Rod makers, net makers, boat builders and fly tiers create the tools with which we pursue our passion.
Into Mongolia
- By: Matt Harris
- Photography by: Matt Harris
Taimen are fish of legend, murderous, malevolent beasts armed with a nightmarish dental array and a cold-blooded, primeval killing instinct. These malicious assassins possess catholic tastes, and anything from lenok and grayling to rats, ducks, bats and even fellow taimen regularly fall prey to their swift, savage attacks. Taimen often hunt in packs, a habit that has earned them the soubriquet “river wolf” and conjures a frightening image to anyone who wades waist-deep into a taimen river.
Taimen broadly resemble long, lean brown trout, but unlike their smaller cousins, grow to truly enormous size. They populate a huge catchment that stretches across Asia, from the Volga and Pechora Basin in the West, to the Pacific seaboard and Sakhalin Island in the East, and their prodigious bulk and nerve-shattering strikes spawn countless stories, some little more than fanciful myths, others incontrovertibly based in fact.
