I walked along a remote Cape Cod beach at last light. The full moon had just popped above the horizon and the soft, east wind promised great fishing. A young woman stood at the water’s edge. Her black ponytail stuck out from the back of her faded Red Sox hat, and she watched her two young kids...

Most anglers caught their first fish on a worm beneath a bobber. Saltwater junkies often skip worm hatches for bigger bait like menhaden, herring, sardines, mullet, or ballyhoo, but worms aren’t just for little kids in sweetwater. When salty species like black drum, weakfish, striped bass, tarpon...

The sea at false dawn was a mess. It had been blowing for a week, with strong Easterlies stacking up roller after 6-foot roller to pound the beach. Rain fell long and hard and rivers brought down tree limbs and coffee-colored water. Huge clumps of bladderwort and saltcord grass floated on the...

When I first heard that the Edwards Dam on Maine’s Kennebec River was coming down, I couldn’t believe my ears. The 917-foot-long dam, built in 1837 from an early mix of concrete and timber, existed in some form or fashion for 162 years until it was demolished in 1999. Edwards Dam, along with 14,15...

The school of striped bass blitzing down the beach had to be at least a quarter mile long and a hundred yards wide. Sometimes I saw their heads break the surface, other times their backs and dorsal fins sticking out. They frothed the ocean water white, trying to salvage the seven different types of...

I trimmed up my outboard, cut the motor, and drifted into the channel. The southwest wind blew warm and soft with a light smell of bladderwort drying on the rocks. I lobbed a short 10 feet of anchor rope because I wasn’t going to be there long before getting back after the stripers. My sand flats...

I grabbed the striped bass by the lip and hoisted him over the gunwale. He was a good fish, a perfect fly rod fish in fact— a scratch over 34 inches in length and weighed 15-or-so pounds. He was an easy spot on the flats some 15 minutes earlier with his pronounced, vibrant, black-and-purple...