Fishing Gear

The clocks just jumped ahead an hour, and daytime temps are finally above the freezing mark. The days of ice fishing at your favorite lake are dwindling as the ice starts to get thinner and thinner. Plans for spring fishing trips on open water out of my trusty Alumacraft are already bouncing around...

Most anglers get comfortable with a few favorite rigs and often forget to experiment with newer models that are designed for specific applications. Sure Texas, Carolina, and Lindy rigs have caught a lot of fish and still should still be used. But this doesn’t mean that we shouldn’t experiment with...

At some point, fishing just went full speed ahead with technology. There are big debates about live sonar and whether or not you can even be competitive if you don’t use the latest innovation. However, anglers are often quick to forget to use some of the technology that has been around for a long...

No matter where you stand on any particular cultural, political, or economic division, you might have noticed that two states have become proxies for perceived extremes, California and Texas. Yet whether you consider their differences to be real or exaggerated, there’s one clear place where the...

Remember those old ads in your daily newspaper, Boys Life, or the back of those certain–ahem–men’s magazines imploring you to buy a special lure you’ve never heard of? “Better than live bait!” they cried, or even the more hyperbolic “Already banned in six states!” That’s the same kind of hype we’re...

Generally, I meet two types of fly anglers—those who tie their own flies and those who don’t. It seems to be a zero-sum game, but I’m here to make an argument for a gray area in the middle. Enter myself, the purely functional fly tyer. I’ve never smuggled exotic bird feathers to save up for a rare...

Where I’m from, you’re not really an angler until you have a decent pair of waders. In the Pacific Northwest and many other regions, you need to be able to get comfortable standing in chilly water if you’re going to catch anything outside of July and August. Whether that’s wading deep in glacial...

Walking down the dock on Day One of the 2014 Bassmaster Classic at Alabama’s Lake Guntersville, dodging fanboys, photographers, and jersey-laden anglers who looked like NASCAR drivers, I stopped at each boat. I didn’t need to talk to anyone, I just wanted to know what the fish were biting. Sure...

Captain Jamie L. Potter is one of three captains leading water rescue teams with Virginia’s Richmond Fire Department. The Richmond teams respond to more than 100 boating, wading, and driving accident calls a year, so her insights are hard-won. Capt. Potter tells us what we can do to avoid a rescue...

All nuances aside, there are really two distinct types of spearfishing out there. First, there’s spearfishing in Hawaii. Then, there’s spearfishing everywhere else. Don’t mistake one for the other: Do so and you might find yourself off the coast of Hawaii exhausted, cut up, and frustrated with the...

Sunglasses are to fishing what binoculars are to hunting: you’re not quite doing it right without a decent pair, and any serious participant always has a set glued to their face or hanging around their neck. Besides the rod and the reel, your shades are just about the most important tools in your...

While most consumer dealings are relatively frictionless, there’s something about buying and selling a boat that turns people into lunatics. I’ve sold six fiberglass boats in my lifetime, and one Coleman Crawdad jon boat. I’ve also been on the buying end of an equal number of transactions, and I can...