Fishing North Shore Steelhead

By Nick Simonson
If you’ve ever laid eyes on a steelhead, you know the color they bring to a spring fishing trip. The hens are a glistening chrome with a faded pink stripe down their sides and a light green top. The bucks turn a deep pink – almost purple – throughout their sides [...]

Brown Trout Fishing

It’s What We Make of It
By Nick Simonson
A year ago this very morning I was sitting across from my old boss in a conference room as he explained the layoff benefits the company would be providing me until they’d run out or until economic conditions improved. As I had been the one handling the [...]

The Bye Week

By Nick Simonson
My guess is whomever was in charge of setting up the 2009 NFL schedule was a deer hunter and a Minnesota Vikings fan. What other alignment of the stars could explain last week’s bye for the Favre n’ Harvin show falling precisely on the opening weekend of deer firearms season in the [...]

Spring Steelhead Fishing

By Nick Simonson
As my offering drifted around in the pool eddy, I hoped that my brother would see a fish caught – if not by me, then by another angler, or maybe himself – and he would experience the finned allure of the north shore of Lake Superior beyond the lichen-covered bluffs and pine-shaded streams [...]

Fall Trout Fishing Time

By Nick Simonson
With all the hunting opportunities around us, it’s tough to set the shotgun or the bow down for an evening and pick up the fishing rod. However, fall provides an excellent chance at some fast trout fishing, particularly in those deeper pits and ponds where agencies have stocked trout for put-and-take fishing.
If [...]

North Shore Steelhead Initiation

Our Outdoors
Nick Simonson

 

 
Though the weather is an element that is always out of my control, I try not to let it dampen the spirits of a fishing trip; particularly when that trip is my first of the season and my first to a new place. Despite highs in the forties, rain and cold swollen streams, [...]

Discovering Trinity

By PJ Maguire
Easter weekend, with most of my peers hunting snow geese somewhere from Nebraska to North Dakota, I was in Northern California. My father and I had made the journey from St. Paul together by plane. We were going to visit my sister and her fiancé and their new child my first nephew Martin. [...]

Fly Swap

Our Outdoors
Nick Simonson
Quilters have their bees and bakers have their cookie exchanges. At these events, the artists in their respective hobbies get together to exchange patterns and recipes, adding a little more to each other’s experience, each taking away something new to try. The equivalent for fly anglers, the phenomenon that is fly-swapping, accomplishes the [...]

Time to Start Tying Flies

Our Outdoors
Nick Simonson
Over, under, around and through, that’s the way to tie…a fly? Well, that’s the way I finish them at least.
Another great start to a fall bird season and the switch to daylight standard time has dashed my hopes of anymore after-work hunting trips. But once again those pre-standard time hunts have given me [...]

Fly Fishing for Beginners

By Doug Leier
At this stage in my life I feel satisfied with what I’ve bagged, tagged and caught, including deer, birds and a few lunker fish. A 40-inch pike is a favorite memory because of the light rod and tackle I was using and my struggle to boat the fish. It was a classic case [...]

Sorting the Fly Box

Our Outdoors
Nick Simonson
What’s in a fly box? Flies, obviously, but it is the stories those flies tell of a winter gone by and the promises of an upcoming season that make the arrangement special.
Monday night, after a particularly frustrating evening of fishing current rushing by at 1300 CFS, I called it quits and went home. [...]

Fly Tying Kit Becomes the Gift That Keeps on Giving

By Nick Simonson
I couldn’t even cast a fly rod last year at this time. In fact, my only experience with longrodding was a lame attempt a few summers ago on an Idaho stock pond near a hotel we stayed at while my dad attended a conference.
After awkwardly whipping the rod through the air for [...]