The Season in Pictures

This year's client list featured many talented anglers, including Australia's Philip Clement, Maine's Fred Clough, North American rep of the Lax-A Angling Club, and London's Matt Harris. The photos below are mine, but Matt's album from the river includes some truly spectacular images.

What's the Knock on Lenok?

None, in my opinion. Although some Russian scientists carp about the "damage" they inflict on salmon fry in the lower Amur basin, lenok rise enthusiastically to the dry fly and fight well. Our endemic species is the blunt-nosed lenok, Brachymystax savinovi, better known as the Amur trout. They are less common than the sharp-nosed variety—and grow bigger—so we naturally value them more. In other publications, I've described them as closer to browns than rainbows, but they are really their own fish, with their own habits and personality. Here's a brief video of one during the release. Take a good look at the predatory jaw and the coppery-colored background for those beautiful spots.

"We could not calculate directions between Noord, Aruba and Dadal, Mongolia"

Headed for Mongolia tomorrow so that must mean the earth has traveled completely around the sun again. We've moved since last August, of course, but only a few miles, toward the northern tip of the island.

A few publications on the horizon: a story about marlin and Cabo San Lucas in the September Gray's Sporting Journal, another selected for an anthology from Fly Fisherman magazine, and a brand-new work, set in Shanghai, forthcoming in American Fiction, volume 12.


The anthologized piece is one of my contributions to "The Seasonable Angler," originally published in 2002. It's called "On the Flats," and is about the joys of not catching bonefish.

The Snail's Pace

While trying to find a name for these Aruban land snails (possibly Diplopoma crenulatum), I stumbled across a 1971 article by the late Stephen J. Gould, "The Paleontology and Evolution of Cerion II: Age and Fauna of Indian Shell Middens on Curacao and Aruba." Gould makes a number of interesting observations, including the odd fact that snail shells found in the 4000-year-old middens are larger than any alive today. He guesses, logically enough, that past conditions might have been much wetter (and hence more favorable for land snails) on these now dry islands, but also notes that there was no other evidence for this change in climate.

Three decades later, biologist Kees van Nooren has found support for Gould's conjecture. By analyzing pollen and spores from deep sediments, he discovered that desert Aruba was once a lush garden with at least seven different species of ferns, and that the departure of fertile soil coincided with the arrival of European colonists.

I used to imagine that, like most humans, I learned quickly but now recognize that illusion. In those days I would have overlooked these snails and the beauty they are capable of, thanks to persistent (slow) motion and a hard shell.

Home from the River

October 6 marked the end of an inspirational season, with excellent conditions for sighting fish and only one day of snow. The biggest taimen measured a very conservative 55 inches, caught by Jim Hickey of Worldcast Anglers on a sculpin pattern.



After 14 hours on the so-called road, the guides and I rolled into Ulaanbataar looking forward to enjoying our first electrically chilled beers in more than a month. Because it was nearly midnight, the first half-dozen restaurants we entered were either already closing up or out of food but, finally, on the west side of Sukhbaatar Square, we found a place with the words "art" and "pub" on it, where the waiter was willing to bring us six plates of french fries and many cold bottles of Altan Gobi and Tiger (the tap for GEM, our favorite Mongolian brew, was sadly dry). Note: If you find yourself in the city at a more reasonable hour, I recommend the steak with roasted peppers at Veranda, the second floor of a restaurant called Silk Road, with a fine view of the monastery of the Choijin Lama.

Country Cookin

Back in the States again for a roadtrip: South to Midwest to Northeast. Have parked ourselves in Ocala, Murfreesboro, and Galesburg so far but the hands-down highlight has been Country Boy's Cookin (no g), exit 121 from Interstate 75 in Unadilla, Georgia. The ribs are moist, tender, with great flavor that only improves with a few shakes of sauce. (I recommend the hot and spicy.) The beans are sweet, the cole slaw is sweet, and the atmosphere is unironic Bassmaster Classic. I wrapped a few leftover ribs in foil and enjoyed them several hours later—truly enjoyed them—despite a motel room with no outside windows and the faint reek of filtered cigarettes.

On your way out of Country Boy's, do not miss the opportunity to buy a bag of freshly boiled peanuts—"the country caviar"—from Hardy Farms across the parking lot.

I'm an idealist. I don't know where I'm going, but I'm on my way.

—Carl Sandburg

At Sea

One odd thing about dislocation as a way of life is the whirlpool of memory. Whenever I am tempted to consign the past to a predictable current, like an oarsman on a favorite river, or to a periodic ebb and flow, as comforting as the tides, the gyre returns, spinning.

And so the air is warm as breath again, with the faint hint of frangipani that we loved in Thailand and Malaysia.



And there are geckos here too, but the locals call them pega pega instead of chee chak. Like us, they are not natives to the island, but transplanted foreigners who have taken to their new home.

Our street is named after an obscure French author and alcoholic who did not die soon enough to escape Rimbaud's assessment of him as constitutionally incapable of true "vision."


Here, at least, he intersects with Byron, is only two blocks shy of Victor Hugo, and resides within shouting distance of Shakespeare.


Surely that is consolation, if consolation there might be.


Across the way, our neighbors fly a yellowfin tuna from their windmill and keep noisy parrots on the patio.



Which reminds me both of the Maldives and of my first island home in the Florida Keys, where two of my dearest friends served a nightly highball to their chihuahua.