Fishing

Ice fishing has always made me feel nostalgic. As a guide, I spend most of my time rigging equipment and finding fish for clients. It can be hard to simply enjoy time on the water when you’re focused on giving your clients a successful fishing trip. But when I go ice fishing, all of that goes away...

Almost every outdoor activity has its own upper tier. A black belt level test that outdoorsfolk take up to challenge themselves in hopes of finding out how far they can push their passion. For hikers, it can be a particularly rough or long trail. For hunters, it can be pursuing a difficult species...

That was quick. A Michigan ice fishing season opened at 8 a.m. on Saturday, February 7, only to close 48 minutes later after the harvest quota was met. The quick season—if you want to call it that—took place on Black Lake, which is situated in Cheboygan and Presque Isle Counties, and was for lake...

Researchers were capturing fish on a recently restored floodplain in Mississippi last month when they tangled with an absolute brute: a 7-foot 10-inch alligator gar with a whopping girth of 55 inches. Solomon R. David, an assistant professor at the University of Minnesota and a highly regarded gar...

The arrival of autumn means a lot of things to outdoors folk. It’s the start of hunting season, the first step towards cold-weather activities like ice fishing and trapping, and if you’re the type, the first chance to grab a pumpkin spice coffee on your way to the woods. However, for anglers, the...

There’s a long history of record fish being eaten by the angler who caught it. The world record walleye, coho salmon, northern pike, and several others were all consumed after being weighed and measured, including the world record largemouth bass, which was famously eaten for three straight days by...

When I was a kid, deep water fascinated me. I was convinced that those dark, seemingly fathomless depths that stretched into blackness below my boat held fish of unimaginable size. I believed that all I had to do to catch them was to somehow get my lures and baits down into the 50, 80, 100-plus-foot...

One of the things people like to say about my job, is that it sure must be nice to hunt and fish all the time. I always agree, because that sounds a lot better than mostly sitting at a desk pounding on the keyboard while waiting for the next Google Meet to start. While my job puts me into the field...

Nothing says summer like spending a long day on the water and then bringing home a mess of fish for the pan. For many anglers, a summer fish fry is part of the season and every bit as iconic as watching baseball, launching fireworks, having picnics, and cannonballing into the local pool or swimming...

A bowfisherman just landed the biggest flathead catfish ever recorded in Michigan. According to a Michigan Department of Natural Resources (DNR) press release, Codie Carlson of Newport, Michigan, was fishing from shore on Plum Creek at dawn on Sunday, June 29, when the epic catch went down. Carlson...

Whaling is a generational profession, steeped in lore and heritage. Burly hunters take to the sea in hopes of impaling the largest mammals on earth. Not without controversy, the tradition of whaling still occurs in far-off places. Visceral images and videos occasionally leak, stoking the flames of...

Much of the outdoor world is dominated by single-species pursuits. On the hunting side, this makes sense. After all, if you draw an antelope tag, you’re not super likely to quickly try to find another big game species to hunt out in the sagebrush. When it comes to fishing, the single-species pursuit...