First Casts 07.22.15

If you learn a few basic techniques and strategies, you can take much better fishing photos.
Photo by Steven Brutger via stalkingtheseam.com

[Editor’s Note: “First Casts” is an occasional feature that highlights great fly-fishing content from around the Web—from how-to articles, to photo essays, to interesting reads.]

• Many of us have had the same experience: you enjoy a great fishing trip, but the photos you took just don’t live up to the experience. Writing on Stalking the Seam, Steven Brutger offer “5 Tips for Better Fish Photos,” and these are suggestions even I can make use of to up my game.
• Tom Hazleton knows that sometimes you have to bushwhack–and perhaps bleed a little–to find great fishing. His story on Midcurrent, “The Art of the Brook Trout Death March” will make you feel like your right there in the alder thicket with him.

A trophy now found only in Maine, the blueback trout is a rare catch.
Photo by Lawrence Pyne via burlingtonfreepress.com

• Although they once inhabited still waters across northern New England, blueback trout can now be found in just a handful of lakes and ponds in remote Maine. Lawrence Pyne’s story in the Burlington Free Press details his quest to catch one of these relicts, which are actually a form of arctic char.
• Across the West, heat and drought are forcing river closures and “hoot owl” restrictions which limit angling hours. To help fishermen deal with tough conditions, Montana Trout Unlimited offers an Angling During Drought page, which also includes information on how high temperatures affect trout.
• Wanna buy a fly-fishing ranch in Colorado? A family of oil billionaires from Texas, the Walters, are letting their 785-acre Table Rock Ranch go for a mere $18.5 million. What do you get for that kind of dough? The cool part is the three trout streams on the property.
• A great article by Spencer Durant on the Hatch magazine site details efforts to restore cutthroat trout to as much of their native range in Utah as possible.