In a rare stroke of luck, or something, the occupants of the middle and window seats next to me on the plane to Houston, from where Pat Dunlap and I would jump to a flight to Belize City, weren’t a fat guy and an anxious mother with a screaming infant. Instead, our neighbors were two 20-something cocktail waitresses who each worked their way through four Screwdrivers before we touched down.

“We’re going to the Bahamas to party,” said the blonde in the tank top, after drink number one. “Where you headed?”

There’s much to ponder in Rivers of a Lost Coast, an award-winning documentary about a minor apocalypse—make that major for West Coast salmon, with many runs already extinct or on the verge; and catastrophic for California’s steelhead, now so diminished that conditions call for a new word or one I don’t know yet. If decimation means taking one of 10, how do we describe a process that leaves roughly that? And when so much of what’s left is spawned hatchery product returning from the Pacific for factory-pool reunions?

After a full day of flats fishing out of Abaco’s Sandy Point, it was time for a much-anticipated Bahamian après-fishing ritual. Our group—Stu and Jeaninne Apte, Jean Cochran, Clint Kemp and me—huddled around the dining-room table and dove into piping-hot conch fritters with tall, chilled Mojitos in hand. Our host, marine artist and Black Fly Lodge Bonefish Club partner Vaughn Cochran, eventually joined us. He cleared off half the table and unrolled a white canvas.

“First thing you got to know is that you never touch the fly line,” Jake Jordan tells his sailfish-school students. “If you keep touching it, then I go below deck and come out in my nun’s outfit and crack your knuckles bloody with a ruler.”

New Zealand’s South Island is a trout hunter’s dream. In this land of big fish and gin-clear water, Kiwi guides tell you to forget large numbers of fish caught—it won’t happen here. There can be zero-fish days that are thrilling, as you may spend hours stalking a 10-plus-pound brown trout that refuses every offering until it finally “stiffens” as Kiwis say about fish that are off the feed. No matter; we’re here, after all, to test ourselves against the best trout in the world. A friend presented a perfect toast at the end of a New Zealand journey when he simply said “To the Everest of trout fishing.”

The bonefish had been tough to approach and on this day, the last day of the Redbone tournament in the Florida Keys, the wind speed must have dropped to zero because it was dead calm. It was a day on which the water and the sky don’t make a defined horizon and the least disturbance would send bonefish to another zip code.

Bob Orsua was in full cry on September 15, 2010. “That’s a lie!” he told me between deep inhalations as he spoke unofficially for the 100-member Flathead Wildlife Inc. rod-and-gun club and virtually all outfitters, charter skippers and guides who work 122,885-acre Flathead Lake in northwestern Montana.

Q: What leaders, and connecting knots, are best for bluewater fly-fishing?

Sitting here in Loreto, Baja Mexico, taking a break during a tough week of fishing (all sympathy appreciated), I’m reflecting on the many questions asked, and answers provided by, the mix of newbies and experienced pros to bluewater fly-fishing here at the lodge. Such a grouping is a fertile environment for moving up the fly-fishing learning curve. Inevitably, the focus becomes leaders and, more particularly, knots. The question boils down to, What leaders do I use and how do I connect the pieces?

Patagonian Mice?
I’d like to thank Jerry Gibbs for doing such a professional job of chronicling his experience of fishing with us here in Chilean Patagonia…

Revisiting Henry’s Fork
I enjoyed Greg Thomas’ (always well-written) article on the return of the Henry’s Fork (Autumn 2010). But as former chair of Trout Unlimited’s National Resources Board…