I’m not an artist and have no plans of trying to become one. It felt necessary to address the illustrations that have accompanied several posts. I feel like we can have a discussion about them now that I’ve been as honest with you as I can be. I have a handful of photographs and a […]
“This is all you need to catch fish up here,” George said earlier in the day as he handed out egg sucking leech patterns he had tied back home. They were #6 size royal purple leech patterns with bright orange yarn eggs tied near the eye of the hook. We tossed the leech pattern along […]
“Look! We’ve spotted our first bear!” Dad joked as George greeted us coming off of the float plane. George had a welded metal houseboat docked on the backside of the harbor just out of sight from Tom’s. It was painted in camouflage as well which made it very difficult to spot. An entire story […]
For the few hours that it gets dark in Alaska during the late summer, it gets really dark. Remember, there’s an almost guaranteed chance that it’s either raining, or the sky is overcast so there’s almost no chance you’re going to have any moonlight. It’s at that moment that you realize just how dark a […]
There’s so much that can go wrong when trying to catch a fish on a fly rod. There’s at a minimum 4 knots that connect the fly to the reel. Hook sets are critical to fly fishing as well, and they can be very species specific. You certainly don’t set the hook the same way on trout […]
At times I can hardly distinguish what characteristics actually define the person or the place until I arrive at the singularity where George and Yahtam are really just one and the same. I’ve mentioned before that George and Bo Jackson were good friends. They bow hunted together, and apparently while Bo was at Auburn, […]
I can recall our first return trip from Yahtam being a roughly two-hour boat ride in the steady rain. It wasn’t thick sheets of rain, but each drop was fat and consistently beat on the outer shell of your clothing like a deep rhythmic bass drum so persistent that it became almost impossible to focus […]
It’s difficult not to philosophize when discussing fly fishing. The mixture of science (objectivity) versus art (subjectivity) demands it at a certain point. In the beginning, it feels like a black art. The cast seems like something only a sorcerer could master. The mind hardly even knows where to begin at this point. The […]
“Y’all did alright today, but just wait until tomorrow. We’re going to hike up through there and hit the honey hole,” George told us as Dad was cleaning the day’s catch. The term “honey hole” is widely used in fishing lore. To keep it within the realm of fishing, it’s the proverbial end of the rainbow […]
George’s explanation as to what the name means was fairly simple, “Yahtam means ‘nothing’.” The name literally means East Nothing. I can only imagine part of the reason how he came up with the name being he didn’t want anyone knowing anything about where he was fishing. This isn’t particularly uncommon amongst anglers. If you […]
Tales from East Yahtam 