I’m no expert when it comes to Southeast Alaska and all that it has to offer. We took a couple of trips there with George and they were indeed life-changing experiences, but there’s still so much about the area and what it has to offer to fly fishermen then what I’ve experienced. Still, that’s not […]
During our first trip, we unpacked all of our gear and prepared our rods for the next day. A friend of ours had insisted we bring along two of his top of the line rigs for our fishing trip. These were Orvis outfits that came in “fancy” rod tubes. I wasn’t as savvy back then […]
“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 […]
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 […]
“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 […]
I’ve recently felt very nostalgic about my past trips to Alaska. I genuinely hope to go back and fish there again someday, but I understand better now than before that I won’t be able to do what we did 10 years ago ever again. George Mann was a friend of my father and an accomplished […]
Tales from East Yahtam 