North Boundary
I Don't Care About How Undiscovered River X Fishes: A Rant on How Tell-All Destination Articles are Ruining Fly Fishing
When I was 18, my cousin and I put together a string of days on several southeast Missouri bass rivers that simply could not be beat. We each caught multiple two-pound bass (largemouth, smallmouth, and Kentuckies) in low-productivity water where a twelve-incher is average, and on the last day of the streak, in late May, I caught more fifteen-inch bass than I have in any complete season since, and probably two-thirds of the fifteen-inch smallmouth I've caught in my entire life. We had the pattern dialed, but we also benefited from several years of great water conditions that had produced a bumper crop of large fish that season, and from the fact that we had ferreted out access points on second- or third-tier rivers, access points leading to stretches of canyon water that were faster and steeper than any other stretches of the rivers, miles of water with lower fish densities than elsewhere but which were almost never fished, though they ran only an hour and a half from St. Louis.
Then I wrote a magazine article about it, as a break from the "serious" literary writing I was doing as a college freshman. As a how-to where-to story, it was great. Only the fact that I lost the four-pounder I hooked on one of the rivers kept me from getting a cover shot for the magazine I wound up selling the story to, Missouri Game & Fish . The picture of a fish my cousin got and the two-page spread one of my slides merited showed what the 2500-word article did not. I got $250 for the story, sold a half-dozen other pieces to the magazine, had a regional fly-fishing article published simultaneously in several other Game & Fish publications, and eventually landed a scholarship based on these stories. In most senses, my article was quite a success.
