In my last post I mentioned bottom-fishing. Day or night, it is one of the easiest and most productive styles of fishing from a boat. Just rig your line with a weight and a baited hook, drop it to the bottom, and wait for something to bite.

This is a birthday card I received from my family last Fall. The painting was done by my father, Terry McIlrath. He has been a professional artist since before I was born, and has been drawing, painting and sculpting fish images for just as long.

Fish and art have long been parallel themes in my own life and I guess it is only natural that they have combined in many ways.

I used to get a bad case of the Winter fishing blues every year. I could usually make it to February without going too crazy but eventually I’d bundle up and go looking for something to catch, which was usually nothing at all. For many fishers (especially the carp on the fly variety) Winter is a tough time of year. Even in Hawaii the storm fronts start to roll through weekly and the water temperature falls just enough that the fishing slows down noticeably. This year has been a little bit different. This year, my fishing blues are of a different kind.

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What do you do after a long day of fly fishing for carp on the Columbia, after dinner has been eaten and the dishes have been washed? Go fishing for smallmouth bass!

Flats fishing on foot and flats fishing from a boat are fairly different experiences. Like most things, each comes with it’s own advantages and disadvantages. I have spent quite a bit of time fishing solo from an inflatable boat or SUP board, but this was the first year I have spent any meaningful time fishing from an actual boat while being poled by another person. I have yet to really get the hang of it, but I have definitely learned some important lessons, which I thought might be useful to others.

I went fishing in a new spot for trevally. It was a bit of a drive by Hawaii standards but I was confident that the extra effort would put me in a good position to catch some fish. But this story isn’t about fish, it is about tackle. It does begin though, with a fish, a BIG fish. Continue reading →

There have been some recent computer issues that made blogging difficult. Fortunately, or unfortunately, there hasn’t been much news on the fishing front. We took a trip to meet my parents on Maui over Spring Break and I did some Papio fishing on the South side of the island. Continue reading →

For my first fishing of 2018 I decided to start small. Very small. We took some micro-fishing gear out to one of our favorite places, a long level reef full of pools and holes that teem with a variety of tiny fishes. Continue reading →