The Tar Heel Outdoorsman

It was fall in the foothills.  It was dry and clear and the sweet-cool of the morning refreshed you.  Cool, but not cold.  A good fall day.   I'd loaded up the canoe from the coast and headed west to the in-laws' place, on the banks of the Yadkin River, outside of Winston-Salem.   There's something about a smallmouth bass on a fly rod.  Maybe it's the strength of the fish, the strength of their pull against the current.  Or maybe it's because they're the fish that really taught me about fly fishing.  My original fly fishing quarry.  In all honesty, smallmouth caught me, not the other way around, back on the banks of Rapidan River in Virginia.  I've been hooked ever since.   I met a man once, while trout fishing in the mountains, who claimed the Yadkin held the best smallie fishing in North Carolina.  Better than the New River, even the French Broad.  Maybe not in numbers, but in size.  I'll be honest, I...

I'll preface by saying this---I'm a very novice turkey hunter.  I've only been a handful of times.  Never shot at a bird, never seen a gobbler . . . and to be honest, never even heard a gobble while out turkey hunting, though I've heard them when other outdoor pursuits have called me into the woods or the swamp or onto the river.   I met up with my cousin, Jay, for opening weekend of turkey season.  The other side of his family owns some land near Laurel Hill.  The land is largely used for timber.  Lines of pines in neat rows, so open in the understory that you could drive a truck though, with a bed of pine straw covering the sandy ground.  There's almost no underbrush, aside from the stray hardwood, and the stray dogwood, blooming now with their white petals. It's cleared from regular prescribed burns and raking, I learned, so some money can be made off the straw while the trees grow.    They don't call it "the sand hills" for nothing, ...

          The section of the Rapidan River that runs along Woodberry Forest School's rural Virginia campus is a special place.  A place that brings me back to simpler times.  When you could run down to the river after class or after sports on Tuesdays or Fridays or Saturdays or before chapel on Sunday, and you could catch all the smallies and bream you'd want on a simple popping bug fly.  You'd find some surprisingly nice smallmouth in there, on occasion, especially considering the size of the river.                      Woodberry was the place where I really fell in love with casting a fly rod.  For my birthday my tenth grade year, my first year up there, my dad got me a casting lesson with someone at the Orvis store in Richmond, and got me my first decent fly rod.  The feeling of casting, of feeling the bend in the rod propel line through the air, stuck with me....

                                              It was mid-June, and the lawyer-quiz was not far off.  Sometimes, you need a break, to clear your head, to get some clean(er) oxygen to the brain, to keep that thing inside your skull from turning to mush, jumbled with actus reus  and fee simple subject to a condition subsequent  and the  rule against perpetuities  and the elements of common law burglary or larceny and d uty-breach-causation damages and ... on and on and on.  So, trusty Old Town canoe on the truck, I drove a mere five minutes from my cookie-cutter apartments to a little bit of public land, near where I had often duck-hunted in my undergrad years.  I'd fished there before, and never had much luck, but in a different area, and by foot, not by boat.  As much as I'd like to describe it mor...

Good times on the lake and in the woods.... unfortunately no gobblers and a few stuck trucks, but a great weekend nonetheless. Through the cypress

The clock says 2:00.  In the morning.  The clock's tick keeps on ticking and all you can do is think.  Your mind's way too active and you try to force yourself to sleep but you can't. And even though you aren't going fishing in the hours that will soon unfold, you're thinking about fishing.  You're tired, you need sleep, but your brain doesn't seem care. You're thinking about hauling through the salt marsh, running in just inches of water, weaving your skiff through the creeks like a rally car driver on a dirt track.