Before I was old enough to drive, my friends and I had already scouted several fishing holes around our hometown of Slidell, La. We bicycled to these piscatorial pleasure pits between times when our dads could take us “real fishing” and when we should have been studying or in class. Most people call their favorite [...]

Hanging meat doesn’t necessarily proclaim an enjoyable hunt. Quite often, the most successful adventures come on days where a sportsman never even fires a shot and no game makes it to the dining room table. One can measure true success more by what one experiences in the wilderness — the heavenly peace, animals observed and [...]

In 1948, a French watchmaker named Maurice Jacquemin revolutionized light tackle fishing. At that time, most people fished with bulky, difficult reels requiring some skill. An inexperienced angler, and even some old pros, could easily create a mass of tangled line that might ruin a day on the water. Jacquemin, an engineer for the French [...]

When the Spanish explorers first began to trek across North America about 500 years ago, they discovered “dragons,” dubbing these giant toothy reptiles, “El Lagarto,” or “the lizard.” Over the centuries, English-speaking people corrupted the Spanish phrase into “alligator.” For 400 years, many settlers considered them vermin worthy only of eradication to protect humans and [...]

Stinging raindrops mixed with sleet projectiles pelted the foreboding forest like fine birdshot fired from a thousand distant shotguns as I walked up the trail toward the deer stand. In thick darkness, I followed the path as it snaked through somber rolling hills shrouded in mist and obscured by the precipitation. The previous evening, I [...]

To the north, water, marsh and sky merged into one colossal swirling, flashing grayish, black mass, erasing any trace of a horizon. Safe for the moment in the bay, we listened for our quarry. Ahead of the storm, the water around us slicked into a quiet greenish-gray sheen in the oppressive late summer afternoon heat. [...]

Long, long ago in a parish far, far away, my older sister planned the perfect Easter weekend family activity. “Daddy,” she said, “you and John get up early Saturday morning, go out into the swamp and catch a bunch of crawfish. Come home about noon to clean them, so Mom can cook them. Tell her [...]

My Daddy always used to say, “You can either go fishing or take a kid fishing. You can’t do both at the same time. Decide what you are going to do and stick with it.” An original axiom or not, his words proved profound, as anyone who ever fished with small children can attest! Obviously, [...]