Have you ever wished you could spend a day on the water with one of the fishermen you watch on TV? Or the “pro” who wins all the fishing tournaments? Or a guide who always manages to get his clients into fish? Or perhaps the old man you watched on a stream one evening who could sidearm an ant pattern under the overhanging grass from 60 feet away to fool the big brown trout you never could catch?

I’ve wished that. I’ve wished just to go along, because “how-to” fishing advice leaves me cold. I want someone to show me....

Every spring, as runoff surges down the steep river canyons of Lake Superior’s North Shore, dozens of water witches appear at the mouths of the Lester, Sucker, Baptism, Poplar, Devil Track, Brule, and other streams large and small, working their magic with dowsing rods that remarkably resemble graphite fly rods. They hold these wands above the impenetrable, rushing water and concentrate as intently as if they were Moses, beseeching God to part the Red Sea.

Then someone calls out, “Fish on!” A torpedo of lustrous silver, rose, and olive rockets from the dark water. And a fish that has spent...

“Eat, eat!” Bob Nasby yells as he snaps out 80 feet of fly line as if he were shaking out a rug, dropping a deer-hair Dahlberg Diver within a few feet of the bank of the St. Croix River. “Eat!” Before he twitches the bug, a foot-long smallmouth snatches it and dances across the surface of the river. Nasby plays it out, then releases it. “I love smallmouth bass,” he proclaims. “I love them.”

A few casts later, I lay a big, black, rubber-legged fly against the shoreline. A solid hit, a big flash, then a strong run. The biggest...

Nothing quite so amazes an angler as watching an electrofishing crew go to work on a stretch of blue-ribbon trout water. Dozens of hefty browns, rainbows, and brookies—many far larger than anything the average angler has caught in years of fishing toil and torment—come twirling up from the dark recesses of the stream to the irresistible attraction of an anode charged with several hundred volts of direct current. Mere shadows on the stream bottom offer up a limit of keepers. A single downed branch holds three or four fish that, had they taken a dry fly, would fuel...

Up on the front deck, manipulating the trolling motor, Ron Kobes holds court in a voice at least as strong as Luciano Pavarotti’s. Kobes brings the same intensity and enthusiasm to fishing that a SWAT team might save for bursting in on a gang of bank robbers with hostages. When Kobes talks about fishing, he does so in a tone of voice that you or I might use to address someone standing a quarter mile away.

“It really isn’t the place for a two-piece rod—using heavy jerkbaits,” he says, eyeing my light outfit with disdain. As he speaks, he...

Dress Abe Lincoln in hip boots and fill him full of strong Java, and you get an image of Tim Holschlag as he expounds on his favorite subject—big smallmouth bass and tiny creeks. Whether Holschlag just naturally has a manic glint in his eye, or whether it derives from his passion for smallmouth fishing, is tough to say, because ever since he was old enough to punch the button of an old Zebco, “crick bass” have occupied the eddies and pools of his stream of consciousness.

We’ve all read the ubiquitous “Small-Stream Smallmouth” magazine story in its various forms;...

Bobbing in a wind-ripped Mille Lacs, we’re surrounded by magic light, brilliant halo that cuts through clouds and glimmers off the scallops of waves all around the horizon. The lake must have been a formidable beast any fisherman—from the Dakota who huddled around its shores three centuries ago, to the sport anglers of 50 years ago—who all had to fear its stormy temperament. Yet today we charge into the hard east wind with impunity, my spine growing shorter each time we hit a three-foot wave. late May, but you’d think we were headed out to shoot bluebills. “I’m...

Think a moment. Think of northern Minnesota and Canada.

What do you imagine? Birch and spruce forest stretching as far as you can see? Sparkling blue lakes sitting in basins of solid granite? Walleyes swimming in water so clear you can see bottom 10 feet down? Northern pike smashing a bucktail in a bay rimmed with wild rice?

Well, think again. Think of hundreds of square miles of prairie and farmland stretching out toward Saskatoon. Picture a lazy brown river, as thick as gravy, winding back on itself again and again like the bow on a Christmas present. And imagine...

Chet Meyers is lost in a reverie, adrift in a fisherman’s dream world. He has just caught the largemouth of a lifetime. Not only is it the biggest bass he ever caught; he has caught it on a beautiful day in late summer under a mackerel sky and a dead, dead calm on the water and not a boat—not a single soul—on the lake, even though we are surrounded at the moment by two million people.

We are on Lake Calhoun, sandwiched between wealthy Kenwood homes and the high-energy, artsy Uptown area of Minneapolis, where the clothes are...

With his bushy beard, slicked-up pompadour, and a face as tanned as cowhide, Dick "the Griz" Grzywinski looks more like one of the original Hell's Angels than a fishing guide, more at home on a chopped Harley than at the tiller of a Yamaha 60-horse. Yet here we are aboard his fishing boat, puttering out to an underwater hump on South Lindstrom Lake to fish for, of all things, bluegills.

Among serious anglers, Grzywinski is known as the master of the bizarre technique called "ripping," or as Grzywinski himself sometimes refers to it, simply "the Technique." He trolls quickly along...

Come late May and early June, the first long days of spring warm the rocky face of the Boundary Waters Canoe Area Wilderness. The aspen and birch leaves sprout tender, lively green leaves. The portage trails finally dry out and allow easy passage from one lake to another. Bulrushes poke above water in the back bays. And big bass—quite a lot of bass over three pounds—are beginning to move into shallow water to spawn. Anyone can be a smallmouth expert.

The game is simple. We prowl along the shore in a canoe, looking for the right kind of...

Mark Windels is a casting machine. Standing in the bow, he quickly reels in a bucktail till the leader touches the rod tip, punches the freespool button, thumbs the reel, and launches a cast of 120 feet or more, never moving his left hand from the foregrip. “No lost motion,” he says. Then he cranks away on his big ABU Garcia 7000 bait-casting reel as though he’s grinding meat. For awhile I try to match him cast for cast, but by midafternoon my back aches as though someone shoved a knife under my right shoulder blade. The tendons in the...