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March 2026

This past year was an interesting and rewarding one, albeit challenging.  Despite my paucity of new posts in 2025, I am grateful to my subscribers and readers that stuck with me.  The number of my views and visitors to hooknfly.com remained at the record levels established in 2024.  Again, the most popular article was Best Fishing Books Of All Time with thousands of reads.  If you Google “best fishing books” my post on the subject will pop up at or near the top after the sponsored sites and the ubiquitous AI summary overview, even before it sometimes!  That’s a real surprise in this era of videos, internet, and short attention spans.  People do still read, especially anglers and nature aficionados!  And comments from readers like “What fun to go on a walk with you.  I love all the lovely details that you see and identify for us” make it all worthwhile.

The good news is more publications are on the way.  My recent article coauthored with fishing buddy from Georgia Steve Keeble on trout fishing the Blue Ridge Mountains of southwest North Carolina was just published in  the January-February issue of American Fly Fishing.  Check back here after April 1st for a link to download the piece.

Mr. Keeble At Work

The Author Scores With Mop Fly

Another about my quest to find rare Rio Grande Cutthroats on Jim Creek in the Colorado backcountry, a remarkable stream recovery story, will be out soon.  I am also working on a feature article for the late summer issue of Florida Sportsman on fishing and exploring the Big Cypress National Preserve in southwest Florida. The huge preserve covering over 700,000 acres is adjacent to Everglades National Park and managed by the National Park Service.  It is home  to hungry snook, high-jumping tarpon, and a bevy of beautiful birds, not to mention the infamous Alligator Alcatraz!

January started off fine with a relaxing hike in a secluded, lightly visited part of the Collier-Seminole State Park, just west of Everglades City. It’s a true wilderness on the edge of the Everglades that is a great way to get to know a range of Glades environments from prairie to slash pine forests that transition into bald cypress strands and mangroves.  There’s a chance to see deer, bear, and even Florida Panthers but also a host of other interesting smaller critters like shrews and tree snails as well as beautiful birds such as large pileated woodpeckers.  (See https://hooknfly.com/2025/04/23/collier-seminoles-flatwoods-trail-a-hidden-gem-for-families-with-kids-and-for-bicyclists/ )

But then I hit a rocky patch.   Aside from competing with artificial intelligence ( AI) and swimming upstream against the video tide, my biggest challenge started when I came down with a serious case of vertigo in early February.  I always assumed vertigo was just a fancy word for motion sickness which has plagued me ever since I was a kid.  No reading in the car or riding in the backseat for me.  Not so!  Vertigo is a whirling dervish, head-spinning trip that can knock you out of the ball game for extended periods.  I struggled with it for several months, squeezing in a few good days fishing here and there in the Everglades without tumbling out of the boat.  On one trip my granddaughter Aly caught a nice sea trout on the Turner River all on her own, outfishing her Daddy Matthew and me!

Fortunately in late March I found an ENT doctor who along with his team of audiologists cured me in short order after multiple tests finally identified the problem with pesky little crystals in my semi-circular canals that are so important to balance and stability.  I was cured with a targeted physical head maneuvering treatment in Florida in late April, just in time to head to Colorado and chase some trout!  So far so good!

I arrived back in Colorado with high hopes, my fly rod rigged and ready to go, only to miss a step on my cabin stairs in early June, take a tumble, and break five ribs!  Fortunately, it was during runoff season in the mountains so had time to recover before the streams were fishable again.  I was back on the water in early July and fooling some eager trout.  But talk about intimations of immortality!

Solar Time…Here Comes The Sun

As I related in my 2024 yearly report, I was fortunate to play a major role in a ground-breaking study of how to deal with the significant impacts of large-scale solar facilities, so critical to meeting the soaring demand for clean electric energy.   I took on an interesting assignment to assist Saguache County, Colorado, home of several of my favorite trout streams, in dealing with proposals it was grappling with to build huge industrial-scale solar energy facilities.  Because the San Luis Valley is one of the sunniest locales in Colorado, it is a magnet for these facilities that can cover hundreds of acres with significant impacts on wildlife, agricultural areas, and scenic vistas.  With generous support of the Gates Family Foundation out of Denver, I teamed with a bright, hard-working law professor, Jonathan Rosenbloom, to produce a detailed report recommending regulations to ensure the facilities are properly sited and operated to address potential adverse impacts while still accommodating these energy sources so essential to reducing carbon emissions and grappling with climate change.

We finished the study in December 2024, and I winged back to Colorado from Florida to present the final report to a SRO crowd in Saguache County including the three county commissioners, staff, and dozens of citizens.  The report was well-received.  I proceeded to hightail it back to Denver with a huge snowstorm nipping at my heels.  Fortunately, got to do some sledding with my granddaughter Aly before returning to Florida.  The report was then featured at the annual conference of the Rocky Mountain Land Use Institute at the University of Denver School of Law which I co-founded with my good friend and fishing buddy Professor Ed Ziegler.

In November of 2025 the county commissioners adopted new regulations that incorporated the main recommendations of the report which has become a model for rural jurisdictions across the USA facing a surge of large-scale solar proposals to satisfy the hunger for electricity by sources such as electric vehicles and increasingly controversial data centers linked to mushrooming artificial intelligence use.

On a sad note, Professor Ziegler, also known as Zig Zag Ziegler for his elusive running style as an all-American running back at Notre Dame, passed away suddenly on late October due to a serious lung infection.  Fortunately, I got to see Ed and talk with him before he left us.  I cherish those memories of our time on the water together.

The Scrapers

I was delighted during the summer of 2025 to see the numbers of views and visitors to my site start to skyrocket!  One day over 2,000 people logged in to read my blog, focusing mostly on trout fishing articles. But when those astronomical numbers kept repeating for a week, I got a little suspicious, smelling a rat!  So I did a little investigating and discovered that of those 2,000 visitors, over 1700 were from China and Singapore.  Now there are a few trout streams in China, particularly in remote mountainous regions, but the numbers looked fishy….and not in a good way.  With the help of a company called Wordfence, I Iearned that the clicks from China, Singapore, and several other Asian countries were likely scraping information and text from my blog illegally, probably for AI outfits.

One proof was that some of the text for the AI overview that comes up when you search on Google for “Best Fishing Books” is a direct copy of language lifted from my related blog articles!

After a payment of $150 for its services, Wordfence shut down 99% of the scrapers who continue to try to bust through the protective fence that is blocking them from copying information from my site. This past week alone Wordfence blocked 3,791 scrapers from Singapore, 582 from China, and 186 from India!

What is particularly annoying is that I don’t try to sell anything on my site nor has it been commercialized in any way.  I have been fortunate in life and feel sharing my adventures and information with other anglers and outdoor enthusiasts is a way to say thank you and a good vehicle to build constituencies to protect our beloved natural resources like trout streams that are under siege now more than ever.  Frustrating when these scoundrels try to take advantage of that!

The Sirens     

According to Greek mythology, sirens were beautiful creatures with the wings of birds and the faces and upper bodies of alluring women that used their mesmerizing voices to lure sailors to their deaths with irresistible songs.

That’s sometime how I feel about the allure of remote, high country trout streams that keep me young.   But they are getting harder to find.  Luck was on my side in 2025 though, when I met lady guide and author Michele White at a local Trout Unlimited meeting and got an autographed copy of her interesting book Lesser Known Fly Fishing Venues in South Park (Colorado) published in 2020.  I immediately spied a couple of remote creeks in the book that sounded fantastic.

The first turned out to be a bummer.  While secluded as promised, its beautiful beaver ponds had filled in with silt, and the creek in between ponds was completely overgrown since the guide was written.  Grrr.  One tiny brook trout saved me from the dreaded skunk! But the next one, with a very inviting name that shall remain nameless for the time being, lived up to its billing.

With my local fishing buddy Tenkara Tom, we did some four-wheel drive reconnaissance in the fall and had a good outing surrounded by breathtaking scenery, whetting my appetite for more to come this summer.  Tune in then.  The other siren is a new state wildlife area in South Park featuring miles of Tarryall Creek, one of my favorites.  I  have written about fishing the upper Tarryall on the Cline Ranch State Wildlife Area where I caught some big brownies. (See article at:  https://hooknfly.com/2021/07/30/get-on-the-beat-at-tarryall-creek-in-south-park-colorado/ )  An initial foray into the new refuge with my acrobatic photographer Jody Bol in September was encouraging.  More to come soon.

  The Divine, Hard-Working Ms. Bol!

 

 

 

 

 

 

That’s it for 2025.  A promising 2026 is already underway in the Florida Everglades thanks to some very cooperative snook and tarpon. Stay tuned!!