Fishing

Wednesday

Jane Stannus

The beauty and complexity of salmon

Britain’s most popular fish comes with batter, not scales – but America can virtuously say its favorite fish is salmon. Salmon and tilapia, according to AI, but you must never take AI at face value. Nor tilapia, for that matter. Stop me if I’ve already recounted the sad tale in these august pages, but I once – disastrously – tried to serve my relations tilapia. I bathed it in lemon-butter sauce, sprinkled chopped garden-fresh chives on it and nestled it among roasted tomatoes, olives and little baby potatoes in their skins. I even called it whitefish. I really gave it a fair shot. But pointed questions quickly came sailing toward me. What is this fish? What do you mean, tilapia? Where does it live? What does it eat? What are its desirable attributes?

salmon

Thursday

Fred Wilkinson

Off-season fun in Montauk

At the very end of Long Island you’ll find Montauk, the end of the line on the Long Island Rail Road; the train station might be familiar if you’re a fan of Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind. In recent years, Montauk’s popularity has boomed, becoming an extension of the Hamptons in the summer. But in the off-season, it remains a secluded and mysterious town. I have come here every year for the last five years — Montauk is famed for its incredible striped bass and largely untouched natural beauty.

Montauk

Saturday

Amber Duke

Hunters laugh off the Harris-Walz campaign effort to win their vote

Avid outdoorsmen are slamming a new political coalition formed by the Harris-Walz campaign aimed at winning their vote in the 2024 presidential election. “Hunters and anglers want to support Harris-Walz as much as the fish and game want to be eaten,” one Maryland-based hunter who recently bagged a state record bear chuckled to The Spectator. Governor Tim Walz kicked off the “Hunters and Anglers for Harris-Walz” group on Friday with an article placed in Outdoor Life magazine. The coalition is described as “a new national organizing program to engage, mobilize a broad coalition of sportspeople, conservationists and rural and gun violence prevention voters in key states across the country.

hunters Embroidered campaign hats of US Vice President and Democratic presidential candidate Kamala Harris and Minnesota Governor and Democratic vice presidential candidate Tim Walz (Photo by ANGELA WEISS/AFP via Getty Images)

Saturday

Morgan Marietta

Why the death of Chevron matters

Chevron is dead. Many will mourn its passing. Forty is too young, they will say, for a doctrine to have done its work in enabling bureaucrats to decide for us the meaning of laws and the nature of reality. But the US Supreme Court has overturned Chevron in a landmark ruling in Loper Bright and Relentless, cases named after fishing boats which regulators drove toward extinction. It is appropriate, as Justice Gorsuch phrases it in his concurrence, that “the Court places a tombstone on Chevron no one can miss.”   The powers of the bureaucracy reined in by the new ruling may seem subtle or benign. The Chevron doctrine was that when the terms of a law are ambiguous, regulators in administrative agencies have the power to define the meaning of the law and its application.

chevron

Thursday

Ilya Shapiro

The Supreme Court takes on the administrative state

After consecutive Supreme Court terms with major rulings on abortion, guns and affirmative action, the justices don’t have anything on the docket now that will roil the culture wars. (The Trump ballot case to be argued as this goes to press will be a small blip.) Instead, this year our black-robed philosopher-kings are doing battle with the administrative state — which Steve Bannon promised to “deconstruct” when Donald Trump took office last go-round. That shouldn’t be surprising; notwithstanding the media trope that Trump “stacked the court” to overrule Roe v. Wade, it was instead potential nominees’ commitments to reining in the bureaucracy that was White House counsel Don McGahn’s focus.

Supreme Court

Sunday

Teresa Mull

Maine’s lobstermen are a dying breed

It’s 5 a.m. in early May in Harpswell, Maine — “a working waterfront” community. I’m sipping coffee on the deck of Mark and Judy Sgantas’s charming home. The Sgantases are distressed about the government overreach and so-called “green energy” initiatives their neighbors have told them are apt to destroy the New England maritime economy and communities. We keep our voices soft so as not to disturb sleepy Casco Bay and the peach-and-plum masterpiece gradually unveiling itself in the sky and reflecting on the still water.

lobster maine lobstermen

Wednesday

Ashley Colby

Stop ignoring the real environmentalists

What does throwing soup on a piece of art have to do with the environment? When we hear the word environmentalist, what comes to mind is something like an Extinction Rebellion or JustStopOil activist: young, urban, progressive, with an expressly political agenda. But what if there are other categories of environmentalists that are expressly ignored, that may have the insights we need to solve the very real environmental problems we face? In my PhD research, I spoke with people who produced a significant amount of food for their own consumption in and around Chicago. Many of them were were disaffected by the focus on climate change and the obsession with consumption as activism.

environmentalists

Thursday

Amber Duke

What’s with all the cheating scandals in sports?

Cheating scandals in sports are, sadly, not uncommon. Tom Brady was suspended for several games after the NFL claimed he was "generally aware" of a plot to deflate footballs to make them easier to throw. The Houston Astros fired their manager for using video footage to steal opponents' signs. Barry Bonds missed out on a spot in the baseball Hall of Fame over his use of performance enhancing drugs. Cyclist Lance Armstrong was stripped of his seven consecutive Tour de France titles and an Olympic medal for doping. Still, it's fairly unusual for cheating to make national headlines unless it occurs outside of one of the four major professional sporting leagues. That's why it caught my attention when there were three major cheating scandals involving niche sports in just one month.

Fishermen stuff fish with lead weights (Twitter Screenshot)

Monday

Micah Mattix

Enjoy fishing, but don’t overthink it

Spring fishing season has finally arrived in southeastern Virginia. I went out a few weeks ago to see if the crappie were biting. They weren’t. I went out last weekend after I borrowed a kayak from a friend — someone had stolen my run-down Jon boat (may they never catch anything again but disease) — and caught three. I am a recreational — not an avid — angler, and will probably only fish a dozen or two times over the next months. I don’t mind if I don’t catch anything. There are moments, even, when I think I would almost prefer not to catch anything because it would interrupt the experience of floating on the lake and looking.

fishing

Thursday

Isaac Sligh

Ice fishing in the Arctic

Like a rocket launch from the Cosmodrome, a Russian ice fishing trip must be timed just right. During my month in Archangel, a city in Russia’s far north on the edge of the Arctic Circle, the temperature swung between -30°F and a balmy 36°F. For ice fishing, the closer to the lower end of that range, the better. In fact, it’s a matter of life and death — the ice must have enough time below zero to freeze to a safe depth. I make it up to this chilly harbor town about once a year to visit my in-laws. It’s always a dramatic touchdown at the local airport as the runway, dusted with drifts of snow, appears at the last minute from out of a heavy fog.

ice

Sunday

James Panero

Porgy and best

Give a man a fish, and you feed him for a day. Teach a man to fish, and you feed his esteem for a lifetime. There are few miracles greater than what rod and reel will conjure from the deep. So it has been for me as I cast away my cares in this uncertain year. In early spring, I delighted for the first time in the freshwater lake fish of New England. In the cooler months, bluegill, pumpkinseed, yellow perch and largemouth bass all swim close to the Connecticut lakeshore. Fishing from the shore in one such lake in Litchfield County, I found that a simple spinning jig or, better yet, a nightcrawler on a hook and bobber are all that is necessary for a strike. These frisky creatures can be as colorful as their names.

porgy