I stopped subscribing to the New Yorker a few years ago, mostly as a time saving measure. My Dad still gets it.  He cuts out articles from newspapers and magazines that I might like and mails them to me, and this week he clipped a New Yorker essay by John McPhee about fly fishing for pickerel.

I could read anything by McPhee, even his 700-page opus about geology, but particularly his essays on fishing. Here’s a bit of his description of pickerel:

This family–Esocidae–is not popular with aesthetes, with people who torture trout. Put a pickerel in a pond full of trout, and before long all that’s in there is a larger pickerel. There are people who hunt pickerel with shotguns. In Vermont, that is legal…

A pickerel’s body is sixty percent muscle. Undulations move along the body in propulsive waves that culminate, like oar sculling, in straight-line forward thrust.”

§4552 · February 23, 2010 · Fly Fishing, Freshwater, Lit, Media · Tags: , , · [Print]

Leave a Comment to “McPhee On Pickerel”

  1. Rob says:

    Some of my best times ice fishing were catching Pickerel….

  2. I’ve got to try ice fishing some day, just for the auger.

  3. Murdock says:

    Come on down once the ice melts. I have some good size ones in the pond out back. Watch out though. They bite.

    Lee

  4. I was thinking of your pickerel float tube story when I read the article.

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