Zach Matthews
Zach Matthews is the editor of The Itinerant Angler website (itinerantangler.com) and the southeast field editor for Fly Fisherman magazine. He has also contributed feature articles and photography to a variety of outdoor publications, including American Angler, Fly Rod & Reel, Backpacker, Garden & Gun, and The Drake. He hosts The Itinerant Angler Podcast, a popular internet radio program. Lauren Matthews’ photography has been featured in American Angler, Backpacker, Fly Fisherman and elsewhere. Both Zach and Lauren speak, host seminars and give lessons on fly fishing and fly casting throughout the Southeast.
Author Articles
Fishing Two-Handed Rods: "Long Shots"
THE JET OUTBOARD gurgled to a halt as I stepped out onto a vast gravelly shoal. The river that greeted me was daunting — featuring a yards-wide channel, variable flows, and trout that often seemed just out of range. It's a scenario faced by big-river anglers across the country, and many a rotator cuff has suffered from the stress of repeated monster casts...
Carp: "Screwball Looks, Lonely Places"
TEN YEARS AGO, maybe even fifteen, you’d have gotten a strange look if you mentioned flyfishing for carp anywhere this side of the Atlantic. Since then, carp seem to have become the species everyone feels obliged to mention at least once. You see carp in magazines, in books, even on the occasional flyfishing television show. Although some of these...
Ten Ways to Improve Your Fly Fishing Photography
SOME TIME AGO, I sat down to write out the top ten things I felt had changed when I began to take photography seriously. Later, I revisited that list and saw that I had changed yet again. That’s the nature of photography, I think: you are always learning. See, I had gotten this gig writing articles for flyfishing magazines — a lifelong goal — and one...
Brake Jobs
ON A TRIP THROUGH Mississippi, I once saw an elderly man catching catfish using nothing but a coffee can as a "reel." Strange as it may have looked, his can accomplished a reel's simplest purpose: it held his line. And for many fly fishermen, this is almost all a reel does. On the other hand, saltwater anglers sometimes need serious stopping power, and many...
Breathing Underwater
IF YOU'VE LOOKED at the stack of fly-fishing catalogs on your bedstand lately, you’ve probably noticed a lot of recent growth. Just 15 years ago, fly fishers could reliably choose from a small handful of products for their wader, jacket, vest, and sundry other needs. Established companies such as Hodgman, L.L. Bean, Orvis, Patagonia, and Simms have been...
Choosing Cane
WRITERS AND ENTHUSIASTS have been so busy describing the recent "resurgence" of bamboo in the fly-fishing world, it's easy to forget that cane rods never actually went away. The truth is, there is no more versatile rod-building material than bamboo, which is why it's been so successful. The stuff's been ripped, planed, and glued together into fly rods since...
