A lot of our favorite fishing lodge meals are tough to recreate at home, not only because they’re complex, but also because they require ingredients you can’t find at your local grocery store. Hanna and I eat ridiculous amounts of chicken and vegetables, but lately we’ve been trying to integrate more fish into our diets so we reached out to Nanci Morris Lyon at Bear Trail Lodge to get the recipe for the salmon that I enjoyed there last summer.

Because of my dad’s job, most of my childhood summers were spent in the back seat of a sedan driving someplace across America. I’m not sure I appreciated spending so much time with my family and seeing our great country much at the time.

We all have our names for big fish – footballs, tanks, donkeys, unicorns, pigs and hawgs (or the more dictionarily proper “hogs”), among others. But how do you represent those notions graphically? As far as I can tell, artist Nate Karnes, who sells his goods through Remedy Provisions, is killing it in that area.

I’m not the kind of guy who craves steak, especially if it’s just average or subpar (Rodney: “still has marks from where the jockey was hitting it), but a few times a year I need a really prime cut and I splurge on an upscale steakhouse. The best I’ve ever had was the bone-in ribeye at Mastro’s in Scottsdale, Arizona, but I’ve also enjoyed the porterhouse at Peter Luger’s in Brooklyn, I’ve dined at Chicago’s Gene & Georgetti, and a few times a year we hit the gluttony-based-destination known as Fogo de Chao where I go overboard on their prime top sirloin known as picanha.

On my drive to the 2020 Bassmaster Classic, my first stop in the state of Alabama was not at a gas station. It was not at Dreamland for ribs. It was not at Talladega. Instead, I very purposefully made a beeline directly from my Virginia home to Scottsboro Tackle in the town of that same name.

“Chucking big fluff at big slabs” – that’s how Predator Fly Gear describes their fishing preferences. There’s nothing wrong with a native brookie sipping a size 22 dry fly, or a sac au lait chewing your mini jig, but you’ve gotta respect a company that sells clothing and art dedicated to all manners of toothy critters and piscatorial ne’er do wells.

They say that 50 is the new 40 and 40 is the new 30 and I believe that because I feel and “think” I look pretty darn good for 51 (yep, I said it).

I’ve been accused of traveling to Mexico often enough that I might be eligible for dual citizenship, and I make no secret of my love for Mexican food. Surprisingly, though, the best tacos I ate last year were not south of the border, but rather on my northernmost trip.

I get asked all the time: “Why don’t you eat the fish you catch?” The large majority of the fish Pete and I catch are released. Catch and release fishing is a conservation practice developed to prevent overharvest of fish stocks in the face of the growing human populations.

We are fortunate to be able to go to many luxurious fishing resorts with great food, and some not-so-luxurious ones that also have great food. That’s not a strict necessity, of course, so long as the fishing is good, but the Robbins family will go out of our way for exceptional eats. Hanna somehow manages to keep the pounds off through her Orange Fitness Theory cult, but my belly speaks for the both of us.

Jigalode – which, as their website points out, is definitely not “Gigoloed” – makes some serious clothing, like a performance hoodie whose sale benefits the Bonefish and Tarpon Trust. They’ve also teamed up with local Florida artists to produce gorgeous thematic shirts, like one called “Focus” and another called “Exotic Invasive,” both of which evoke distinct Florida experiences.

It’s not often your husband asks you to work the pole, but recently Pete made that request in order to ensure that we’d have a perfect fishing trip to Guatemala. Shortly before we left we needed to make sure that we knew how to get spectacular coverage of our sailfish with our GoPro as the lodge doesn’t take the sailfish fully out of the water and into the boat in order to take pictures.