Indiana tends to get skipped over in national fishing conversations, which is a mistake that serious Midwest anglers have been quietly benefiting from for years. The state sits at the southern end of Lake Michigan and has 11 miles of shoreline on one of the best salmon and steelhead fisheries in the Great Lakes. The…

Texas has the most licensed freshwater anglers of any state in the country. That fact alone should tell you something. These aren’t people driving to fish in other states. They’re staying home because there’s enough water here, and enough fish in that water, to keep a serious angler occupied for years without running out of…

Georgia gets talked about as a bass fishing state, which is accurate but incomplete. The spotted bass fishery on Lake Lanier alone would be enough to put Georgia on a serious angler’s radar. The largemouth bass fishing on Lake Eufaula and Lake Seminole competes with anything in the South. The coastal inshore fishing from Brunswick…

Every angler has a list. Maybe it lives in the back of a notebook, maybe it’s just a running thought in the back of your head, but it’s there. The fish you’ve heard about, the one a guide described in a tone of voice that made you stop whatever you were doing, the species that…

Most people who fish have a short list of places they want to get to before they’re done. A lake they read about in a magazine, a river a friend described with more enthusiasm than usual, a destination they’ve been planning for years without quite pulling the trigger. This list is that conversation in written…

Most people asking this question already want a boat. They just want someone to tell them the math works. Sometimes it does. Sometimes it absolutely doesn’t. The honest answer depends almost entirely on how often you fish, what type of water you’re on, and whether you walk into ownership with a clear picture of what…

Alaska is not a fishing destination in the way that most places are fishing destinations. It’s more like fishing as a category gets redefined when you’re standing in it. The rivers here run with salmon in numbers that don’t seem real until you see them. The lakes hold fish that have never seen a lure…

Pennsylvania has more miles of trout streams than any other contiguous state in the country. That fact doesn’t get repeated enough. People think of Pennsylvania as a mid-Atlantic state with some nice farmland and a couple of cities, and meanwhile it has one of the most extensive cold-water fisheries east of the Mississippi running through…

Ohio gets underestimated as a fishing state by people who haven’t fished it. The default assumption is that it’s flat, industrial, and mostly corn. However, that simply isn’t the case. What it actually has is the western basin of Lake Erie, which is the most productive walleye fishery in the world by almost any measure…

Michigan is surrounded by four of the five Great Lakes and contains more than 11,000 inland lakes. It has over 36,000 miles of streams. The Upper Peninsula alone covers an area larger than Connecticut, Massachusetts, and Rhode Island combined, and most of it is water, forest, and not many people. The fishing here is not…

When it comes to Alabama, most people think of college football. The people who know about the fishing don’t always rush to advertise it, which suits them fine. The state has mild winters, a long growing season, and enough water spread across its reservoirs, river systems, and Gulf Coast that serious anglers can find something…

West Virginia doesn’t get the fishing attention it deserves. Most people hear the name and think coal country, winding mountain roads, and not much else. Meanwhile, serious anglers have been quietly making the drive for decades to fish water that would be absolutely mobbed if it were in a more obvious state. The rivers here…