Because confidence gets shooters into the zone—and the zone is a real place.
My cousin sent me a note the other day saying he had gone nine for nine so far during pheasant season, and he asked for advice and sympathy in advance of the inevitable slump. I congratulated him on his hot streak and told him not to worry about it when he did finally miss. The important thing is not to get too high about hitting or too low about missing but to take it in all stride.
Shortly thereafter, I learned that the “hot hand fallacy” has finally been debunked. It has always been an article of faith in basketball that you feed the hot shooter. In the ’80s, three behavioral economists conducted a study of the “hot hand” theory of shooting and hitting streaks, based on the hits and misses of the 1980-81 Philadelphia 76ers over 48 games. According to their analysis, there were no streaks that couldn’t explained by the laws of probability. Whether you made or missed a shot had nothing to do with what happened on previous shots. There were no hot hands, according to their data. The hot hand was just one more example of people seeing patterns in randomness. In practical terms, it meant there was no reason to give the ball to the hot shooter, because he wasn’t truly hot. Coaches and athletes protested, but the hot hand fallacy gained wide acceptance and has been applied to many endeavors beyond hoops.
In a recent study, Professor of Decision Sciences Joshua Miller and economist Adam Sanjuro, recrunched the statistics and found that the hot hand does exist. Making a shot increases the probability of making the next. They found the players on the 1980-81 Sixers actually had an 11 percent greater chance of making the next shot (and they think it may be even higher) when they were on a hot streak. That makes a lot more sense. Your confidence grows when you see the ball drop through the basket—or watch birds fall from the sky. Confidence gets shooters into the zone, and the zone is a real place.
It’s about time. The hot hand fallacy never made sense to me, because mental state has so much to do with hitting and missing. In fact, I’d like to see Miller and Sanjuro apply their method to missing. Just as hot streaks are real, so are slumps. If you let it, missing feeds on itself and can become a negative feedback loop that begets more missing. It’s been a few years since it’s happened to me in the field, as I’ve gotten better at letting go of misses, but I remember an afternoon field hunt in Alberta years ago when I was in a bad mood and let myself sink into a funk. The more I missed, the more upset I got, the more upset I got, the more I continued to miss. The downward spiral into futility and despair lasted into the next day’s hunt. I didn’t come out of it until I got back home.
Enjoy the hits, learn from the misses and put them behind you. That’s the way to get hot, and the way to keep from going cold.
Written by Phil Bourjaily for Field & Stream and legally licensed through the Matcha publisher network. Please direct all licensing questions to legal@getmatcha.com.
After an injury stymies the author's fly-casting skills, he revisits lessons from the late, great Lefty Kreh and finds his stroke again.
I was recuperating from a broken wrist, which I suffered on a Montana trout fishing trip when my horse bucked as it stepped on a rattlesnake that had been mauled by a bear. In other words, I tripped on a rock while hiking back to my car and cracked the sesamoidal pisiform of my wrist. Right there at the triquetral joint. Ugh.
I knew I’d have to modify my fly-casting stroke while I regained strength and range of motion, and it so happened that I was working on a tribute to Bernard “Lefty” Kreh, the legendary flyfishing angler and instructor who had passed away just a few months earlier. Watching YouTube videos of Lefty casting was a revelation. At more than 80 years old, the man could cast 80 feet of fly line with all the drama of opening a can of soda. As I pecked away, one-handed, on my story, I thought: If I have to relearn a little, maybe I should start at the beginning.
After all, I’d been thinking about the mechanics of my fly casting for a while. For years, I had been using a Kreh-like total-body casting stroke, but as I threw ever-heavier lines with ever-heavier rods, all sorts of unnecessary gesticulations crept into my style. I had begun raising my casting arm to squeeze more rotation from the shoulder. I would punch the rod forward like I was taking an angry swing. I could sense that my casting was getting out of hand, and then I had a chat with Flip Pallot, the second most famous flyfisherman of all time. He told me that in 1964, when he was already a hotshot South Florida flyfishing guide, he saw Lefty cast an entire fly line with his bare hands. “I knew right then,” Pallot told me, “that I might know how to catch fish on a fly, but I didn’t know shit about fly casting.”
It was, most likely, the only time that Pallot and I will ever feel the same way about our casting skill. It was time to go back to school.
Casting Calls
Over the next few weeks, I propped my laptop on a chair in the backyard, pulled out a rod, and let virtual Lefty reteach me how to cast. He espoused what he called the Four Principles of Fly Casting. Like gravity, they could be neither altered nor ignored. Most are standard fare among casting instructors: The fly must be moving before you begin the backcast. Don’t bend your wrist, or you’ll waste a cast’s energy by throwing the line in a curve. The line will continue in the direction where the rod tip stops.
But it was Lefty’s “head to toe” casting style that set him apart from many. He eschewed the metronomic 10 o’clock to 2 o’clock cadence that most fly casters first learn. From the shade of my pecan tree, the World War II veteran dismissed this as “saluting.”
“What are you, a windshield wiper?” YouTube Lefty asked. “In no other sport do you only use your hand and arm. From Frisbee to ping-pong, you use your whole body.”
For Lefty, the perfect fly cast started at the ankles, knees, and waist as he twisted 45 degree away from the target and brought his casting arm behind his shoulder. He waited for the fly line to flatten out behind him, then he'd reverse courdse, with a smooth forward cast that picked up speed from starts to stomp-on-the-brakes finish.
For Lefty, the perfect fly cast started at the ankles, knees, and waist as he twisted 45 degrees away from the target and brought his casting arm behind his shoulder. He waited for the fly line to flatten out behind him, then he’d reverse course, with a smooth forward cast that picked up speed from start to stomp-on-the-brakes finish.
I mimicked his power stroke, threading the fly line in the open airspace between the back deck and the pecan. I had to raise the rod tip a smidge for the line to clear the neighbor’s fence on the backcast, but I’m sure Lefty understood that I was working in a tight space. But otherwise, he let nothing slide. He admonished my hand position on the cork. “Thumb behind the target!” He called out my snapping strokes. “Accelerate through the stroke! You don’t have to work any harder to cast 60 feet than 20 feet!”
I practiced turning my body toward the backcast and keeping my elbow low. “Don’t ever lift it off the shelf,” Lefty explained as I replayed the clip a dozen times. I started my casts farther back, focusing on a smooth acceleration from start to finish.
“That’s right!” Lefty hollered out, both to me and to some young woman standing by a farm pond on the computer screen. “Casting too hard is how you get wind knots when there ain’t no wind!” We practiced day after day as Lefty admonished me from the bow of a flat skiff in the tropics, from years and decades long past. My wrist began to complain less and less, and my fly line loops tightened.
“You don’t cast a fly line, you unroll it…. A backcast ain’t nothing but a forward cast going the other way…. Get the fly moving!” Lefty barked from the laptop’s tinny speaker.
A month later, laptop Lefty was, unfortunately, nowhere to be found. I motored out of North Carolina’s Beaufort Inlet with a grimace; a 20-knot wind chopped the water into 3-foot waves, each curl capped with white foam. Scattered schools of Spanish mackerel and false albacore popcorned around the tide break, but the fish were up and down so quickly, you’d miss every chance with a four-stroke false cast. I eased upwind of the fish and listened to Lefty’s words in my head. I slowed each cast down. With my arm locked to an imaginary shelf, the cast’s low center of gravity helped keep my feet bolted to the hull. I turned my body toward the backcast, Lefty-style, and smoothly delivered a 40-foot zinger with a single backcast. I practically felt his hand slapping my back.
Then I missed the only solid strike I’d have that morning. I set the hook too early and practically ripped it from a mackerel’s mouth. Flustered, I heaved on the rod for the backcast instead of stripping the fly tight, and pulled a spaghetti wad of gnarled line straight into the hull. I had to laugh. If Lefty were watching, I knew what he’d say. I’d heard it a dozen times before.
“God ain’t gonna let you cast until you get the end of the line moving,” Lefty preached. “He just ain’t.”
So it was back to the basics. Seems like that always works best.
Gear Tips: Hot Rods
It isn’t suitable for every fishing situation, but the Sage Igniter rod series does what it is designed to do with a ferocious punch: deliver heavy lines and heavy flies through strong winds and over long distances. And it’s not just for the salt: A super-fast blank taper and light feel make these rods a potent tool for all-day casting from a drift boat.
Written by chillman for Field & Stream and legally licensed through the Matcha publisher network. Please direct all licensing questions to legal@getmatcha.com.
Even in the middle of a “bomb cyclone” storm, the bonefishing at Abaco Lodge is still a fly angler’s paradise
Fly rods Kelly Bastone
As the bonefish bulleted away with my line , my heartbeat seemed to lurch into fast-forward. Here in the Marls, a 300-square-mile expanse of tropical flats off the west coast of the Bahamas’ Great Abaco Island, the fish must’ve sensed that it could run forever. I let the reel whir until the line slackened slightly, then I cranked like mad to haul it back.
The fight went back and forth like this for two marvelous minutes before my rig suddenly slackened altogether. Looking at a straight rod, I realized I’d lost my fish. I felt cheated enough to howl.
“Nothin’ you coulda done about that,” said Travis Sands, who was poling me around the shallows beyond Abaco Lodge. Living in Colorado, I’ve lost my fair share of trout for reasons both obvious and inscrutable, and I know that breakoffs are just part of the game. But apparently, I’d hoped angling’s laws might work differently down here in the Bahamas. And we’d seen so few fish that day that I worried I might’ve flubbed my only chance to bring a bonefish to the boat.
Grey Ghost Paradise
This was my first trip to the Bahamas, and I expected warm temperatures—or at least sunshine and those blue-opal waters found nowhere else. But as luck would have it, the same weather system that was dumping January’s “bomb cyclone” on the mid-Atlantic coast was also roiling the water here at Abaco Lodge, situated on the labyrinth of mangroves and mud flats known as the Marls.
These vast swaths of shallow water hold huge numbers of bonefish, which helped earn this area its National Park designation in 2015. Marls fish, on average, aren’t huge—5 pounds ranks as big—but they are plentiful. In May and June, Sands tells me, the fish are so thick that you can’t wade without kicking them.
That’s what prompted Oliver White to establish Abaco Lodge in 2009. A globetrotting angler and adventurer, White has scouted fisheries from French Polynesia to Guyana, and he knows an uncorrupted gem when he sees one. So, when he stumbled upon a ramshackle waterfront property on the west coast of Abaco Island, on the Marls’ very doorstep, he rounded up some investors and turned the dilapidated former hotel into an 11-room fishing lodge and dock.
Abaco Lodge bahamas bonefishing Kelly Bastone
The lodge lounge is comfy (its sofas are flanked by an open bar and a big-screen TV) and the décor is sleek but relaxed: The small waterfront yard includes both a fire pit and a black stone swimming pool. But direct access to the flats is the lodge’s standout feature. Instead of having to trailer a boat to the put-in (as most Abaco Island anglers do), guests at Abaco Lodge roll from coffee to dock—and in the afternoon, from dock to Kalik lager—with a 15-second commute.
Fishing from the dock wasn’t an option when I arrived, though. Whipping winds, grey skies, and cold, murky water sent the bonefish fleeing to warmer depths. But as Sands and I set out on his flats skiff on the first of three days, he seemed cavalier about the unfavorable conditions. “We’ll find some,” he assured me. He beamed even brighter when I selected a dun-colored Coyote Ugly shrimp fly that Drew Chicone had sent me for this trip. (The author of the book series Top Saltwater Flies, Chicone has taught fishing workshops from Abaco Lodge and knows what works on the Marls.)
With the wind consistently topping 20 mph, Sands chose to hug the tall, pine-covered coast of Abaco proper rather than venturing into the low-lying mangrove islands offshore. We spent the morning drifting through sheltered bays that warmed up quickly during the brief periods of sun that let us peer into the water. Even then, we saw almost no fish.
“All the little guys are afraid of getting beached, so they’re hanging out in the deep,” Sands said, explaining that wind affects these depths even more than the tides and that only the bigger bones feel comfortable enough to feed in such changeable water. Targeting giants struck me as a fine idea, but the fish I eventually hooked (and lost) was mid-size at best, and thickening afternoon clouds shut down the action altogether. That day’s consolation prize was conch fitters and buttered lobster tail back at the lodge.
Abaco bonefish caught with coyote ugly fly Kelly Bastone
Last Cast
The next morning I stepped onto the dock to find that the water was clearer but the wind just as strong. My guide Michael Taylor (guests at Abaco Lodge fish with a different guide each day) ran us 20 minutes offshore into the gust-hammered Marls. For four hours, we searched the roughed-up water for fish. We glimpsed no other boats, no shred of any human evidence anywhere in the vast, open flats. Mesmerized by the immensity, I stared at the mangroves’ arcing legs, and tried to conjure fins.
Finally, we spied a trio of big, brawny bones feeding hard along a sandy beach. Taylor brought me within 30 feet of them, but I couldn’t handle the crosswind, and we soon watched the three bonefish zipping away. The next pod we located offered easier casting with a tailing wind, and two long strips after I laid down my Coyote Ugly, I felt the tug of a hooked bone. The photos we took reveal it to be an average-size fish, unremarkable in any visible way. But as I leaned over the hull and cradled its belly in my fingers, the fish seemed like a staggering gem. Exhilarated to have driven the skunk off this trip, I decided that catching any additional fish would be gravy.
Author fighting bonefish Hilary Hutchenson
Thing is, I soon found myself hungering for heaping helpings of that gravy, and my final morning at Abaco seemed likely to serve it up. Clouds persisted but the wind had died, presenting us with glassy water that spotlit tailing fish. Ashron Williams, a third-generation bonefishing guide who was born and raised on Abaco Island, poled us through the Marls’ watery crannies.
“A lot of guides are afraid of the Marls,” said Williams, who’s logged so many miles on these flats that he long ago lost any qualms about getting lost or stuck aground. Within minutes of cutting the motor, he spied a small school of bonefish feeding against the mangroves. I dropped the fly silently, but too far to the left.
“Leave it,” Williams said. Holding my breath, I watched the lead fish munch its way toward my Coyote Ugly.
Tailing bonefish Joe Cermele
That’s the great thing about fly-fishing in the Bahamas: These smooth, sand-bottomed flats are more forgiving than reefs. Bonefishing in Belize, for example, demands absolute accuracy, because letting the hook rest on the bottom is likely to get you snagged on a coral head. But the Marls let me be more approximate with my casts. Once the fish finally nosed toward my line, all it took was one long strip to spark a chase. The hooked bonefish rocketed toward the mangroves, but I managed to steer it back toward open water and reel it to the skiff.
As the day stretched on, we never did spot the massive pods of bonefish that the Marls are famous for, but the fish we did ambush were greedy eaters. My friend hooked a bone on his second presentation, after the fish refused the fly on the first pass. And most of the fish we caught were bigger than the Marls’ 3- to 4-pound average.
The biggest, though, made those mid-size fish look like guppies. Williams spotted it form 100 yards, tailing 6 feet off a skinny crescent of sea-lapped sand.
“There’s three of them, at 11 o’clock,” he said.
As we began our silent, slow chase, I kept my eyes fixed on the trio of tails jutting out of the glassy water, like tiny black-edge flags flutter in a languid breeze. Finally, we drew close enough to make out their bodies underwater. The lead fish was a giant—8 or 9 pounds, Williams estimated—and feeding hard. I unleashed my fly, made two false casts, and dropped the fly right where I wanted, about a foot beyond the fish’s nose.
Releasing bonefish Alex Suescun
Or, so I thought. The moment my fly hit the water, I watched the three biggest fish sprint away from the boat, spooked. My presentation would’ve been perfect for the 4- and 5-pounders we had been seeing, but this bonefish was twice as long, and I misjudged the distance between its wake and its mouth, inadvertently landing the fly on its back.
“With the really big bones,” Williams said, “you’ve got to lead them more than you think.”
I lost that trophy. But next time, I promised myself, I’ll parlay the lesson to win.
Written by Kelly Bastone for Field & Stream and legally licensed through the Matcha publisher network. Please direct all licensing questions to legal@getmatcha.com.
Late-season waterfowl hunting presents a pair of good-news/bad-news scenarios, depending on the weather. On mild winter days, any gun should do the job. That’s the good news. The bad news is that wary ducks and geese don’t fly as much or decoy as well in warmer weather. That means your chances are fewer, and your shots may be long.
On bitterly cold and windy days, ducks and geese trade caution for the need to feed. That’s great. But some guns turn balky in the cold and can also be difficult to run when your fingers are frozen and gloved. It’s frustrating when birds work and your gun won’t.
You need a gun-and-load combo that’s equal to both situations. It needs to hit hard and function reliably.
How to Choose the Right Shotgun Gauge and Choke
Late season is the time for big guns. Because winter birds tend to be tougher to kill, it’s a good idea to go to bigger shot, which hits harder. In order to do that and keep the pellet count up, you need to go with a 3- or 3½-inch 12-gauge, or even a 10-gauge.
I keep a 10-gauge gun handy for days when I want to send a lot of shot into the air, but the versatile 3½-inch 12 is far more popular than the fading 10. You can handload 3½-inch 12-gauge shells that are even more potent than factory 10-gauge ammo, and the 12-gauge guns are handier in the field. Plus, you can make or buy lighter 12-gauge loads for when you don’t need the extra range, or to shoot targets in the off-season so you can hit what you shoot at when the late-season comes.
If you expect birds to be skittish, you may want to tighten up your choke too. This gives you more range, and the tighter choke also compensates somewhat for the added density of cold air that makes patterns open more quickly. If you normally shoot Improved Cylinder or Light Modified over decoys, for example, switch to Modified or Improved Modified.
How to Choose the Right Shotgun Action
A late-season gun has to function in the cold. That’s why pump guns are a good choice now; they put follow-up shots on target as fast or almost as fast (depending on your skills) as an autoloader, and being hand-powered, they’re more reliable. O/Us and side-by-sides are the most reliable of all, since it’s difficult to get snow and ice inside their closed actions.
Gas-operated semi-autos seem to have the most trouble in the cold. How you clean and lube one can have a lot to do with how it performs in winter weather, but no matter how much or how little lube I use on my favorite gas gun, it turns sluggish any time the temperature gets below 15 degrees. There are exceptions to this rule; I’ve been impressed with the gas-operated Remington V3, for example, for late-season hunting. But generally speaking, inertia and recoil-operated autoloaders do better in the cold.
Field & Stream
How to Choose the Best Shotgun Ergonomics
Enlarged bolt handles, safeties, and bolt releases used to be aftermarket accessories. Increasingly, they are standard equipment on semi-autos intended for waterfowl. Enlarged loading ports, inspired by three-gun competition and its need for speed, are finding their way onto waterfowl guns too. All these features make a gun easier to handle in the cold. As one who suffers from numb, weak fingers on late-season hunts, I like a gun with a fairly soft magazine spring as well, so long as it doesn’t impair the gun’s function.
How to Pick the Right Late-Season Shotgun Loads
Switching to bigger and/or faster shot is also a good idea now. Bigger shot hits harder, bucks cold and wind better, reaches farther, and patterns tighter than smaller pellets. If you have a supply of bismuth or premium tungsten-iron squirreled away, the late season is the time to break it out. Here are suggestions for the most popular winter birds:
Big Ducks: Go with 3- or 3-1/2-inch No. 2 steel at 1450 fps, or No. 3 or 4 bismuth.
What I like: Kent Bismuth or Kent Fasteel 2s to save a little money.
Canada Geese: Use 3-inch tungsten-iron 2s or BBs, 3-inch steel BBs over decoys, or 3½-inch steel BBBs for pass shooting or wary birds.
What I like: Winchester DryLok Super Steel 3-inch 1¼-ounce BBs and 3 ½-inch 10 gauge DryLok Super Steel 1-3/8-ounce BBBs.
Divers: Go with 3 or 3½-inch steel 2 or 3 shot, or a steel/tungsten or bismuth duplex load.
What I like: Federal SpeedShok 3 or 3½-inch 2 or 3 shot, or Federal Black Cloud 3×9 TSS.
Written by Phil Bourjaily for Field & Stream and legally licensed through the Matcha publisher network. Please direct all licensing questions to legal@getmatcha.com.
The best hunting buddies push you to go farther and work harder than you would on your own
It was his jackleg float tube that really drove me crazy. I’d bought a brand-new camo belly boat for duck hunting—one of the first models that involved more than a Cordura-covered truck-tire inner tube—and my buddy Lee Davis and I had scouted the perfect duck swamp to give belly-boat hunting a whirl. When Davis showed up in the dark, however, he toted a Beverly Hillbillies version of my ride. He’d lashed a sky-blue boat cushion into the donut hole of a used inner tube from an 18-wheeler.
“Really, dude?” I said. “I got up at three o’clock in the morning for this hunt, and you show up with a yard-sale boat?”
He just grinned and easily bore it. Davis was used to being chided for leaning on gumption rather than gear. “Man, you don’t need all that new stuff,” he’d say. “Just tough it out.”
Just tough it out. That was his refrain, year after year. Long after the rest of the world had shifted to polypropylene thermal underwear, Davis sported 100 percent cotton waffle weave, despite the fact they stank like a goat’s belly after a few hours of hunting. He looked like the lumberjack on those paper towel rolls. I had to have every new flashlight on the market, while Davis was happy with his Rayovac that ate D batteries like jerky snacks. His decoys were anchored with a mishmash of U-bolts and railroad spikes. I swear I remember him once tying a decoy line to a can of beanie weenies. I spent a lot of time with Davis, standing in the dark, shaking my head.
Gear Hack
I had Davis on my mind recently for a couple of reasons. For starters, I’d just finished cleaning up the last basement-floor mountain of hunting gear—a nearly waist-high pile of decoys, boots, treestand climbing sticks, fetid clothing, and candy bar wrappers that had accumulated like battery-terminal corrosion over the last few months. Like many of us, I’ve wound up with a ridiculous amount of gear over the years, and I can’t wrap my head around why I keep every worn-out and outdated doodad.
In addition to postseason gear sorting, I’d also recently wrapped up reading a book about the ill-fated Donner Party, the Oregon Trail migrants who were snowed in along the High Sierras. They walked until their boots crumbled and their feet turned black. They ate their dogs, then their buffalo-hide blankets, then one another.
I’d never figured Davis for a cannibal, but there was no doubt he was cut from a different cloth than many. He’d played football in high school, a 5-foot 9-inch atlatl bolt in the cornerback position whom the local paper called “pound for pound the toughest player to wear the Yellow Jacket uniform.” He took that approach to hunting. He might not have had the best gear, or been the best duck caller, but he could outwalk, outpack, and outlast just about anybody. Hack through the worst beaver-swamp briers. Haul boats across the mudflats. Stay longer. Never complain. Not rely on stuff. Just tough it out.
What I noticed during all those years I hunted with Davis was that I had to rise to his level. It never occurred to Davis that maybe I was just average, so I grunted it out alongside. We pushed each other. No one was going to quit or cry uncle. I grew tougher—had to be—to hunt with Davis.
We’re lucky if we’re blessed with field partners who push us to levels of skill, endurance, and pain tolerance that we never would reach on our own. Another who’s inspired me is my pal Scott Wood. I’ve hunted with him when he was so sick that I had to pull over to the side of the road so he could puke out the truck door, wipe his face, then hammer down to the woods. Hard to tell a guy like that that you’d rather just catch a few extra winks in the morning.
Davis’s crowning achievement was his country-boy hack of the L.L. Bean Town and Country jacket. This was the ubiquitous tan corduroy zip-up coat with the knit sleeves and cuffs, designed for casual Fridays and lunch at the golf club. In Davis’s hands, it became a blank canvas for a D.I.Y. camo job. As I was salivating over the latest love child between Gore-Tex and Mossy Oak, he was in the hardware store aisle, loading up on Rust-Oleum spray paint in flat black and drab green. He went with a vintage pattern, accentuated with a few stenciled leaves. That coat looked like a mildewed rucksack and smelled like a chemical plant, but he wore it for several duck seasons, rain or shine. Wet, the jacket must have weighed 15 pounds, and I’m convinced that he wore it long after he probably wanted to. Same thing with the cotton long johns and the Levi’s jeans under his waders. Makeshift gear on the outside came to symbolize steely resolve on the inside. If you’re tough enough, what do you care for comfort and convenience?
Of course, Lee broke down eventually. Maybe he didn’t have anything else to prove. He bought a decent pair of waders, traded his old o/u for a semiauto, and even sported a few sets of synthetic underwear—although I’ve long suspected that he picked them from a ski-shop bargain bin.
But for many formative years during which I learned the limits of my own intestinal fortitude—not to mention the limits of my anterior cruciate ligaments—Lee would stage his gear at the edge of the railroad tracks, roll up a flannel shirt to show the waffle weave underneath, and hoist a pack of three dozen decoys that clinked with his junkyard anchors. I’d do the same, grunting, as he’d stop to turn around and shine that big Rayovac in my eyes and call out, “You coming, tough guy?”
Gear Tip: Refined, But Rugged
Banded Tall Grass Oil Cotton Chaps Banded
Lee Davis would never spring for fancy bird pants, but he would love Banded’s Tall Grass Oil Cotton Chaps ($150; banded.com). They’re bird britches, sure, but they’re turkey-scouting, shooting-lane-clearing, dog-training, and firewood-splitting britches, too.
Written by T. Edward Nickens for Field & Stream and legally licensed through the Matcha publisher network. Please direct all licensing questions to legal@getmatcha.com.
