News and Updates

Spring Creek Strategies: Hatches, Patterns, and Techniques By: Mike Heck

Strategies for selective trout in clear water. New patterns designed for spring creeks and how to fish them. Simple explanations of the major hatches on spring creeks across the country

Spring creeks, those rare waters that flow right out of the earth–in whole or in part–are both a blessing and a curse for anglers. They are a blessing because the clear, cold, nutrient-rich waters grow abundant insects, which in turn grow and sustain large populations of healthy trout. They flow free of ice in the winter and run cool during the hottest parts of summer, providing year-round angling. In many ways, this bounty becomes a curse, because the abundance and steady supply of food can spoil the trout, making them less likely to take a piece of fluff and feathers. Many spring creeks are also small, their challenges enhanced by weed-choked runs and tricky currents.

Fishing the Film By: Gary Borger

Fishing the Film still holds the greatest attraction for the fly rodder in any water type. Fish feeding at the surface film are not necessarily eating “dry flies”; they might be feeding on emergers, nymphs, minnows swimming near the surface, mice or frogs swimming in the film, and other organisms utilizing the uppermost layer of the water. In this book, Gary Borger covers the skills necessary for successfully fishing the film, including an understanding of what fish see when feeding at the surface. There’s a thorough look at the food organisms of the film zone and Gary reveals the secret of the Universal Emerger, hatch types, rise forms, and much more. The book contains a host of tactics for fishing the film, including both dead-drift and action-packed presentations. A chapter entitled, “What, When, Where, Why, and How” details the presentation tactics for fishing stream and lake situations. Throughout the book, the “how to” is animated with stories that stretch back over half-a-century of Gary’s fly-fishing life. Complementing all of this is a collection of black-and-white illustrations by Jason Borger.

Brook Trout Forest By: Kathy Scott

Kathy Scott’s Brook Trout Forest is a simple, journal-style essay book covering a year in the life of the author, and Scott focuses on the themes of teaching, bamboo fly rod building fly fishing and nature.

Her essays are shorn of the self-affected posturing cluttering so much of today’s fly fishing literature, and those who believe fly fishing adventure exists only when a former soviet republic is involved will probably want to look elsewhere.

Instead, Scott simply pens a sweet, simple straightforward account of her year in fishing and bamboo rod making. There is little conflict or drama, a fact which is likely the book’s greatest strength and perhaps its biggest weakness

Fly Fishing Tailwaters: Tactics and Patterns for year-round waters By: Pat Dorsey

Tailwaters provide extraordinary year-round fishing, but you have to know how to fish them. The author covers how tailwaters work – how cold waters released from a dam Tailwaters provide extraordinary year-round fishing, but you have to know how to fish them. The author covers how tailwaters work – how cold waters released from a dam affect the water, the aquatic life, and the fish. This book has it all: the hatches, the best imitation flies to use in every circumstance, nymphing and dry-fly tactics, all illustrated with drawings by artist Dave Hall and more than 200 color photographs.

Hemingway on Fishing: By Nick Lyons

Hemingway on Fishing collects the bulk of the author’s angling-related writings, including other Nick Adams stories and excerpts from several novels–most notably, the memorable wine-soaked pilgrimage to Spain’s Irati River in The Sun Also Rises. However, the lesser-known newspaper and magazine articles may elicit even more interest among readers. A piece that the 21-year-old Hemingway wrote for the Toronto Star Weekly in August 1920 reveals his rather precocious confidence. “At present the best rainbow trout fishing in the world is in the rapids of the Canadian Soo,” he announces in the first paragraph, and then proceeds to scotch any hopes of an easy catch: It is a wild and nerve-frazzling sport and the odds are in favor of the big trout who tear off thirty or forty yards of line at a rush and then will sulk at the base of a rock and refuse to be stirred into action by the pumping of a stout fly rod aided by a fluent monologue of Ojibwayian profanity.

By 1933, Hemingway was writing about his true angling passion–deep-sea big-game
fishing–for the likes of Esquire and other large-circulation glossies. In “Marlin of the Morro: A Cuban Letter,” he notes that when the northeast trade winds blow, the “marlin come to the top and cruise the wind.” To catch a fish, the saying goes, you must think like one–and Papa’s perceptive descriptions of piscine behavior show why he was considered one of the premiere anglers of his day. It’s true that Hemingway indulged his passions in life and on the page, and that sometimes the former got him into trouble. As for the latter, those of us who enjoy a good fish story are the luckier for it. –Langdon Cook

Hook Line and Sinister: Mysteries to Reel you in By T. Jefferson Parker

Sixteen of America’s favorite author-anglers spin tales of mystery and fishing in this collection. From the tragic to the comic with many stops in between, these stories reflect the authors’ passions for both making stories and catching fish. Michael Connelly, Ridley Pearson, John Lescroart, Don Winslow, Melodie Johnson Howe, Victoria Houston, and others all share a mysterious affection for things piscatorial when not busy writing best-selling books. This collection of all-original short stories will entertain even the most discriminating mystery reader.

Proceeds from this book will help support two charitable groups, Casting For Recovery, which helps women cancer survivors to heal body and soul through fly-fishing, and Project Healing Waters, which does the same for our returning veterans.