If you’ve been wondering why I haven’t been blogging more frequently, wonder no more. I’ve been simply too busy: filling orders, conducting classes, traveling, writing, photographing, fishing, and–though I didn’t know it at the time–doing research for a new book. At the end of each day, despite my best intentions to write up a newsletter or even a blog, I was simply too tired to do anything more than flop into bed and dream about the day to come.
Some of my regular newsletter and blog readers may recall that back in May I began to re-read my old fishing diaries, some going back to 1958, and to re-visit some of the streams and ponds and lakes that I knew and loved so well when I was young. Well, these nostalgic visitations became a bit of an obsession with me. And a revelation as well.
Fifty years is a long time and in that time many changes naturally occur, some for the worse, some for the better , some hardly noticeable. And so it was with some of the places I re-visited fifty years or so later. I found out, for example,that Fish Brook in Topsfield, one of my favorite small streams in 1958, is now only a shadowy trickle of its former self, all silted in and brush-grown and really unfishable over much of its rather short length. Same with Stony Brook in Weston, which I revisited just the other day. I almost couldn’t find it, it was so overgrown with brush in the stretches I used to fish and its water volume seemed to be about half what it was then, just a trickle; the meadow stretch where on June 5, 1959 I caught a beautiful rainbow trout on a Queen of the Waters wet fly now abuts a subdivision. Continue reading “New book in the works”
In between tying flies and filling orders this past month I’ve been busily working on revising and rewriting Striper Strategies, which has been out of print now for almost a year. It’s been over ten years since the first printing and, judging from many readers’ requests, it’s time to bring it back.