Trout Tracks: Essays on Fly Fishing

by Jim McLennan, Lynda McLennan (Illustrator)

Overview

Drawn from 55 years of excessive obsession with trout, water, streams, and flies, this collection of essays from Canada’s most widely read fly-fishing author since Roderick Haig-Brown reveals the depth of engagement that this sport engenders. Poised and polished words reveal the flaws and virtues of humanity, the strength of Mother Nature, the beautiful mystery that is a wild trout, and the obsessed’s inexplicable need to outsmart a creature with a brain the size of a pea.

Fly fishing is considered perhaps the most reflective and graceful of outdoor pursuits, and author Jim McLennan agrees – for the most part. Trout Tracks includes pieces on fly-fishing people and fly-fishing places, plus stories of quiet successes and loud failures, in sum revealing the soul of “the quiet sport.”

You won’t learn from this book how to cast farther or tie a knot faster, but if you’ve ever fly fished – or if you want to – you’ll smile and understand more clearly the seduction of wild trout in wild places.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781771603652
Publisher:	Rocky Mountain Books Incorporated
Publication date:	05/31/2022
Pages:	256
Product dimensions:	5.00(w) x 7.00(h) x 0.90(d)

About the Author

Jim McLennan is the author of four books on fly fishing and is a past recipient of the Andy Russell Nature Writing Award, Trout Unlimited Canada’s Bob Paget Memorial Conservation Award, and the Outdoor Writers of Canada Best Book of the Year Award. He is contributing editor for Fly Fisherman and Fly Fusion magazines, and his writing has also appeared in The Canadian Fly Fisher and Outdoor Canada. Jim is also co-host, along with Derek Bird, of Fly Fusion Television, a series broadcast on the World Fishing Network. He is a frequent speaker on fly fishing and conservation topics at events throughout the U.S. and Canada. Jim and his wife, Lynda McLennan, live and work in southern Alberta, where they fish, hunt, write, and manage McLennan Fly Fishing (mclennanflyfishing.com).

Lynda McLennan was a founding director of Casting For Life, a fly-fishing retreat for breast cancer survivors, and has been teaching fly fishing in various formats since the 1980s. She is a skilled photographer whose work appears in magazines, books, and on numerous websites. She has been a photographer for Highfield Stock Farm since 2013.

Table of Contents

Foreword ix

Acknowledgements xiii

Preface xv

1 Places

Institutes of Advanced Learning (2016) 2

Fly Shops (2015) 6

Fishing Lodges (2017) 10

Montana (2016) 14

Lakes (2018) 18

A Famous River (2016) 22

2 Bugs, Real and Fake

The Secret Fly (2017) 28

Whose Fly Box? (2015) 32

Tricos (2015) 36

The Trustworthy PMD (2017) 45

Eight Months of Big Dries (2018) 51

Requiem for Hatch Matching (2020) 58

When Should I Change Flies? (2021) 64

3 How

When Cutthroats Get the Blues (2014) 70

On the Contrary… (2020) 76

Memory and Selectivity (2020) 82

On Being a Noticer (2011) 86

Degrees of Difficulty (2016) 90

Fair Weather Fishermen? (2014) 94

Timing Is Everything (2010) 98

4 Navel Gazing

Big Fish, Little Fish, Any Fish (2014) 104

Expectations (2013) 109

Healing and Coping (2018) 113

Connections (2015) 117

Road Trips (2015) 120

Technology vs. Tradition (2016) 123

Why Do We Do It? (2020) 127

To Share or Not to Share (2010) 131

Tiny Perfect Moments (2012) 135

5 The Silly Side

Character(s) (2021) 140

To All Fly Fishers Younger Than Me (2018) 144

The Language of Fly Fishing (2019) 148

Helpful Definitions (2019) 152

Excuses (2012) 156

Losing Stuff (2012) 160

6 At the Water

Boats (2012) 166

At Home on the Bow (2013) 170

2013 (2014) 175

Water Music (2015) 179

7 People

Mentors (2012) 186

Artists (2017) 190

Grandparenting (2020) 194

The Influencers (2012) 198

L.H.P.: Remembering a Mentor (2021) 205

8 Aging (Gracefully, More Or Less)

Longer Lunches (2010) 216

Old School (2017) 222

Fishing Vicariously (2016) 226

Maturity or… (2018) 230

Old Friends (2012) 233