Salmon on a Fly: The Essential Wisdom and Lore from a Lifetime of Salmon Fishing

A salmon is a large and energetic fish inhabiting untamed places. A fly rod is a wispy featherweight stick of graphite or bamboo. Connect the first thing to the second by a length of line with a #4 White Wulff, and the comprehension of wilderness is immediate. And nobody has captured that magical experience and understands the process better than Lee Wulff--long the acknowledged dean of American fly-fishing in general and salmon fishing in particular. He was an enthusiastic practitioner and a generous teacher. This book--his last--gathers sixty years of experience and wisdom on fly-fishing for salmon
Here are thirty of Lee Wulff's finest essays on salmon: narrative accounts of trips to the most tantalizing waters in North America and beyond; ruminations on technique, equipment, and fly selection; spirited appreciations of the natural world (he was an environmentalist long before that word became popularized); advice to beginners and old hands on casting and reading a river. Wulff was the skilled tactician with an uncanny ability to get salmon to rise to his fly patterns, and he candidly explains his methods in these pages.
Like the best books, this one is apparently about one thing (fly-fishing for salmon) while it is really about something else (the love of life itself).

After his death in an airplane crash in 1991, Wulff's eulogists emphasized his salmon conservation work from among a lifetime of angling accomplishments. So this collection, spanning his writing on Atlantic salmon (including a few of his rare fiction pieces from the 1940s), will come as something of an epitaph. The stylish introduction by Nelson Bryant is like swallows over a stream: a promise of good fishing. Former Fly Fisherman managing editor Merwin's selections reflect Wulff's range as an angler and conservationist. The claim the subtitle makes for this pleasant little anthology of magazine pieces--"The Essential Wisdom and Lore from a Lifetime of Salmon Fishing"--however, was actually met by Wulff's The Atlantic Salmon, published in 1989. Still, this is a fitting farewell to a passionate, truly compleat angler.
Copyright 1992 Reed Business Information, Inc.

The Atlantic salmon, arguably at the pinnacle of the salmonoid hierarchy, is a creature of unique characteristics--and woe betide any trout angler who approaches it as just another game fish. This posthumous collection of 30 previously published essays by one of the masters of the art pulls together enough well-written instruction to address a surprising gap in the practical literature. In recent years, only John Underwood & Ted Williams's Fishing "The Big Three" with Ted Williams ( LJ 9/1/82. o.p.) comes to mind approximating the same type of specificity (though more briefly). Recommended particularly for fishing collections in the Northeast and all others with a clientele (armchair or otherwise) who pursue the species.
- David Panciera, Westerly
Copyright 1992 Reed Business Information, Inc.