Yep, it’s late. We had to chop out about two dozen pages, and adjust content as a result. Once we got there, and I got my final marching orders on drawings (which I was behind on by at least four weeks anyway), we decided to just re-set the release date to end of summer. We had originally intended for an early summer release, but now will have a release date targeted around the time of the Fly Fishing Retailer show in Denver (second week of September). No point in killing myself to get it done for a mid-summer release when no one is interested in books during that time anyway.

So, I am now in the final week of drawings and layout. It looks good, hopefully won’t require much tweaking prior to print, and is still on-track for US$24.95 and 192 pages of goodness.

Thanks for your patience, and now that GB and I have the kinks worked out of this whole process, I will be digging into the next book (details soon) immediately after I hand over the print files for this one.

In the meantime, here’s another excerpt to whet your appetite (we hope). GB’s voice here:

Like basically all fly fishers of my day, I largely learned on my own by reading and struggling—often more struggling than not. At first it was only magazine articles. The local, town library had no books on fly fishing. True, the magazine pieces were very good—people like Joe Brooks, Ted Trueblood, Al McClane, the young Ernest Schwiebert, and others—wrote very well, but in the multiplicity of the various magazine pieces, there was not the cohesiveness of coverage that books afford.

None-the-less, it didn’t take long to figure out the “dries up and wets down” mantra.  And I blithely went along, not having any other source of information to counter the accepted norm. Besides, the whole dry-fly-up-and-across thing was still rather new—Frederick Halford’s book, Modern Development of the Dry Fly, had been published only 45 years before I took up fly fishing. It was still a very fresh idea, resonating very powerfully throughout the entire world of fly fishing. And to my young mind, if I was to be a fly fisher, I had to do what fly fisher’s did. So up with the dry, it was.

But then, in 1968, just as I was completing my M.S. degree at Penn State, Richard Alden Knight published his little volume, Successful Trout Fishing. It was an eye opener. He seriously proposed fishing the dry fly across or down-and-across and moving it, a technique he called the “Live Fly.” Wow! It was my first taste of the iconoclastic, and it was delicious. Here was real logic and practical advise, not codified, regimented information that prohibited any deviation from the path. I’ve renamed Knight’s tactic the “Live Dry” because other fly styles can also be, and often are, fished in a “live” manner.

Nancy and I moved to Madison, Wisconsin, that summer, where I began my Ph.D. work. Or should I say, I began my adventure with the Live Dry tactic. The fish of Black Earth and Mount Vernon creeks laughed at my crude, initial attempts, but at the end of the summer, I was the one laughing. The tactic is not hard to conceptualize, but there are some subtleties that need to be developed in order to achieve what Knight was able to do.

The fly is presented exactly as one would with a Down-and-Across Dead Drift (Parachute Mend and all). After the fly is slotted in the fish’s feeding lane, it is allowed to drift drag free, and then moved only the slightest bit when it approaches the edge of the fish’s window. You have to develop a very subtle twitch or movement of the fly. This is the hardest part of the whole presentation, but there are a couple of tactics that are easy to learn and that work quite well….