Fishing Stories ─ A Lifetime of Adventures and Misadventures on Rivers, Lakes, and Seas

All fishermen who have fished for a lifetime have baskets of great stories and reminiscences about the sport they love. Nick Lyons’s new collection is chock-full of them. From fishing a small Catskill creek and catching a huge brook trout when he was barely out of infancy to long opening day treks during his teens, and then on to fishing in France, Iceland, Key West, Montana, and widely elsewhere, Nick has spent a lifetime on the water.

Fishing Stories features tales about bass, bluefish, tarpon, stripers, bluegill, and many other species as well as portraits of many of the unusual people with whom he has fished. Lyons describes a long, hilarious day with a character named Hawkes in one story, and then the next features a father and son on a Western lake.

Through these memories, Lyons shows the comfortable pleasure of fishing waters close to home that one knows just about as well as his or her closest friends. Stories describe days of discovery and adventure on new waters; fishing with famous fishing writers, and new friends, and a granddaughter; and fishing in a little pond he built during the years he refers to as his Indian summer. An unforgettable fight with a gigantic fish in a Western river and simpler days fishing for bluegill and pickerel are also documented.

No fisherman of any stripe will fail to find stories that echo his or her own experiences, and all will come closer to understanding the passion that drives all serious fishermen.

Nick Lyons is the author of many books on fishing, including his famous Spring Creek, and a former English professor and book publisher.

Mari Lyons, whose drawings have graced this and other books by her husband, is a painter who exhibits regularly at First Street Gallery in New York City and elsewhere.