This is a great way to get youngster's started on a wonderful, lifelong pastime, and best of all, it's a great alternative to sitting in front of the video game console! It's written by a former Adirondack Guide with 50 years of angling experience. It was inspired by the steady stream of non-fishing adults faced with youngsters clamoring to go fishing, and needing advice. It's not your typical guide, and it emphasizes critical thinking and strategy formation as the route to sucessful fishing. It downplays buying tackle, but It covers enough about rods, reels, lines, hooks, and baits to get you started well (without breaking the budget.) It provides basics about fish and their ecosystems, and presents the fishing trip as a chance to observe, puzzle out the individual habitats, and figure out where the fish are. It also encourages further exploration and research. It's all written at a level that youngsters will understand and enjoy, but the content is not 'kid stuff.' Scattered black and white only illustrations make it environmentally friendly and add interest at strategic points. It is gender neutral and emphasizes safety, social responsibility, and a good conservation ethic. It will inspire days of exercising body and mind, and interacting constructively with the outdoors. It makes a great gift for youngsters, and might just rescue the uninitiated adults drafted for supervisory duty.
About the Author: Dave acquired over 50 years of fishing experience starting as a child in New York's Hudson Valley, the mountain streams and ponds of the Catskills, the Finger Lakes region, and finally both the accessible and remote waters of the Adirondacks. He's enjoyed fishing Cape Cod, Maine, Mississippi, Southern California, and the Jersey Shore. He was a licensed guide in the Adirondacks, preferring remote stream and pond expeditions, and eventually became an avid fly tier, rod builder and lure designer, and an active advocate for wildlife conservation and environmental preservation. In his spare time, he got an education, managed a sporting goods store, and eventually worked as both a college administrator and Associate Professor of English. Writing about fishing was inevitable. He's a practicing artist, working in ink, watercolor and oils, hence the book's illustrations by the author. He also designs, builds, and plays electric guitars and writes a bit of music for a little creative outlet. His father's fear that this fascination with fish would prevent him from ever getting an education and making a decent living were only partially realized. He regrets not a minute of it, and quotes the adage, "the hours a man spends fishing are not counted against his allotted time on earth." If it's true, he expects to live about 250 years.