Читать книгу 50 Best Places Fly Fishing the Northeast - Bob Mallard - Страница 13

Introduction

I ALWAYS KNEW I would someday be involved in writing a definitive guide to fly fishing in the Northeast. Over the years friends, associates, and peers encouraged me to take the plunge and write down what I knew. I started several times, but I never finished. I struggled with the format. Where-to guides come in many flavors, and I just did not know where I wanted to go with it. Sometimes there seemed to be too much information. Other times, too little. Sometimes there were glaring omissions. Other times, odd inclusions.

I wasn’t interested in writing the kind of kiss-and-tell book that identifies specific pools to fish, where to park, and what fly to use. I was not sure that level of detail was necessary. I wanted to tell people where to go and why. I figured they would know—or figure out—what to do when they got there. Sure, some basic tackle and fly information was useful, but to try to delve into too deep a level of detail without consideration of the current weather, water levels, water temperatures, and so on, seemed futile, and worse, potentially misleading.

While working on Terry and Wendy Gunn’s 50 Best Tailwaters to Fly Fish, I realized that I had finally found a format that worked for me. In addition to telling the angler where to go and why, the book provides information about local fly shops, guides, lodging, and food that would be useful to the visiting angler. The book is not burdened with a level of minutiae that was as likely to be wrong as it was right.

It did not cover waters for the sake of covering waters—there was no room for filler. It focused solely on the best.

Next was the author/editor vs. solo author approach used in the book. Tapping fly-shop personnel, working guides, lodge owners, and others to contribute chapters wherever possible would allow me to create a veritable all-star team of regional expertise. This would in turn increase the value of the information in the book, and make it more interesting to read. It would give me a chance to share the limelight with friends, acquaintances, peers, and even competitors. It would present a real challenge to try to pull it all together— far harder, in reality, than writing everything myself.

When the same publisher, Stonefly Press, contacted me about the possibility of writing a book about the Northeast, I jumped at the opportunity. Finally, a format that worked for me and a publisher who understood that more is not necessarily better, and that less detail is better than inaccurate detail. The folks at Stonefly Press have brought a fresh and modern view to the fly-fishing where-to book. They have breathed new life into a genre that had become a bit stale. They have set the bar higher than it has ever been set before. I commend them for helping to reinvent the fly-fishing where-to book.