Dry Fly Fishing Books: Recommenations

[Randy Kadish]

I’m reading In The Ring of the Rise. Franky I’m disappointed so far. I found The Dry Fly And Fast Water much more interesting.

Any thoughts?

Can anyone recommend a good book on dry fly fishing?

Randy

[Andrew Barclay]

I was going to suggest A Modern Dry Fly Code.

[Neal Osborn]

Randy, this won’t answer your question directly but have you checked out the “writing” section of this board?  There are some great posts there with tons of recommendations on books to read (good reviews also).  I have cut/pasted over two pages of books for my wish list.  I gave a copy to my wife and she gets me a few as presents here and there.  Great way to build up your library.

Mike Cline offered a veritable gold mine on a recent thread http://www.itinerantangler.com/cgi-bin/yabb2/YaBB.pl?num=1206701762. I have been saving these .pdfs to my computer to read when traveling.

[Mike Cline]

Randy,

Leonard M. Wright’s Fishing the Dry Fly As A Living Insect (1972) acutally gets a lot of kudo’s in the more academic fly fishing literature but it not that well known.  I have a copy and have always enjoyed reading it.  Here’s a quote about Wright from his NY Times obituary in 2001:

Mr. Wright’s first book, ”Fishing the Dry Fly as a Living Insect” (E. P. Dutton, 1972) raised the hackles of some reviewers and weekend fishermen.

The sportswriter Red Smith wondered in The New York Times whether its author could possibly still be alive. Surely, Mr. Smith wrote, ”he must have been struck dead for blasphemy, for he had the audacity to suggest that the high priest, Frederic Halford, and such sainted subdeacons as Theodore Gordon, George M. L. LaBranche and Edward Ringwood Hewitt had rocks in their heads when it came to floating a tuft of feather and silk over a trout.”

The Halford gospel, Mr. Smith noted, taught that the fly should be cast upstream and floated down ”in an absolutely dead drift.” Mr. Wright cast down and across and twitched the fly as he did to suggest to the fish that ”here is something alive, edible and defenseless.”

But Mr. Smith tried the Wright method and then accepted, as he wrote, ”what Mr. Wright tells us now –that nothing brings out the essential bully in a trout like a live bug he knows he can whip.”

Fishing the Dry Fly As A Living Insect is probably a title you want to read at least once.

[John Pavoncello]

I’ll second “Fishing the Dry Fly As A Living Insect”

[Author]

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