Winter is a time for dreaming. Short days, long nights. The season makes me pick up books more frequently than I would at other times of the year. During spring, summer and fall, I’m packing the outdoors into every moment, from dawn to dusk when I can. During winter, I relax. Relaxing this winter means going through Chris Santella’s book, Fifty Places to Fly Fish Before You Die, again. This is a beautiful little hardbound piece on fly fishing destinations located all over the world. And when I turn through the pages of Fifty Places, I can’t help but feel the travel bug coming on . . . hard. From the Atlantic salmon streams of the Gaspe Peninsula, to the tarpon grounds in the Jardines, from British Columbia steelhead on the Dean River, to the sea-run brown trout of Tierra del Fuego, Santella covers it all. And it’s all in a voice I’ve come to know, filled with knowledge and humor, all whittled down with his editor’s-eye filleting pen. In each section, and as you would guess by the title there are 50 of them, Santella interviews the experts for each fishery and quickly distills the best seasons to be there, what honest expectations should be, and what the lodge experience and local flavor is like. This book, published by Stewart, Tavori @ Chang should come with a warning—it retails for $24.95 but by the time you’ve forked out the dough for the trips you book after reading Fifty Places, you’ll have lost thousands. My suggestion? Buy this great book, dream big, and see if you can get a shore pass from the “better half.”
Note: If you’ve read Fifty Places, let us know what you thought about it.