Showing titles in Hunting & Fishing

The Book of Eels, a combination of social comment, biography and natural history, is also a fascinating and witty account of Tom Fort’s obsession with the eel, his journeying to discover the eel in all its habitats and the people he meets in his pursuit....

On 17th November, 2012, Salvador Alvarenga left the coast of Mexico for a two-day fishing trip. A vicious storm killed his engine and the current dragged his boat out to sea. The storm picked up and carried him West, deeper into the heart of the Pacific Ocean. Alvarenga would not touch solid ground again for fourteen months. When he was washed ashore on January 30th, 2014, he had drifted over 9,000 miles.

There is the Cornwall Lamorna Ash knew as a child – the idyllic, folklore-rich place where she spent her summer holidays. Then there is the Cornwall she discovers when, feeling increasingly dislocated in London, she moves to Newlyn, a fishing town near Land’s End. This Cornwall is messier and harder; it doesn’t seem like a place that would welcome strangers. Before long, however, Lamorna finds herself on a week-long trawler trip with a crew of local fishermen, afforded a rare glimpse into their world, their warmth and their humour.

In 1898, the British were building a railway line between Mombasa in Kenya and Uganda. At the Tsavo River in Kenya where a bridge needed to be built, the project was suddenly interrupted by two man-eating lions that targeted the camps of the workers. Over a period of nine months, the lions killed scores of people. These lions were deliberately hunting people, preferring humans over any other prey, and they seemed to have supernatural abilities in evading all attempts to stop them. Colonel J.H. Patterson, the chief engineer in charge of the project, finally managed to eliminate them.

Peter Hathaway Capstick first earned a name as an outdoor writer in the pages of such magazines as Guns & Ammo, Petersen’s Hunting, The American Hunter, and Outdoor Life. In Last Horizons, the first of a two-volume collection of his hunting, fishing, and shooting tales, Capstick shares twenty-four stories of his keen eye and steady hand with rifle, shotgun, bow, and typewriter.

In Wild Men, Wild Alaska professional hunting and fishing guide and outfitter Rocky McElveen tells the stories of his own adventures as well as those of some of his well-known clients. The book takes listeners directly into the Alaskan bush, and shares the intense challenges of a majestic wilderness that pushes a man to his limits.

In The Optimist, David Coggins tackled the techniques of fly-fishing and meditated on its virtues, recounting his triumphs and failures. Now, in The Believer, he deftly mixes travel, local cultures, further fishing challenges (some knee-buckling in their disappointment), and details his own experience as life and love crowd his time to fish.

With over 30 years' experience, there is perhaps no one better qualified in the art of carp fishing than angling legend John Wilson. In this essential carp fishing guide, John covers everything you need to know, providing beginners and experts alike with invaluable hints and tips. Along the way John offers advice on the best equipment for each scenario as he passes on a wealth of knowledge that can come only from a lifetime of fishing.

Paradise, Gierach shows us, is relative; it can be found in the guilty luxury of fishing private waters or when one is soaked to the skin, in a small canoe on a big lake in a storm a hundred miles from anywhere, exhilarated after a day's fishing. There are also pleasures to be found in unexpected places: solitary fishing trips, fishing for less-appreciated fish like carp, or meeting a guide who at first seems like an inarticulate ax murderer but who proves to be a "Zen master among fishing guides."

"One of the best acid tests of an introductory book...is that the text allows the reader to learn an important skill independent of the illustrations. Fly casting is very difficult to teach in person, and even more so in print, yet this book contains the best, the most interesting, and the most effective introduction to fly casting I have ever read."

On the last day of June, my bush pilot left me alone and without food in a wilderness rain forest of Southeast Alaska. He would return in September. For the next 10 weeks my survival would depend on foraging, hunting, and fishing on an island I would share with 1,600 brown bears.

A chance meeting around a safari campfire on the banks of the Mupamadazi River leads to The Last Ivory Hunter: The Saga of Wally Johnson, a grand tale of African adventure by renowned hunting author Peter Hathaway Capstick. Wally Johnson spent half a century in Mozambique hunting white gold—ivory. Most men died at this hazardous trade. He’s the last one able to tell his story.

Hugh Tempest Sheringham was one of Britain's greatest - if not the world's greatest - fishing writers. From trout to carp and from pike to eels - yes, eels! - his love of both fish and fishing both delights and amuses as much today as it did in bygone times. Coarse Fishing is one of his best known works, and is recommended for both the keen angler and for the lover of the most genteel of British writing. If P.G. Wodehouse had been an angler, he would no doubt have spent many pleasant and amusing hours on the bank with Sheringham, and the world would have been the richer....

From the author of Last Horizons, Peter Hathaway Capstick now presents Death in a Lonely Land, a second volume of his hunting, fishing, and shooting adventures on five continents—stories collected from such magazines as Outdoor Life, NRA’s American Hunter, Guns & Ammo, and Petersen’s Hunting. The stockbroker-turned-outdoorsman recalls his days as an African pro hunter in “The Killer Baboons of Vlackfontein.” “Four Fangs in a Treetop” records a foray into British Honduras for the jaguar, “a gold-dappled teardrop of motion.”

Whether debating bamboo versus graphite rods, describing the pleasure of fishing in pocket waters or during a spring snow in the mountains, or recounting a trip in pursuit of the "fascinatingly ugly" longnose gar, Gierach understands that fly-fishing is more than a sport. It's a way of life in which patience is (mostly) rewarded, the rhythms of the natural world are appreciated, and the search for the perfect rod or ideal stream is never ending.

Meat Eater chronicles Rinella’s lifelong relationship with nature and hunting through the lens of ten hunts, beginning when he was an aspiring mountain man at age ten and ending as a thirty-seven-year-old Brooklyn father who hunts in the remotest corners of North America.

Why is it that catching a fish, or simply contemplating catching a fish, can be so thrilling, so captivating? Why is it that what seems such a simple act—that of casting a line and hoping—can feel so rich in mystery? Illuminated by Water is Malachy's personal attempt to understand that freedom and to trace the origins and sources of that sense of wonder. He shares the appeal of fishing, its intense joys and frustrations, the steadying effect it has both at water's edge and in the memory, and the contemplation of nature and landscape that comes with being an angler.

In 1834, Osborne Russell joined an expedition from Boston, which proceeded to the Rocky Mountains to capitalize on the lucrative salmon and fur trade. Beginning at the age of 20, he detailed the life of a trapper in his journal and recorded his adventures through treacherous terrain, encounters with dangerous wildlife, and confrontations with the Rockies natives of the Rockies. Osbourne would remain there for the next nine years. Journal of a Trapper is his remarkable account as he developed into an experienced trapper and a seasoned mountain man of the Rockies.

Growing up on the Cambridgeshire Fens, Will Millard never felt more at home than when he was out with his granddad on the riverbank whiling away the day catching fish. As he grew older his competitive urge to catch more and bigger fish led him away from that natural connection between him, his grandfather and the rivers of his home and into large commercial fisheries catching fish after fish.

While most of us fly-fish to escape from daily life, for John Gierach and his friends fly-fishing IS a way of life. They are trout bums. But John Gierach is also an exceptional writer. The essays in Trout Bum are reflective, bitingly humorous, and enormously wise in the ways of fishing and men. In vivid, unforgettable detail they recount the emotional, spiritual, and tangible adventures and pleasures of stalking trout in and around the Rockies—day in, day out, from season to season, with friends, and alone.