Pocket Guide To Fly Fishing For Steelhead, with Jay Rowland and Ehor Boyanowsky. An Umpqua Book. $12.95

This book first came out in 1994, but if you are lucky you can still find a copy at your local fly fishing shop. When I first reviewed it, shortly after it was published, I called it the greatest little book ever written about steelhead fishing. The compliment still stands, eight years later.

Ehor is a former president of the Steelhead Society of British Columbia. Jay is a past president of the Totem Flyfishers, B.C.’s oldest, an arguably most distinguished, fly fishing club. The two can often be seen fishing British Columbia’s steelhead rivers together....and let’s put it this way - you sure don’t want to come down the run after they have been through.

Ehor and Jay are tremendously skilled steelheaders. They cast beautifully, and read the water quicker than river otters. Sometimes you can see them on the Thompson in the fall, fine combing one run after another, and almost always on the move - unless they have stopped to play a fish, or socialize with fellow anglers.

Teaming up on the Pocket Guide, they managed somehow to compress their impressive knowledge into a something like 20 pages. The book’s pages aren’t numbered, but rather have subject headings on tabs, so that you can flip it open for quick, easy reference. Forget how to tie an improved clinch knot - there it is in a diagram that’s so easy to follow it doesn’t need an explanation in words. Been spooled by a wild steelhead? There’s another diagram in the same section on the arbor knot, which you’ll need to connect new backing to your reel.

There are tabs marking sections on tackle, lines, movement, seams, deep water, weather - more than a dozen different categories in all.

The copy I’m reviewing has been hauled around in my fishing bag from one corner of British Columbia to the other. I’ve read it streamside and waiting in airport lounges. It still looks good, because it was printed on a special, tough water resistant paper - and it still holds revelations.

A lot of the stuff in this book you will found you once knew, but forgot, so it’s a convenient memory prod.

Flipping the book open to the Dry Fly section, I find a neat, precise description of the basic strategies and key considerations. There’s also half a dozen fly patterns there. So you can learn, on one small page, how to fish, what to fish and where to fish. That’s typical. They use the same compressed, well organized approach for each subject.

It is amazing that so much good information can be packed into such a little book, one that’s sized to fit in your shirt pocket.

A book this small is easy to overlook in a tackle shop. Ask for it. If they’ve got one, buy it. Don’t think twice. You’ll be getting helpful hints out of it years from now.