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  The Essential Guide To Fly Fishing In British Columbia. Edited by Robert H. Jones, with contributions by Neil Cameron, Jim Crawford, Rory Glennie, Robert Jones, Martin Lamont, Ralph Shaw and George Will. Published by Johnson Gorman. Cdn $24.95 or US $19.95 You can almost imagine the sweat beading on his forehead as he pondered the difficulty of the task. How could anyone write a fly fishing book that encompassed all that? Surprisingly, he decided to take on the job. Wisely, he decided to recruit a team of experts to help him. "The more I thought about the suggestion, the more I realized how much such a book was needed,” he writes in the Introduction. “To be honest, I couldn’t think of any one person who could write such a book and do it justice, but I knew a few who could come close.” Dividing the province into three sections - Northern British Columbia; Southern British Columbia; The Coast & Islands - the writing team set out to provide an overview of an area that has high mountain lakes, deserts, rainforests, tranquil bass ponds and raging steelhead rivers. It must be said that even for seven writers, B.C. is an awful big piece to bite off. But they do a pretty good job of it, providing a broad overview of geography, species and techniques. If you are heading to B.C. for the first time and want to get a sense of what your fly fishing options are, this is a good place to start. You can learn here about fishing Pink Polly Wogs for huge chum salmon, fresh in from the sea, or tiny chironomids, for big Interior rainbows. You can learn why not to fish from river ice, even if it does mean you’ll catch big Arctic grayling (Martin Lamont was lucky to escape with his life when a pan of ice separated suddenly, and went crashing downstream). There’s information of lakes and rivers to fish. And information on when to fish. There’s also a lot of things about fly fishing in British Columbia not covered by this book, but it’s a good overview - and a good place to start for a newcomer.
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When a publisher asked outdoors writer Robert Jones to do a comprehensive fly fishing book on British Columbia, he thought about the vastness of the province, with its 30,000 lakes and 11,000 rivers; he pondered its varied terrain, from the Rocky Mountains to the Pacific Coast, and its numerous fish species, which includes salmon, trout, steelhead, bass, grayling, cod and northern pike.
