I have fished quite a bit for coarse fish with a fly in my time. Bream, perch, roach - and pike of course. I even hooked some chub that willingly rose to a dry cast to rising trout. And it was all a lot of fun! Pike are greedy and fierce, perch are numerous and finicky, bream are heavy and slow and roach are about the hardest fish I ever tried to hook on a dry fly.
Updated or edited 1 months ago
I have fished quite a bit for coarse fish with a fly in my time. Bream, perch, roach - and pike of course. I even hooked some chub that willingly rose to a dry cast to rising trout. And it was all a lot of fun!
Pike are greedy and fierce, perch are numerous and finicky, bream are heavy and slow and roach are about the hardest fish I ever tried to hook on a dry fly. All this very well illustrates the whole point of this book: these species are dramatically underestimated as a quarry worth pursuing on a fly, and only during the later years have pike and carp gotten some attention while the rest of these common and often numerous species get little focus at best from us fly-fishers.
But there's a lot of potential here.
I always wanted to target carp for their strength and tench for their beauty, and this book might very well lead me to these experiences. It's a very thorough how-to on each of the coarse fish species pike, rudd, carp, roach, perch, barbel, chub, zander, dace, tench and bream.
Each species gets its chapter with a walkthrough of gear, seasons, flies, fishing strategies and much more. The book is richly illustrated with more than 300 pictures and drawings on its 224 pages, and seems almost endless once you dive into it. In the end there's even a chapter on "other fish" from the tiny minnow to the giant catfish. How about catching large catfish on swallow (yes, the bird!) imitations?!
...there's a lot of potential here.
Garnett knows his game and seems to be a very experienced angler - both with a fly and with the gear mostly used for these fish. The pictures show him with many very nice fish in very nice surroundings, and serve to illustrate the potential.
This is a really excellent hands on how-to book and a very welcome push in a direction away from trout and salmon snobbery and into something that is actually much more approachable for most of us. Lakes, ponds, bogs, slow river and canals are all around most of us while good trout or salmon water can be rare.
This book can inspire you to utilizes these mostly untapped resources.
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