With equal measures of passion, irreverence, and hilarity, Martin Donovan salts a traditional fly-fishing setting with an oddball cast of characters, props, and predicaments.At age fifteen, Donovan graduated from Testwood School in Southampton, England and set out on a ten-year odyssey of traveling the world, working odd jobs, and pining for an eventual means of returning home to the chalkstreams where he fished and explored as a child.Through connections and persistence he eventually worked his way into the exclusive niche of riverkeeping and landed a job working the Nursling beats on the famed River Test.Keeper, is Donovan's rollicking account of his antics abroad, and two decades of tending rivers, coddling fish, and guiding anglers. His stories are exceptional, but what ultimately sets them apart is his wry voice and his bracing departure from the stereotypical English fly-fishing memoir. He introduces us to gentried English dry-fly purists and mobs of bait soaking carp-catchers. He writes about prominent London attorneys, cantankerous skinheads, redneck clock peddlers, and booze-swilling farmers. While fly-fishing for trout and salmon are Donovan's beloved diversions, he also has an eclectic fixation with derelict motorbikes, chainsaw carpentry, hitchhiking, canned beer, and curry houses.While some angling traditionalists may lament that all of the great stories have long-since been written about the English chalkstreams, we are proud to present an engaging addendum and a fresh new voice from the birthplace of fly fishing.

Keeper, A Life Amongst Fishes and Those Who Catch Them

Travel

Martin Donovan

Travel Writing

Departure Publishing LLC

Over the course of a year, Pete McDonald and Tosh Brown followed an immeasurable biomass of predators and prey on their annual oceanic migration from Maine to North Carolina.From Casco Bay to The Outer Banks, they shot photographs, burned video footage, and interviewed an eclectic cast of anglers, guides, merchants, and fly tiers. They filled rent cars with sand, they fought ill-mannered dogs in cheap motels, and they boosted convenience store profits in nine different states.Departure Publishing is proud to present The Blitz, Fly Fishing the Atlantic Migration. Through McDonald's turn of phrase, and Brown's eye for imagery, they have created an engaging and comprehensive view of the beaches, tidal rips, birds, bait, and gamefish of the Eastern Seaboard. This is not a how-to-where-to guidebook; it's an offbeat celebration of the unique and vibrant fly-fishing culture of striped bass, bluefish, tuna, bonito, false albacore, redfish, and other nearshore pelagics.Joining McDonald and Brown in this collaboration are celebrated East Coast photographers, Dave Skok, Brian Horsley, Sarah Gardner, Jim Levison, Matt Boutet, Sam Talarico, Barry and Cathy Beck, and others.If you're partial to crashing surf, panicked baitfish, diving birds, and busting fish, this book is the perfect complement to your fly-fishing collection.

The Blitz: Fly Fishing The Atlantic Migration

Pete McDonald

Tosh Brown

On a sweltering summer day in 2010, Christine Warren stepped into a 24-foot canoe and paddled toward a goal that she never previously imagined possible. The Texas Water Safari is a 260-mile paddle race from the Texas Hill Country to the Gulf Coast. Run continuously since 1963, the course follows the San Marcos and Guadalupe Rivers to the coastal fishing town of Seadrift. Paddlers must complete the race in 100 hours. While the exhausting pace and blistering heat are reason enough to bow out, it's the ancillary hurdles that often eliminate racers long before the finish line: dam portages, water moccasins, logjams, mosquitoes, dysentery, alligators, sleep deprivation, and equipment failures. Paddlefish is the first complete narrative ever published on The Texas Water Safari. With a mixture of humor, misery, history and triumph, Christine has written an engaging and entertaining memoir of her yearlong transformation from a mom, writer and fly fisher, to a viable competitor in The World's T

Paddlefish First edition by Christine J. Warren (2011) Hardcover

Sports & Outdoors

Christine J. Warren

Water Sports

From his early years with bass bugs and soggy sneakers, Tosh Brown takes us on a forty-year odyssey of rivers and oceans from Alaska to the Amazon.
Top of the Flood begins in the summer of 1976 and ends on Tosh's 50th birthday with an evolved realization that the fish count is a minor component of the larger scene, and that one can grow old without becoming an old geezer.
With volumes of published fly-fishing photographs, Tosh is well known for his skill with a camera. But as you'll discover in this book, he also has a rare talent for arranging words on paper. Not only can Tosh do both, he excels at both. He's like the Deion Sanders of freelancers, minus man-to-man coverage ability.
Writing humor is a lot harder than most people think, yet Tosh makes it look easy. His humble style fits well with his frequent Texas cultural references, and he presents an honest, unfiltered portrait of each destination that he visits.
I've chased redfish with Tosh in South Louisiana, and bonefish and snook, via kayak, in the Yucatan. He brings a unique perspective along on every adventure, and he transcribes them into stories with proficiency and candor. If the second half of his life reads as well as the first, I look forward to the sequel.
Tom Bie Publisher The Drake

Top of the Flood: Halfway Through a Fly-Fishing Life

See the best price to sell, buy or rent books by the Departure Publishing LLC publisher. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Books by Departure Publishing LLC

See the best price to sell, buy or rent books by the Departure Publishing LLC publisher. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Keeper, A Life Amongst Fishes and Those Who Catch Them

The Blitz: Fly Fishing The Atlantic Migration

Paddlefish First edition by Christine J. Warren (2011) Hardcover

Top of the Flood: Halfway Through a Fly-Fishing Life