Canada's Classic Fishing Lodges

A.J. Pell is rector of Christ Church in Hope, B.C., editor of the
Canadian Evangelical Review, and an instructor of Liturgy, Anglican
Studies Programme at Regent College in Vancouver, B.C.

Seventeen of Canada’s finest fishing lodges—from the Langara Fishing
Lodge on the B.C. coast in the west, to Newfoundland’s Tuckamore Lodge
on its northern peninsula in the east, to the Northwest Territories’
Plummer’s Great Slave Lake Lodge in the far north—are featured in
this lovely book. Each lodge has been assigned its own chapter, which
opens with a brief history of the lodge, and follows with the authors’
notes on their experiences of the food, fishing, and scenery. The text
is interesting, and the photographs give a sense of the lodge’s
ambience, the grandeur of the setting, and the size of the fish one
might expect to catch.

The work, however, is meant to be a coffee-table book, and as such it
falls short. The text is informative, but the writing is the sort of
plodding prose found in mid-range fishing magazines. A Nick Lyons would
have given it the poetic grace and vivid imagery that make coffee-table
books keepsakes. The photographs give a good sense of each locale, but
are not quite artistic enough for such a book, and not even quite good
enough for Fly Fisherman magazine. Nonetheless, many a sport fisher who
has stayed at a Canadian fishing lodge will want this book, and will
value it for the pleasant memories it evokes.