Maximum Salmon.

A.J. Pell is editor of the Canadian Evangelical Review and an instructor
of Liturgy, Anglican Studies Program, Regent College, Vancouver.

Maximum Salmon strives to cover every aspect of recreational salmon fishing for the whole of its Pacific range, from California to Alaska, although almost every example is from the author’s home waters in British Columbia. Certainly D.C. Reid, with decades of personal experience, is an ideal candidate to attempt this task. In over 300 pages of text, Reid walks the reader through everything she or he needs to know.

Part One provides introductory material on boats, gear, salmon behaviour, tides, techniques for landing a salmon, and methods of cleaning one’s catch for eating and storage. Along the way he provides unexpected but vital information on matters such as how to survive falling out of a boat and how to tie basic fishing knots. Part Two deals chapter by chapter with the five ways to fish for salmon in salt water: trolling, mooching, drift-jigging, casting, and fly fishing. Here informative diagrams (e.g., rigging a hootchy on page 145, or jigging methods on page 213) help the uninitiated understand the text. Part Three, the shortest and weakest, gives information and instruction for salmon fishing with both gear and flies in fresh water.

Reid manages to keep the tone conversational despite the encyclopedic scope of the book. But at times it would have been helpful if he could have provided more information by means of charts. The rod and reel match information on pages 68–74, if given in a chart similar to the salmon species and lure colours chart on page 179, would have been very helpful. The colour photographs of flies and terminal tackle, inserted as 16 pages between page 96 and 97, are useful when a white background is used, but colours are difficult to discern when shown against a drab background. But these drawbacks should not deter novice salmon fishers from studying this book cover to cover, nor stop any fisher from keeping it as a thorough reference volume.