By Jason Tucker

Dave Karczynski started out as a fiction writer. Luckily for us he discovered fly fishing.

“From the moment I took it into my hands I knew that I was dealing with something amazing, something exceptional, something no legal schedule of plasma donation was going to cover.” With this sentence in chapter 1 of his new book “Calling After Water- Dispatches From a Fly Fishing Life”, Dave Karczynski draws us into his world of fly fishing, his personal rabbit hole he has yet to emerge from.

I hate to start a review with “Full Disclosure” but feel I must- I am friends with the author. Good friends. I stayed at his camp in Northern Michigan and fished with him this spring. We took a nearly two-week road trip together to Labrador in 2015, the story of which is chapter 10 of this book. You may think I’m writing this positive review as a favor to a friend, or because I’m flattered to be featured in a chapter.

But the truth is I am friends with Dave because I’m also a fan. Right about the time my original Fontinalis Rising blog was taking off, Dave Karczynski’s writing seemed to explode onto the scene- it was everywhere in ezines and print magazines including such lofty publications as The FlyFish Journal and The Drake. Dave quickly became my favorite writer in the fly-fishing world, one of my favorites in any genre. So, imagine my glee a dozen years ago when I found out he was going to join us at musky camp that fall.

I was a bit starstruck at first, but by the end of musky camp the next year we were fast friends. And Dave continued to produce astounding work. Over time he put out two books, Smallmouth: Modern Fly-Fishing Methods, Tactics, and Techniques and Orvis From Lure to Fly: Fly Fishing for Spinning and Baitcast Anglers, both excellent books, but to be honest how-to, despite his technical expertise, is not Dave’s writing forte.

His new book, “Calling After Water- Dispatches From a Fly Fishing Life” is his forte- creative nonfiction about his passion for fly fishing. But this is no florid tome on the beauty of rivers and fish. Instead, it is a vibrant travelogue of a man obsessed with fly fishing, someone who loves the raw experience of being in the outdoors, the further out there the better.

And so our man fights through severe injury in remote Canada so as not to scuttle a trip in search of the monster lake trout and pike found there. Together we battled semis, billowing dust and fatigue on one of the most remote roads in North America, then clouds of black flies and high water in search of brook trout in Labrador. Dave endures the bitter cold of Michigan winter in pursuit of steelhead. He floats Himalayan rivers in search of Mahseer. He is unceremoniously evicted from the South American fishing lodge he has been sent to cover, to endure being the only guest at a 5-star resort. He navigates Polish bureaucracy and (literal) tripe to pursue the brown trout, huchen and grayling native to the rivers of Poland. He tiptoes past the bears of Alaska in search of Salmonids. He travels by bush plane, train, canoe, raft and drift boat in search of fish wherever they are found, and he gives us a front-seat view of the adventure.

But this book is not simply a recounting of derring-do and exotic adventures. Dave’s strength is his writing itself. His prose is vibrant, exciting. What springs off the page is a sense of boundless joy, a feeling as if you are catching each fish yourself. I want to grab my gear, run out the door and experience each chapter for myself. Dave’s love of the sport bursts from each sentence, but his sense of overwhelming joy is what sets him apart. And all of it is delivered with his characteristic good humor and bonhomie. I regularly found myself laughing out loud while reading it.

When I first started reading I assumed this was just a random collection of stories, each one a gem in itself, but disparate from the others. As I read a sort of narrative arc emerged- a young, rudderless man emerges from grad school, finds an obsession that plunges him into a life of travel and exploration. But over time he metamorphoses- he gets a job, then a tenured position. He goes from being a broke rank novice to an elder and statesman of the sport. His writing is selling and he gets invited to destinations the world over. Before we know it he is the font of knowledge at the fishing lodge. Then one day he exchanges a life of adventure travel for a piece of land- he puts down some roots. At the end he finds love, marriage and we find him on the cusp of fatherhood. 

So in its way this is a coming of age story. This may seem odd being that the story starts when the author is 25 and culminates when he is around 40. But Dave Karczynski is actually reviving and carrying forward a very old literary tradition. In the past it was very common for writers to eschew family life for adventures and experiences while they built their writing career, then settled down later in life to start a family. This was a fantasy of mine even as a child but I didn’t follow the script. I saw myself as a 45-year-old man working in my study while little feet padded about the house, or wiping drool off my right arm while the left arm typed. But alas.

I can’t recommend this book enough. If you are a fly angler already you are going to love it. It will be a great read this winter, giving you inspiration for the season to come. It has certainly added some destinations to my bucket list. Even if you are not a fly angler the prose, the exotic destinations, sheer adventure, and the beauty of Dave’s writing will draw you in. Before you know it you’ll be researching the price of fly rods and guide services. It will also make an excellent gift for the outdoors person in your life with the holidays fast approaching. It is a book you will read and re-read over the years. I will leave you here with an excerpt from the book.

“It’s hard to know the wild secret places energy is stored, where it comes from, where it goes. I’ll never understand how that calm morning snatched our canoe, and I’ll never understand how that gasping pike summoned enough energy to explode away from me. It could have swum through rock. The rod dove down and sprung back, the recoiling blank thwapping my forehead. My line was busted, the fly vanished, the fish lost. My best pike ever. Gone.”

You can get your copy at davekarczynski.com, from MidCurrent,  or wherever you buy books.