Author Dave Karczynski.

Books

Slow Water Clear as Paint Thinner

A Review of Calling After Water by Dave Karczynski

This year the holiday gift giving season is really easy for fly anglers. Don’t waste your time thinking too much about it: You should buy your fishing buddy, your dad, your partner or spouse, and/or your co-workers who fish Steve Duda’s and Dave Karczynski’s new books—River Songs and Calling After Water, respectively. Both are exceptional, and both are way better than a pair of socks. (Though I’d bet real money that Duda and Karczynski deeply appreciate the value of warm feet on cold winter steelhead days.)

I think you deserve a soulful gift, too. You should probably get yourself a copy of each. Or start dropping painfully obvious hints to the friends and family who might have drawn your name for this year’s secret Santa gift exchange. Duda’s River Songs has already been reviewed here, so you’ll want to leave this page open for others to find if you want to make sure they know you need a copy of Dave Karczynski’s new collection of essays, Calling After Water: Dispatches from a Fishing Life.

Karczynski has won the Robert Traver Award for flyfishing writing and contributed to every magazine that touches the topic in some form or another. His credentials are rock solid and I’ve always loved his work, so I was happy to see this collection and even happier to spend chunks of time absorbing his reflections on why these waters and fish matter so much to all of us.

The stories collected here catalog a fishing obsession that has carried Karczynski across remote Canada and Patagonia, Poland, India, Alaska and the Bahamas, and kept him rooted on secret and not-so-secret public waters in Wisconsin and Michigan. Nighttime Hex hatches, Alaskan Chinook, February steelhead and Spring smallmouth; brook trout and brown trout in their native waters and transplanted across the globe; egg-gobbling Dolly Varden and sculpin crushing Masheer—all are celebrated and revered, as are the people, dogs and economic trade-offs that accompany the journey. Karczynski shows his cards enough that a reader is always laughing out loud at some piece of wry humor or nodding along with legitimately lovely considerations of how family, pals and nature fit into those journeys.

I know I’ll return to these stories over and over again. Partly because they capture the fishing life so well, and partly for the sheer joy of Karcyznki’s pitch-perfect observations: northern Wisconsin spring creeks clear as paint thinner; iridescent Polish grayling shining like they’ve been dipped in motor oil; and the way a violent day of pike fishing recalibrates an angler’s nervous system to a generalized expectation of ambush.

The cover image for Calling After Water by Dave Karczynski.

Calling After Water: Dispatches from a Fishing Life by Dave Karczynski. Lyons Press. 2024.

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