Kayak Fishing: The Ultimate Guide

March 02, 2008 at 10:31 pm

It’s time to start planning those big summer purchases to get you ready for soft water fishing. This year I am leaning towards getting into kayak fishing.  It’s becoming immensely popular all over the world, and they Yukon is no different. The thought of sneaking up on a sleepy Pike in a distant weedbed, trolling the depths of a lake and hooking into a lunker Lake Trout, or anchoring next to an eddy and watching Grayling pop like corn hitting my dry fly. Truth be told, while I find belly boating rewarding, I just get plain tired and can’t cover enough water. 

In my quest to get into kayak fishing I’ve picked up a book, Kayak Fishing: the Ultimate Guide that I planned to review for Fish on Yukon. I’ll start by saying I am at best an average kayaker with reasonable fishing experience. I am self-taught paddler and angler that could use technique across the board. It is for this reason I loved the book. It tells the story from paddling through to fishing and then puts them all together. As one of the author’s states, this book is for people with fishing skills who were on the fence about kayak fishing or long-time kayakers looking at another perspective. I am the former and this book has put me over the edge.

It starts out by getting into all the terminology. This is particularly useful as you start to get into the research of purchasing the gear AND so you don’t sound like a dork in the store. It gets into gear, gear and gear. Let’s face it, kayak fishing has a great deal to do with the stuff you can put on your craft. The photography was excellent and I found myself studying the photos by people that obviously use them to see what kind of configurations they could come up. It is all written well and it captures your attention for just enough time to think about it and grasp it. Again, it covers the whole spectrum from water safety to paddling, to selecting your kayak, to gearing up your kayak to fishing from your kayak and then finishes with different kinds of water. This is particularly useful for us Northerners who fish cold water and not those most documented like Florida or Mexico.

I would say this is an excellent overview of the sport and how to get into it. While this is the first book you should purchase I would suggest once you commit to the sport the book then needs to be passed on to other anglers “on the fence”.  The information in the book is written in such as way that it gets you started but once on your way you’ll want to sink your teeth into more detail about particular aspects of the sport.

You can purchase the book at Up North Adventures in Whitehorse, or on amazon.com plus a whole host of other retailers in the kayak fishing game. The same publisher and author have a DVD as well, but I’ll save that for another day.

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