Breakfast at Trout's Place: The Seasons of an Alaskan Flyfisher [Paperback]

Ken Marsh (Author), Anthony Route (Foreword)

Book Description

Publication Date: November 1999

Ken Marsh will take you on a flyfishing adventure as only a native who has lived and flyfished his entire life in Alaska can. You won’t find a catered, cozy flyfishing camp with protective, professional guides in these stories. Instead, you’ll join Ken and his sometimes crazy, always interesting friends as they flyfish through the seasons in the real Alaska. Through it all, they’re on a search for solitude, for the untrammeled, and for a place where angler and fish can meet in one moment that can’t be taken back or forgotten. It’s the same search all flyfishers are on, but the scale is, like the state itself, much grander than most of the Lower Forty-eight.

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

The worked-over fly-fishing memoir gets a fresh sheen with Ken Marsh's tales from the Alaskan outback. A lifelong resident and editor of Alaska Magazine, Marsh has no need for wide-eyed descriptions of hairy bush plane flights or last-frontier soliloquies. Moreover, he gracefully sidesteps previous touchstones of the genre such as midlife crisis, midlife travel, and midlife discovery that equate fish as savior. Alaska is his savior, and while the fishing is good, what really sticks in the end is Marsh's evocative treatment of his stomping grounds.

When I was young, grayling were for me what bluegills often are for kids in the Lower Forty-eight: the first fish, common, generally easy to catch. Starting at age five, wearing rubber break-up boots and a second-hand wool jacket, I spent my Augusts along the gravel bars of the Nelchina River country fly-fishing for them while my elders hunted caribou.

Marsh sings his way along a Prince William Sound sea-run cutthroat creek to ward off lurking grizzlies; wrestles "bat-eating monsters" in a secret Susitna Valley creek; escapes upstream from the Kenai River hordes to pursue salmon in peace. These are not predictable tales of redemption and big fish; Marsh brings to these pages a sense of the mystery that is so essential to good angling literature, as in this extended metaphor for his uncommon local cutthroats:

There are certain items, mostly among the gear I use for hunting and fishing, that exist in an odd sort of limbo: a folding knife I've kept since boyhood, a bag of spare fly lines, a harmonica I sometimes take on wilderness trips. These things are never quite lost. Sometimes, one or another will vanish for extended periods--a summer, a year, occasionally, longer. But in time, they always turn up, out of the periphery, normally when I least expect them. Cutthroat trout possess a similar vagueness.

Anglers dreaming of Alaska would do well to dip into Ken Marsh's clear-eyed remembrances from a lifetime of fishing the state's seemingly endless waters; outdoors enthusiasts looking for a good read would, too.

About the Author

Ken Marsh is the former outdoor editor, managing editor, and editor-in-chief of "Alaska Magazine," where he also created the award-winning "Hindsight" column.

Product Details

• Paperback: 211 pages
• Publisher: Johnson Books (November 1999)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1555662471
• ISBN-13: 978-1555662479
• Product Dimensions: 8.3 x 5.6 x 0.7 inches
• Shipping Weight: 9.6 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (1 customer review)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #2,456,553 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

8 of 10 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Breakfast at Trout's Place, April 12, 2000

By 

Marty Young (LaGrange, GA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Breakfast at Trout's Place: The Seasons of an Alaskan Flyfisher (Paperback)

Finally a truthful book about fishing in Alaska. Too often we hear of rivers, bays, and streams that are so thick with fish that you can walk from bank to bank without getting your feet wet. As an August / September visitor to the Wood River System in Dillingham, I experienced the pleasure of catching seven different species of fish ... but mainly the mighty silver salmon on the fly. It was hard work, but each catch was well worth the effort. Ken Marsh has captured the true essence of the Alaskan fishing experience ... hard work, late nights, cold water, bears, eagles and also the experience that so many from the "lower 48" can only wish for.

As I return to Alaska this summer, I will use this volume as a guide to fishing areas, rod weights, and patterns. Ken has hit the pitching with this book ... a must read.