Washington's Olympic Peninsula is one of the last pristine regions in the contiguous United States. Old-growth firs and wild salmon still rule this incredible wilderness. Centered around Olympic National Park, a living network of untamed rivers connects the region. Steve Probasco has lived on the peninsula for over twenty years and has fished, floated, hiked, and climbed in all of the river valleys. This unique book reveals his experience and will help you learn the trails, fishing holes, whitewater, and more. The Olympic Peninsula Rivers Guide is packed with access and resource information such as when and where salmon, steelhead, and trout are found in the rivers, boat ramp locations, whitewater spots, and many other outdoor recreation aspects of the river corridors. Over sixty maps and photographs accompany the informative and insightful text.

The Southern Surfcaster will increase your knowledge of fishing and help you develop into a more confident salt-water fisherman. Explore creative techniques and the latest strategies that have transformed the sport over the last decade. Many of the old-school methods of fishing are updated for modern practicality. The Southern Surfcaster will change the way you think and what you thought you knew about salt water fishing.

’I can’t recall us ever talking about anything other than eels and how to best catch them, down there by the stream. Actually, I can’t remember us speaking at all. Maybe because we never did.’

The European eel, Anguilla anguilla, is one of the strangest creatures nature ever created. Remarkably little is known about the eel, even today. What we do know is that it’s born as a tiny willow-leaf shaped larva in the Sargasso Sea, travels on the ocean currents toward the coasts of Europe – a journey of about four thousand miles that takes at least two years. Upon arrival, it transforms itself into a glass eel and then into a yellow eel before it wanders up into fresh water. It lives a solitary life, hiding from both light and science, for ten, twenty, fifty years, before migrating back to the sea in the autumn, morphing into a silver eel and swimming all the way back to the Sargasso Sea, where it breeds and dies.

And yet . . . There is still so much we don’t know about eels. No human has ever seen eels reproduce; no one can give a complete account of the eel’s metamorphoses or say why they are born and die in the Sargasso Sea; no human has even seen a mature eel in the Sargasso Sea. Ever. And now the eel is disappearing, and we don’t know exactly why.

What we do know is that eels and their mysterious lives captivate us.

This is the basis for The Gospel of the Eels, Patrik Svensson’s quite unique natural science memoir; his ongoing fascination with this secretive fish, but also the equally perplexing and often murky relationship he shared with his father, whose only passion in life was fishing for this obscure creature.

Through the exploration of eels in literature (Günter Grass and Graham Swift feature, amongst others) and the history of science (we learn about Aristotle’s and Sigmund Freud’s complicated relationships with eels) as well as modern marine biology (Rachel Carson and others) we get to know this peculiar animal. In this exploration, we also learn about the human condition, life and death, through natural science and nature writing at its very best.