Told through the eyes of a longtime Montana fishing guide and itinerant fishing bum, A Good Life Wasted offers a unique perspective on an implausible period in the recent history of human civilization. When Dave Ames started guiding, Rocky Mountain locals rode horses and dug camas roots; now they're trading stock options on cell phones. The collision of stone and computer ages was short-lived, but the deep-rooted themes of this book remain.
A Good Life Wasted - a chronicle and celebration of the fishing-guide life - is poignant and spiritual; it's Blackfoot Indians and copper miners' daughters; it's fiddles and guitars and the fabric of space; it's about what happens to wild people when the wilderness is gone.
From the first chapter - in which Dave Ames recalls bluffing his way into a job as a fishing guide to the rich and famous (after barely managing to suppress the overwhelming urge to go postal at the federal agency where he suffered his first, and only, "real" job in a cubicle farm) - we're hooked. We gladly follow Ames as he describes the rite of tasting clouds of mating midges to better match the hatch, tells the story of a fabled Blackfoot fishing guide, and shares his further adventures as a guy with no job, no office, and no stress. A Good Life Wasted spins a fascinating, compelling web - a web that entices the deskbound salary slave to make a break for it, and head west to big sky and fast, cold water, ASAP.

"True Love and the Woolly Bugger is a thoroughly amusing, manic, and perversely informative book about fishing in several of its most mutant forms." -Tom McGuane
"Dave Ames's book . . . is good-natured fun, filled with insight, a passion for what honest fly fishing really is. He has a sharp eye for quirky nuance that makes simple language dance a wild step."
-John Holt, author of Knee Deep in Montana's Trout Streams
"True Love and the Woolly Bugger is adventurous and funny, and yet also poignant. In short, it's not just a fishing book, but very much like life itself, and well worth reading, even by folks who have never made a cast." -John Barsness, editor of Gray's Sporting Journal and Montana Time
When is "sex, death, and fly fishing" not about the life cycle of an insect? When you read True Love and the Woolly Bugger, which views fly fishing and life through a different lens. In these tales trout, tarpon, and bonefish are skillfully interwoven with all the things-funny, happy, and sad-that happen to Dave Ames's completely unforgettable characters: a laid-back Bahamian fishing guide who stalks "gourmet" food, especially for his American clients; a tattooed, motorcycle-riding, fly-fishing beauty who teaches the hero a thing or two; his fishing buddies . . . a perverse and driven lot who continually push the envelope of sanity and good judgment.
"True Love" takes you to the Bob Marshall Wilderness to fish for grayling and trout, and to learn about enduring love. "The Woolly Bugger" is an odyssey through three decades of fishing and sometimes hard living, from the author's childhood bait fishing to his truly unusual conversion to flies and catch-and-release.
True Love and the Woolly Bugger will captivate you with remarkable stories, remarkably told, and leave you asking for more.

Told through the eyes of a longtime Montana fishing guide and itinerant fishing bum, A GOOD LIFE WASTED offers a unique perspective on an implausible period in the recent history of human civilization. When Dave Ames started guiding, Rocky Mountain locals rode horses and dug camas roots; now they're trading stock options on cell phones. The collision of stone and computer ages was short-lived, but the deep-rooted themes of this book remain.
A chronicle and celebration of the fishing-guide life, A GOOD LIFE WASTED is a vicarious pleasure for anyone who has ever wondered, even once, what it would be like not to have a "real job." The book is poignant and spiritual; it's Blackfoot Indians and copper miners' daughters; it's fiddles and guitars and the fabric of space; it's about what happens to wild people when the wilderness is gone.
From the first chapter--in which Dave Ames recalls bluffing his way into a job as a fishing guide to the rich and famous (after barely managing to suppress the overwhelming urge to go postal at the federal agency where he suffered his first, and only, "real" job in a cubicle farm)--we're hooked. We gladly follow Ames as he describes the rite of tasting clouds of mating midges to better match the hatch, tells the story of a fabled Blackfoot fishing guide, and shares his further adventures as a guy with no job, no office, and no stress. A GOOD LIFE WASTED spins a fascinating, compelling web--a web that entices the deskbound salary slave to make a break for it, and head west to big sky and fast, cold water, ASAP.