Casting Back - by Peter McMullan (Paperback)

Book Synopsis

Peter McMullan's memoir follows six decades of fishing and writing from Northern Ireland to western Canada.

In Casting Back, McMullan moves from his childhood and early journalism in Northern Ireland through a lifetime of angling that eventually takes him to British Columbia and New Zealand. His earliest quarry included pike, bream, roach, tench and perch before he turned increasingly to brown trout, Atlantic salmon and the traditions of fly fishing.

After moving to British Columbia in the 1970s, Pacific salmon and steelhead opened an entirely new fishing world. McMullan's recollections range from slipping away from boarding school before dawn to fish for tench to encounters with bears, commercial fishers, Irish rivers and western Canadian waters. Across those settings, fishing becomes a thread connecting different stages of his life and the places in which he has lived.

The result is a literary fishing memoir shaped as much by migration, memory and place as by tackle and technique, tracing how an angler's relationship with water changes across decades and continents.

About the Author

Peter McMullan has been writing about fly-fishing for almost 60 years. Trained as a newspaper reporter and later as a sports and fishing journalist, he came to Canada from Belfast, Northern Ireland, in 1971, with his wife Daphne and two young sons, to edit a daily paper. He later moved into corporate and then professional-sports communications. Peter has been passionate about fishing all his life, contributing to magazines and newspapers in Ireland, England, Scotland, Finland and Canada. Along the way his fly rods have been tested by Atlantic and Pacific salmon, steelhead, brown and rainbow trout and from time to time by other species as well. It was the big-fish reputation of the Babine River in British Columbia and its long-standing sport fishing traditions that in 2010 led Peter to conceive and co-author the book Babine: A 50-Year Celebration of a World-Famous Steelhead and Trout River (Frank Amato Publications). He lives in Nanaimo, British Columbia.