"Fly Fishing British Columbia is a collaborative effort on the part of the fly fishing community of British Columbia. Blending the voices of 15 main contributors, all acknowledged experts with almost 500 years of BC fly fishing experience among them, the book distills their knowledge as well as the wisdom, lore, art and science of the many fine anglers who blazed the trails we continue to explore today.

No single writer could have produced this multi-faceted work, nor could the contributors have achieved the level of detail revealed in these pages without the collected fly fishing knowledge left by those who went before. In this respect the book is a celebration of British Columbia’s angling heritage and so becomes a bridge between the past and present.

None of this was clear at the outset. When Jim and Dave from Interactive Broadcasting Corporation contacted me about becoming involved in the writing of a definitive work on fly fishing in BC I was immediately intrigued. As the creator of BC’s premier tourism and outdoor recreation web site (www.bcadventure.com), IBC is a favorite in the province’s angling community and recognized for outstanding quality. The proposed book seemed a natural extension of those efforts, and in the fall of 1998 I joined the team as editor and creative director. From there the project quickly took on a life of it’s own and with it came a lucky star that defies rational explanation. Each time it became apparent that remarkable talent and skill was required, it somehow became readily available.

Artist Debra Bevaart happened along just when it became clear we needed an artist capable of depicting the aquatic environment in exquisite detail. Renowned Canadian artist Ken Kirkby was captivated by the concept and consequently made available a vast selection of his many fine angling works. Photographer Ian Roberts not only had the exacting standards required to do justice to the book’s color section, he is also a fly fisher and writer.

One after another they all appeared when they were needed and each one of them fell under the spell of a project that was clearly larger than any one of its many elements and perhaps even greater than the sum of all those varied parts. It has been a happy and fortuitous coming together of many individual voices, talents and skills. As editor, I like to think every reader will be as captivated as were those who worked on the project and that its underlying message of deep-seated respect, appreciation and conservation will be communicated to all who open these pages and cast a fly to the waters of British Columbia."