The Mark and Mac Show will be live and operational as we begin the final research leg of our book for Johnson Books - Home Bases, Fishing Places: Colorado.
Almost every fishing guidebook you've ever read bases their format around riversheds. To us this makes little sense. Sure, Denver anglers get away for a day's angling on the Platte but most anglers go somewhere, spend the night or several nights and fish the available rivers and lakes near their lodging. Say you go to Lake City or Pagosa Springs or Creede or Grand Junction or Durango or Steamboat or Carbondale for an outdoor adventure getaway, your summer two-week vacation ---- you will fish those fisheries near your home base. Oklahomans, Texans, Kansans go to the southwestern states and they go to a fishing home base not just a single river. They want a guidebook that shows them where to fish around that home base, where to eat, where to stay --- in short, how to plan their trip. That's our book.
A book that is organized by home base --- village, town, city, resort --- is much more useful to the reader than a book that has the Yampa in one chapter and the Elk in another. To be sure, it's a different type of guidebook ---- for the family, for the couple, for fishing buddies --- not just riversheds but angling opportunities from a home base, replete with all the local hotspots, trails, lakes and streams. For the last few years, I fish 50-100 days a year with my fishing buddy and fellow outdoors writer, Chad McPhail.
We'll include lodging information (camping to budget to luxury), dining information, where to get groceries and gas and other supplies; interesting things to do and see when you're not fishing, flyshops and tackle stores, flies and insect hatches, fishing day trips from the base, fishing loop trips, seasonal information, the flavor and personality of that home base. The book would include mostly trout locales but it will include a few warmwater bases as well.
So we begin in late May and end in August. We will fish 40 locales, places we have come to know well over our combined 60 years flyfishing Colorado but places we want to touch up on, get the latest info on, make our home base one more time. This blog will be our journey of this trip. We will be driving Mark's Jeep Wrangler 4-Door pulling behind it our sponsor, an A-Liner Trailer from Columbia Northwest. Let the games begin.
