SPIN CASTING BRILLIANTLY, by Michael Rutter and J. Alan Baumgarten, Mountain Press Publishing Co., Missoula, MONT, 2001, 174 pages, $18.

Reading this comprehensive book as a guy who made his first spin cast more than 60 years ago, I’m wondering if this is quite fair to the authors. For this is a book that assumes you come to spin casting and fishing for the first time. It begins at the very beginning, with advice and specifications about what rods and reels may work best for you and the kinds of fishing you hope to do. I realize now as I read that all those years ago I was too young, too impetuous, and too strapped for cash to worry much about such matters. Off I went to Robertson and Zenger, one of the friendliest local tackle shops, listened to their advice, bought their most affordable rod and reel and took off on my bike for Hook Pond, which I had learned had been stocked several years before with largemouth bass.

Whoever the generous party was who had done the stocking had more or less forgotten about those fish, so I figured the bass had been living fat, dumb and happy long enough to grow into what the rod and gun magazines of the day called lunkers: big, battling, trophy fish. And I was right. Which is by way of informing you that you can probably catch fish with your new spinning tackle whether or not you read this book, especially if you fish a relatively small pond that has been stocked, but never before fished. In the real world, however, especially today’s real world where there is hardly a single cubic foot of water that has not been fished by someone, you can learn a lot from Messrs. Rutter and Baumgarten.

For one thing, their prose is crystal clear. It’s the kind of basic, agreeable English that how-to writers must articulate if they’re to be any real help at all. Plus, these guys have a sense of humor, which also is an essential saving grace when it comes to making instructions not only readable, but interesting. And there are photographs and line drawings aplenty, made more informative by the book’s large-size format.

As I’m reading along, I’m asking myself: What did these guys leave out? By the time I’d turned the last page, I’m thinking: They’ve covered it all, and then some. There are bits and pieces here and there you might not expect, such as hypothermia, how to avoid it and what to do if it’s unavoidable. There’s also a fairly detailed section on catch-and-release techniques, why they should be employed, and how you can do your part to conserve the resource. This is a bit of contemporary information you won’t find in how-to-fish books published a decade or more ago.

Some 50 pages are about the different species of freshwater fish a spin angler is most likely to catch. There is, however, no mention anywhere of the saltwater species that are quite willing to strike at a spin caster’s lure. If I was going to revise the book a bit for its second printing, I’d include a chapter on the definitely exciting dimensions saltwater offers even a clumsy spin fisher. Given the opportunities along Maine’s wonderfully convoluted coast and its several species of challenging game fish (mackerel, bluefish, striped bass and pollock, to name just a few), their mention could add considerably to the book’s useful information.

On the other side of this same angling coin, however, is the book’s wealth of freshwater fishing information. And Maine, as you well know, has some of the finest, wildest, most varied freshwater lakes, rivers, ponds and streams in the nation. There is much to be learned then from the book’s chapters about each, and about the fish that live there, fish well-known to many Maine anglers: brook trout, lake trout, largemouth and smallmouth bass and more. Just about everything you need to know is here, along with a few details you might never have thought of.

If you have a son or daughter, or grandson or granddaughter, who is where I was all those years ago, headed for the local tackle shop to look for his or her first affordable spinning rod, reel, line and lures, you could do your good deed for the day and give them this book. Half of them, of course, won’t read it. But the ones who do will be the better anglers.

Count on it.