Details
Fishing Adventures in Search of America’s Saltwater Gamefish
Signed by the author
Illustrations by Bob White
Hardcover, 320 pages
6.2 x 1.2 x 9.1 inches
Lyons Press (April 1, 2023)
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In Casting Seaward, author, naturalist, and educator Steve Ramirez expands beyond the geographical scope of his first two books by traveling thousands of miles by plane, motor vehicle, boat, and foot pursuing the native gamefish of North America’s salt and brackish water habitats. This journey includes following anadromous fish like salmon from the ocean’s depth to the shallowest tributaries of Alaskan rivers, and following rivers and streams from their freshwater sources to their brackish water deltas.
In the course of this journey, Ramirez explores and fishes portions of the entire American coastline from the Northern Atlantic coast to the Caribbean Sea, the Gulf of Mexico, and up the Pacific coast from California to Alaska. The entirety of this sojourn was written while traveling through the COVID-19 pandemic, and it touches on the lessons that challenges such as global pandemics, global ecological and sociological disruption, and global opportunities for positive learning and change can teach us about nature and human nature. Most of all, Casting Seaward is a celebration of the bounty and beauty of our water-covered planet, and a recognition of its increasingly rarefied qualities.
Each story is told in part through the eyes of the people who have lived alongside, and come to love, these waters and fish. Woven throughout these adventures are the stories of the people he meets and befriends while pursuing a mutual love of nature and the best of human nature, as the first criterion for finding common ground.
Casting Seaward is an enthralling exploration, an insightful warning and call to action, and an exceedingly hopeful story in an all-too-often seemingly hopeless time. It is a story of fishing and friendship. It is a story of humanity’s impact on nature, and nature’s impact on humanity. It is our story, in this pivotal moment in the history of humanity and the living blue planet we call home.
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Editorial Reviews of Casting Onward
“The River Why, by David James Duncan, so profoundly influenced me that I named a beloved dog after the protagonist, Gus. A Fly-Fisherman’s Blue Ridge, by Chris Camuto, and Holy Ghost Creek by Frank Weissbarth, are two of the finest fishing books I have ever read–mostly because they are not really about fishing. Casting Onward sits in the pantheon of these books. It is a book about fishing, but on a much more important level, it is about us, our relationship with one-another, and our relationship with the lands and waters that sustain the planet.”
~ Chris Wood, President/CEO, Trout Unlimited
“This is a book about many important things–friendships, love, humor, and the joys of living–and fishing too! Cast your fly into the circle of life–connect with nature, live in the moment, change the future. I couldn’t close the cover until I finished it.”
~ Randall Kaufmann, author of Bonefishing: Fly Fishing the Flats for Bonefish, Permit, Tarpon, and Trevally
“Steve Ramirez is an author of rare talent, whose prose reads like poetry. In Casting Onward, the follow-up volume to his widely acclaimed Casting Forward, Ramirez travels the country, fly rod in hand, in search of America’s native gamefish in both fresh water and salt, from cutthroat trout in the West to striped bass and bluefish in the East, and much more. Along the way, he reminds us–in his signature lyrical, evocative style–that fishing is about much more than fish.”
~ Bill Bowers, writer, editor, and angler
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About the Author
Steve Ramirez is an outdoor and conservation author who lives and writes in the Texas Hill Country. Steve’s first book, Casting Forward – Fishing Tales from the Texas Hill Country, is a winner of the Excellence in Craft Award from the Outdoor Writer’s Association of America. His second book, Casting Onward – Fishing Adventures in Search of America’s Native Gamefish has received critical acclaim as an important work of outdoor adventure and conservation literature. Steve currently writes the Seasonable Angler column for Fly Fisherman Magazine and his work has appeared in various journals including, Fly Fisherman, Trout Magazine, The Flyfish Journal, American Angler, Tail Magazine, Texas Sporting Journal, Explore Magazine, Under Wild Skies, Cutthroat: Journal of the Arts, The Houston Literary Review, and many more.
Steve serves as the Ambassador for Texas for the American Museum of Fly-Fishing, is a Life Member of Trout Unlimited, and a contributing member of the Nature Conservancy, and Audubon.
As a certified Master Naturalist, Steve is passionately involved in promoting the restoration and conservation of the watersheds, rivers, canyons, forests, deserts, wetlands, grasslands, and shorelines of North America and beyond. He is an avid hiker and world adventure traveler who has explored four continents, but who always seems to return home to the spring fed Hill Country streams of Texas.
