BRIGHT WATERS, SHINING TIDES: REFLECTIONS ON A LIFETIME OF FLY FISHING

BRIGHT WATERS, SHINING TIDES: REFLECTIONS ON A LIFETIME OF FLY FISHING Kib Bramhall is known for three things: painting, fishing, and writing. He is a world-class fisherman who is also a well-known painter. He lives on Martha's Vineyard, where it's hard to tell what he's best known for. WHAT THE EXPERTS ARE SAYING:This is a beautiful book a thin, elegant volume that feels good in your hands while it sweeps you into a world well-known and deeply loved. Published by Vineyard Stories, the book comprises 10 essays (11, including the introduction) about fishing, written across a span of four decades. It is illustrated by 32 paintings of people, and places, and fish that the West Tisbury artist has encountered over the same period. While the book is a feast for the eyes, it is also a beautiful love story about a boy who became infatuated with fishing and let it lead him where it would to exciting people and unexpected places that nurtured him, as a man and as an artist. It all started along the Jersey shore. Of the tackle room in his grandparents' beach house in Mantoloking, he writes, "The aroma was of sea mist and oilskins, and I grew up there and on the beach, a willing and devout student of a pastime I would practice into the next century." --Martha's Vineyard TimesOne of the joys of spending time on Martha s Vineyard whether you know it well or hardly at all is that it s always possible to wake up in the morning and acquaint yourself with it in a new, thrilling and lasting way before you go back to bed. That s what Mr. Bramhall s book will very likely do reintroduce you to a place you may have known only in part, no matter how long you ve been here, largely because you had forgotten (or never knew) where or how to look afresh. Where most of us know the Island only as far as the borders of its shoreline, Mr. Bramhall paints and describes the ocean beyond it, on the surface and below. Where our Vineyard is mostly a place of daylight, his is often wilderness of blackest night. Where ours is an increasingly smoothed-over, suburban place, his remains a hunting ground where intuition, patience and skill are the order of the day (or night). In your hand, the book feels light, the sort of thing you d flip through in a few minutes. But it pulls you in and draws you along, and by the time you re done you feel as though you ve been on a great adventure with an expert guide who shows you just what to look and feel for even if you embarked on the journey expecting the place to be familiar, the expedition predictable, and the experience one you ve already had. --Vineyard Gazette ISBN: 0-9827146-6-1 publish date: 07/31/2011