Casting Seaward: Fishing Adventures in Search of America's Saltwater Gamefish

by Steve Ramirez, Kirk Deeter (Foreword), Bob White (Illustrator)

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.

320 pages, Hardcover

Published April 1, 2023

Reviews

[John · Rating 5 out of 5]

While the first book in this series remains my favorite (Steve taught in that book that it was okay to be a fly angler in Texas where trout are scarce and other fish are beautiful and worth of meeting.), this book opened a world of sea fishing to new perspective for me. While my relationship with my father and that of sea angling were very different from the author’s, his prose led me to reevaluate and reconcile my relationships to both. I can’t wait to fish my Texas coastal waters with a fly rod and recall the better experiences of my life with my now departed father.

I savored this book and rationed its pages to avoid the end until I could do so no
Longer. Now I will have to be satisfied with Steve’s work in periodicals until the release of his fourth book. I can assure you, I will be one of its first purchasers.

Keep casting and writing about it Steve, I will be casting, waiting, and reading. Glad to have you in this world to share a few steps of my journey.