Chasing Ghost Trout

By Dennis Dauble

Nonfiction, 208 pages, 5.5" x 8.5"
Softcover

ISBN 979-8-4974-4461-2

Chasing Ghost Trout is award-winning author Dennis Dauble’s most personal book to date. Every page of this so-called “fishing memoir” shares the events and people that shaped his love for wild trout and the streams of northeastern Oregon's Blue Mountains.

Chasing Ghost Trout is a rollicking ride through five decades of memories that show how the spirit of family and a love of nature can carry us through life. Dauble tells stories about encounters with wood ticks, a first steelhead, cleavage from heaven, sibling rivalry, old trucks, giant bull trout, organized religion, and a legendary rock formation. Even through the pain and uncertainty of his battle with prostate cancer and the loss of dear family members, comfort is found in the constant companionship of his Grandpa Harry’s battered willow creel—aka fish box—and its elusive collection of “ghost trout.”

Dennis Dauble is a Northwest writer and the author of three previous collections of essays (One More Last Cast, The Barbless Hook, and Bury Me With My Fly Rod) as well as the guide book, Fishes of the Columbia Basin, all available through Keokee Books and on Amazon. A retired fisheries biologist, he enjoys time spent restoring his vintage cabin in the Umatilla River valley and hanging out with his wife, Nancy, their two grown children (and respective spouses), and four grandchildren. Each grandchild caught his or her first trout on a fly rod during a summer stay at the cabin. In his spare time, he fishes for trout, steelhead, salmon, and more.

PRAISE FOR DENNIS DAUBLE AND CHASING GHOST TROUT

“Grandpa Harry’s old willow creel—with its faint odors of dried fern and fish scale, remnant of ghost trout—bind these stories of fishing and family along creeks and streams near the western flanks of Oregon’s Blue Mountains.”
— Georganne O’Connor, author of Northwest Arid Lands

“Chasing Ghost Trout is a moving memoir of fishing and family, with all of the stunning beauty of rising trout and the aching sense of loss for places and people washed away by time.”
— Henry Hughes, author of Back Seat With Fish

“Chasing Ghost Trout has genuine interest to all of us who have walked and waded small streams while pursuing those wonderful trout and steelhead. The stories contain many gleaming nuggets of understanding and revelation.”
— Frank Amato, Amato Publications

“Over the past century, nothing in the Columbia Basin has changed so much as the movement of water and the mixture of fish. In Fishes of the Columbia Basin, Dennis Dauble reconstructs the drainage from the earliest geology to the tiniest sculpin, piece by piece. He has created a guidebook not only for anglers but for anyone who wants to peer into the liquid soul of the Interior.”
— Jack Nisbet, author of Sources of the River and Visible Bones

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