Fly Fishing People: Sir Ian Botham

Ian Botham, former (and somewhat controversial) Test cricketeer and now commenter for British SKY Sports, recently published Botham on Fishing: At Sea, Being Coarse, on the Fly (Weidenfeld & Nicolson, October 2008, 240 pages), offering his perspectives on fly fishing, coarse fishing and sea fishing. The Guardian‘s Jamie Jackson excerpts some of the new book this morning: “In January 2001 I opened the Scottish salmon fishing season in a tiny village called Kenmore, which is situated where the river emerges from Loch Tay. It was freezing in the Highlands – they’d had one of the heaviest frosts for a long time and there was ice on parts of the water, so I definitely needed the traditional quaich [Scottish cup] of whisky, which is drunk at the opening.”
Bothan received the BBC Sports Personality of the Year Lifetime Achievement Award in 2004. (See Botham’s Wikipedia entry.)
Botham on Fishing: At Sea, Being Coarse, on the Fly on Amazon.