"You'll meet eccentric shore workers, wealthy guests who arrive by yacht and floatplane, as well as essential guides Big Jake, Lucky Petersen, Vop and Wet Lenny. . . . A deadpan narrative keeps the absurdity coming as earnest RCMP, FBI and Fisheries officers encounter the salmon-obsessed denizens of the island resort. This book is a keeper." —Western Mariner

A colourful portrait of life in a fishing village on the BC coast.

After spending fifteen years as a fishing guide on the BC coast, David Giblin decided that the offbeat people and places he’d encountered during that colourful period in his life had to be preserved. Like any good fishing story, wherein the fish seem to grow faster after they are dead, the forty-seven interconnected narratives in what eventually became The Codfish Dream took on a life of their own. The result is a series of hilarious, strange, keenly observed, true (or mostly true) stories of Giblin’s experiences. These whimisical tales are held together by a thread of international intrigue that affects everyone in the small community of Stuart Island over one eventful summer, when FBI agents visit the island to investigate insider trading. The Codfish Dream is an unforgettable book imbued with an undeniable sense of place and time.

David Giblin worked for fifteen years as a salmon fishing guide at Stuart Island, roughly forty miles east of Campbell River—a fertile environment for the incubation of great fishing stories. He is a visual artist and the author of The Codfish Dream, which as an unpublished manuscript was a finalist in the Cedric Literary Awards in the creative non-fiction category.

David Giblin's profile page

David Giblin is a marvellous storyteller, and The Codfish Dream is a wonderful book: witty, whimsical, well-written, and a terrific read from cover to cover. Pour yourself a beverage of your choice (the author is partial to wine) and settle in. You’ll smile, chuckle, and laugh out loud on almost every page.

Ian Ferguson, winner, Stephen Leacock Medal for Village of the Small Houses

As skillful a writer as he was a sport-fishing guide, David Giblin deftly hooks, reels, and lands us in the watery world of Canada’s wild west coast of the 1980s. Each cleverly crafted story offers a porthole view into a rollicking season of unforgettable characters, capturing a time and place changed forever. With insights and humour as finely honed as a dressing knife, we walk a mile in his gumboots in the hunt for the mighty tyee salmon.

Sylvia Taylor, author of Beckoned by the Sea and The Fisher Queen

You’ll meet eccentric shore workers, wealthy guests who arrive by yacht and floatplane, as well as essential guides Big Jake, Lucky Petersen, Vop and Wet Lenny . . . A deadpan narrative keeps the absurdity coming as earnest RCMP, FBI and Fisheries officers encounter the salmon-obsessed denizens of the island resort. This book is a keeper.

Western Mariner