Belgian Flats
Belgian Flats is the story of a fly-fishing guide named Cody who’s hit a career dead-end after a dozen years guiding on a famed western trout stream. Cody’s mysterious and bombastic mentor, JD, suggests that Cody take a job as a lodget manager at a prestigious Atlantic salmon lodge in northwestern Russia. The story follows Cody’s travels to the Kola Peninsula and his encounters with the characters that filter through—from Oxbridge professors who can’t cast, to philosophizing oligarchs, to Sami herdsmen who are not above kidnapping lodge staff to maintain control of their historic lands. There’s even a love interest. Belgian Flats provides an offbeat and humorous insider’s view of the fly-fishing world that angling aficionados will appreciate.
Chris Santella is the author of 24 books, including Fifty Places to Fly Fish Before You Die and The Tug is the Drug. His fly-fishing stories have appeared in The New York Times, Washington Post, Wall Street Journal, Gray’s Sporting Journal, Outside, Trout, and Bonefish & Tarpon Journal, among other publications.