Fish On, Fish Off is the angling version of Bill Bryson's 'A Walk in the Woods'. Through a series of nearly 50 personal essays, the author explores what happens when the self-taught, DIY angler sets out to fish the world - and winds up stumbling into every possible pitfall and danger along the way. These include: getting chased from a river by an elephant, surviving a terrifying helicopter ride over the Straits of Magellan, and breaking his only rod on the second cast in Cuba's Bay of Pigs.

Closer to home, he is swept off a jetty on Block Island by a rogue wave, winds up in an emergency room more than once with fishing lures hanging from various parts of his anatomy, and perhaps most daunting, surviving 30 years of the scrum better known as opening day of trout season in his crowded home state of New Jersey.

If Upriver and Downstream showed the poetry of angling, Fish On, Fish Off shows the scars.

Almost anybody can tell the hero stories and tales of conquest, but it takes a real writer (and angler) to be able to convey failure and challenges in a way that's still grippy and entertaining. Sautner has a great knack for wit and humility. Think of him in the Zane Grey meets Murphy's Law context. There is some truly perceptive and interesting stuff in this book, and it never sags.
A finny hoot from start to finish.
Every fisherman will find pieces of himself between the pages.
Fish On, Fish Off is an hilarious, engaging collection of everything the rest of us won't admit like fish that get away, not just usually but always; the unsung art of rod breaking; and catching fish only Sautner has heard of. How refreshing to read the memoirs of a weird fisherman ie, an honest one. -- Ted Williams

Stephen Sautner is obsessed with catching fish. Any fish. From the Falkland Islands where he cast for sea trout next to an active mine field, to the Zambezi River where three-ton elephants guarded pools filled with tiger fish and Nile crocodiles. His stories have appeared in The New York Times Magazine, Fly Rod & Reel, Wildlife Conservation, and Underwater Naturalist. Along with Sautner's 15 years of contributing to the NY Times, he is also the director of communications for the Wildlife Conservation Society at the Bronx Zoo, where he publicizes the Society's conservation programs.