About

He describes lakes and salt water too, but says those bodies of water are so large they’re hard to get to know, while most rivers “are comparatively small, and one feels that it is within the range of the mind to know them intimately. . . And in knowing a river intimately is a very large part of the joy of fly fishing.”

This Web Site – an electronic river in the great ocean of the Internet – is dedicated to those same principles.

About the producers of A River Never Sleeps

This site was “hatched” by the co-founders Mark Hume and Nick Didlick while streamside on a fishing trip a long time ago. They met in a Vancouver, B.C. city newsroom in 1989 when they were assigned to cover a long forgotten out-of-town assignment together.

Nick laughs when he remembers asking Mark:”Um, you don’t happen to fish do you? And you wouldn’t mind if we took an extra day and fished a local river would you?”.

To which Mark replied: “Only a day?”.

Since then they have fished many times and in many places and when the baggage on a trip gets tight they have even been known to share a fly rod!

Nick Didlick and Mark Hume first launched A River Never Sleeps in 2000, publishing it, with a few interruptions caused by life, until 2006, when it had an extended hiatus while the publishers pursued other distractions (i.e. real jobs).

Along the way dozens of writers, photographers and artists offered their work to help support the web site. Van Egan, a poet, writer, historian and close friend of Roderick Haig-Brown was an early and frequent contributor until his death in 2010.

Permission to use his iconic shot of Haig-Brown, coming out of the Line Fence Pool on the Campbell River in 1957, is one of his enduring gifts to us. We will miss Van and his contributions very much. Harvey Thommasen, Glenn Baglo, Mo Bradley, Peter McMullan (who with Pierce Clegg recently published ‘Babine’) were other early contributors who shared their fishing experiences with us from British Columbia, Ireland, Yukon, Manitoba, Alberta, Scotland, Fiji, West Virginia, and New Zealand. Loucas Raptis, Bob Wyatt, Mike Sturk, Mike Sayle, Margaret Munro, Stephen Hume, Les Brazier, Dave Hadden, Carl DeFazio, Kirk Wirsig, Hans van Klinken were among those who sent us articles, photographs or art work.

Much of that material can be found posted under Best of ARNS on this renewed site.

In returning to regular production we hope once again, with the help of friends from around the world, to turn this into the best celebration of fly fishing on the web. If you’d like to contribute, please drop us an e-mail.

Mark Hume has been fly fishing for 35 years. He began, at about age eight, catching small trout in Penticton Creek using his hands. From there he graduated to a small, cheap fiberglass rod, a level wind reel (was it really made of tin?) and a can of earth worms. With no one to teach him, he had to learn from books and by watching others.

One day, on Muir Creek, Vancouver Island, he watched a fly fisherman catch a sea-run cutthroat. For his 16th birthday he got a fly rod, slept overnight in the back of his dad’s Ford Falcon on the banks of Muir, and the next day caught 10 sea-runs over 18 inches.

There was no looking back.

Nick Didlick calls himself a professional fly fisherman and an amateur photographer, which is pretty strange, since he has been employed as a photographer for over 30 years. He began fishing for trout at age five or six, and like most children was captivated by the spirit of adventure that went along with every bobber and worm trip he took after school and on weekends with his fishing pals.

He began fly fishing in his early teens after he won a fly rod in a Bar Fishing Derby on the Fraser River, East of Vancouver, B.C and slowly took to fly fishing. You can see his photography website http://nickdidlick.com or his Fly Fish Guiding website http://flyfishingvancouver.com.

If you have story ideas, letters or just general comments send them to the Editor editor@ariverneversleeps.com

If you have advertising inquires, technical questions or general questions about our site send them to the WebMaster webmaster@ariverneversleeps.com