New Star Books, 197 pp., $18, softcover.

I know from personal experience that the best way to acquaint oneself with the rolling storytelling brogue of Andrew Struthers is the old-fashioned way: around a squeaking picnic table in the middle of a warm summer night, the beers almost gone and his gold front tooth glimmering in the moonlight when he smiles through all the funny bits. But if that cannot be arranged, reading The Last Voyage of the Loch Ryan on a rainy night over a couple fingers of single malt is a pretty good substitute.

Struthers washed up on the shores of Tofino via Scotland, Uganda, and Japan, several fishing seasons and part-time jobs ago. And after the feds ran him out of the cozy pyramid he'd built himself on Crown land, he bought a fixer-upper of an old boat by way of the very same government's fishing license buy-back program. This solved his housing crisis, kept his allergy to signing leases at bay, and made it easier to travel to Victoria, where his ex-partner and daughter had just moved.

What follows is the tale of Struthers, self-avowedly "mechanically declined", breathing life into the engine of his boat and learning how to avoid sending himself to an early watery grave. He is more than forthright about his predilection for the bullshit, fessing up on page 13 that "Sadly, that's exactly what happened. Out here, yarn and truth get tangled. A lot of Clayoquot tales are true at one end and tall at the other. But I swear on the grave of Jesus, every tale I'm about to tell you is true at one end."

There's at least one good laugh every other page or so, if you're paying attention, and the whole story comes with free facts about the history of the shipwrecked seamen who settled the white man's Tough City, now riddled with surfers who call it Tofino. And every once in a while Struthers's tale lifts its head off the bar and belts out one of those truths about humanity, that kind of bare-bones insights that can only be got at via the fine-tuned craft of an expert bullshitter.