Writer, fly-fisher, river restorationist
Anyone who’s fished with me will know that I like to take a light line approach whenever possible – fishing with ultralight rigs matched with 3-weight lines or lighter – for their uncanny ability to deliver delicate presentations, cushion vicious strikes on fine tippets, and still land hefty fish of all species with speed and [...]
The past few weeks have been busy with new project development (of which, I hope, more soon!) but I’ve also had the thrill of meeting two great and influential writers on the banks of the Wandle. First up was Tankred Rinder, Austrian author and editor of the rapidly-growing Forelle und Aesche e-zine. Tankred fished the Wandle [...]
Somewhere in the depths of this apparently endless winter (cue another wild nor’easter kicking snow in the face of casting practice and trying to tune a recalcitrant switch rod to throw big intruders, never mind actual fishing) … … Adrian and I grabbed a window in the weather and headed out for a day on [...]
Scotland in September was soundtracked with falling water… Saturated by months of rain, every knee-high tussock on the Isle of Mull gurgled with a thousand tiny rivulets, and every rocky lochside path through the rhododendron thickets chattered inches-deep like a living stream. Mares’ tails billowed white from every crag, pouring over precipitous shelves of volcanic [...]
Eagerly anticipated is a term that probably gets overworked in the publishing business… but it really is true of the Salisbury & District Angling Club’s new addition to the chalkstreams’ literary canon. As befits an anthology written by members of the most democratic club on the chalkstreams (well, almost) and edited by the eminent Graham Chalmers, [...]
Even if you only believe some of the stuff you read in the fly-fishing niche-within-a-niche of the internet, you’ll probably have picked up hints that Airflo fly-lines have suffered from a pretty mixed reputation. Sinkers like the Di7 are still legendary for their efficiency in plumbing the depths of the great Midlands reservoirs, but the [...]
When the authoritative history of whole-river restoration comes to be written, Derbyshire’s Haddon estate will probably deserve a chapter of its own. The Peak District’s limestone River Wye has been legendary for dry fly only rules since 1865, but modern river management took one of its greatest leaps of faith in 2004, when Haddon’s head [...]
I’m delighted to announce that my latest Trout in Dirty Places flavoured feature has just appeared in this week’s issue of Shooting Times. The article focuses on urban fly-fishing opportunities for trout and grayling in Britain’s market towns including Fakenham, Leominster and Tiverton, and I’ve also (briefly!) addressed the vital role that’s played by good [...]
When it comes to pictures expressing a thousand words… even to a compulsive writer, this is one of those. Stalking the gravel flats, swampy oxbows, truncated spurs and meandering terraces of a river I’ve known since my teens but hardly started to understand until now… … thanks to local expert Owain, I felt as if [...]
While this summer’s rogue jetstream took yet another swing at southern and central England, rolling an endless procession of thunderheads up the M3 corridor and finally landing a knockout blow on 2012’s Game Fair… … Rich and I gambled a late afternoon off gainful employment and drove south west from the Wandle to Winchester. Under [...]
