Writer, fly-fisher, river restorationist
When he’s presenting the judges’ verdicts at the Wild Trout Trust Conservation Awards every year, my colleague Paul Gaskell likes to emphasise the odds that are stacked against even the simplest river restoration projects – making it nearly impossible to believe that the spectacular and complicated ones have actually made it through this vicious (and […]
For the second year running I’ve been greatly privileged to contribute a feature to S&TC’s Gamefisher magazine – this time on the hot topic of rewilding, and how it’s actively taking place in Ennerdale on the western edge of Cumbria: Because water flows downhill, rivers are the sum total of everything that’s happening on the […]
Nearly a week after we broke the news on social media, I’m still finding it hard to express how incredibly excited I am to be joining the Wild Trout Trust as their new Trout in the Town officer for the south of England and Wales. Of course, everything has moved on a long way since […]
This month I’ve been absolutely thrilled to see my long-awaited article about the Wandle appearing in the January 2018 issue of Trout & Salmon, which started dropping on doormats and news-stands last week. It’s not a valedictory – the big move from south London to Somerset has happened for family reasons, and I’m still intending […]
These past couple of months, I’ve been contributing articles to the (increasingly authoritative) Fishtec blog… … on a whole range of subjects, from secret-weapon end-of-season trout flies to much more serious issues like invasive non-native species, and what we can all do to identify and prevent pollution in our rivers: Who’s the daddy? Fishing crane-flies […]
Over on my Urbantrout website (the continuity site for my first book, Trout in Dirty Places) I’ve just launched a new edition of my eco-branded Urbantrout Kryptek Highlander fishing caps. These are the same amazing, cutting-edge-camo patterned trucker-style caps that I brought to the UK for the first time last year – and now they’re […]
Writing an article isn’t just writing an article. It’s also writing the right article, and then finding the right place to get it published. Sometimes this can feel a lot like the painstaking process of fishing itself… Three casts later, as I tracked the nymph round and felt it lifting through the currents, just as […]
Just in case you missed all the social media chatter a few weeks ago, I thought it’d be worth mentioning again that my review of Mark Everard’s important new book River Habitats for Coarse Fish has now been published on the Fallon’s Angler website. As I said in my introduction… In these days when all […]
A couple of weekends back – before, during and after the Wandle Trust‘s usual monthly community river cleanup – film maker Jeremiah Quinn came down to the Wandle with his camera to capture some new angles on this little urban chalkstream’s story, and the qualities that have kept lots of us fishing and pulling out […]
As some of the dust starts to settle (or not…) on the results of last week’s referendum on the UK’s membership of the EU, I’m clearly not the only environmental writer who’s been thinking day and night about the implications. Readers of my chapter in Chalk Stream Fly Fishing (2012) may recall that I’m very […]
