Writer, fly-fisher, river restorationist
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 [...]
This time last year when I wrote in my introduction to Trout in Dirty Places … Despite their recovery and fragile resilence, we shouldn’t be in any doubt that urban trout and grayling still inhabit rivers on a knife edge. Chances are, between the time I finish writing this book and you start reading it, [...]
(Photo: Roy Eaton) Amid the storm of positive publicity surrounding the launch of Trout in Dirty Places, a moment of sadness: news of the passing of Sidney Vines. As a confidant of both Frank Sawyer and Oliver Kite, Sidney was a link to a genuinely vanished world, which he recorded authoritatively in Keeper of the [...]
After several successful outings on his own home waters earlier in 2011, during which I’m almost certain I mentioned a little river in South London once or twice… … it was pretty much inevitable that my West Country fishing partner in crime Dominic Garnett would eventually take the bait and visit the Wandle for the first [...]
Especially since that revelatory week in Vail when I found it was perfectly possible to ski in the morning, slip away to Gore Creek or the Eagle River for the lunchtime midge hatch, and still get back onto the slopes before the lifts closed, I’ve been deeply convinced by the leftfield concept of winter fly-fishing. [...]
Since January this year, in my role as editor and lead blogger for the Wandle Piscators’ website, I’ve been contributing occasional guest blogs for the Financial Times’ lifestyle ezine, How To Spend It. As I wrote shortly after I’d received the invitation from PR guru Drew Benvie and How To Spend It‘s deputy editor Maria [...]
(Photo: Dominic Garnett) Every blog has to start somewhere, just like every writer’s career. Fishing-writing got its hooks into me almost ten years ago, soon after I moved from retail to full-time marketing (write about what you know and inspires you is the oldest cliché in the book, but it also happens to be the [...]
