In the past few months I’ve been doing a fair amount of reading about geology, as well as thinking about ways of helping urban rivers now and in the future. So I guess it was slightly inevitable that these themes might emerge in some of my own current writing too…

For the latest issue of Fallon’s Angler (red-ragged by a brief from editor Garrett Fallon which emphasised ‘abandonment, fishing in remote, forgotten places… the inexorable marching on of time and the cycles nature creates in man’s wake… where we come from and where we are going’) I’ve written a piece called When we’re gone on the subject of rocks, time, entropy, industrial ruins, the span of human consciousness, and how a little brown trout may actually know more about all of this than I do.

Meanwhile, I’ve also contributed my own unusual wildlife encounter, in this case approximately 150 million years in the making, to the Wild Trout Trust’s latest publication.

Not Really Fishing: A Little Book of Riverside Moments is a collection of short stories and fascinating facts about river wildlife from a wide range of contributors including Garrett himself, Jon Beer, Michelle Werrett, Andrew Griffiths, Kevin Parr and Fred Scourse, and I’m very proud to have been involved in the editing and design process alongside my colleague Denise Ashton and talented designer Rebecca Hawtrey.

Click on the links below to buy both of these new publications online… and enjoy!

Issue 23 of Fallon’s Angler is available from the Fallon’s Angler website, and Not Really Fishing can be found in the Wild Trout Trust’s web shop, or by print on demand from Amazon.

Here in south London, trout season opens later than elsewhere, and it’s just another quirk of fishing in the 21st century that social media isn’t letting me forget it. 

Starting in early March, my Instagram and Twitter feeds have steadily been filling up with photos from big trout hunters in Scotland, Eden, Derbyshire, Wales and the West Country. If it’s not the trout themselves, it’s the flies that have been carefully tied to catch them: Jinglers for Large Dark Olives, and plenty of March Browns in case this hatch lives up to the promise of recent Easter weekends and sends the trout into what witnesses can only describe, with a kind of religious awe,  as a feeding frenzy…

My latest article has just appeared in issue 9 of Fallon’s Angler, and it’s a compare-and-contrast of early season fishing in the south and the north (for the record, I’m a big fan of both, but it’d definitely be easier to live somewhere not in the south at the kind of cabin-feverish time when I wrote this piece!)

Click here to grab your copy from the Fallon’s Angler shop today.

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 I’ve fished so many times for deep-water grayling in the Alps, the salmon took. 

Unlike that moment when you stick a big trout, and it’s all fireworks and kick-bollock-scramble, the world actually seemed to slow down, and there was lots of time to think. The salmon stayed slow and deep, except when it pulled unstoppably and crashed three times on the surface, and I knew I had to stop it working down to deeper water…

So, I reckon I finally got the right article written about a fish which I may have mentioned once or twice already on this blog, and I’m really thrilled that it’s now been published in issue 8 of Fallon’s Angler.

Apart from telling the story of that unsolicited salmon from the River Ken in Galloway, I’ve also included some unavoidable discussion of the effects of industrial-scale hydropower and blanket coniferous forestry on Scotland’s landscape and rivers, and by extension many other parts of the British uplands. (Spoiler alert: not so good, but if we look hard enough, we can still see some reasons for hope).

Copies of Fallon’s Angler are always available direct from the magazine’s website, or from a few independent outlets. Go on, get yours today…

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 the funky river menders are talking about catchment-scale processes, natural flood management, and even rewilding with beavers, it’s feeling rather rare to find a book that’s just about fish. More to the point, it’s even rarer to find a book that’s just about coarse fish, and that’s exactly the point of this one.

Here in the UK, I think we can fairly say that river restoration for the benefit of salmonid species has made most of the running for the last 20-plus years.

There’s probably a whole tangle of reasons for this. Many coarse fish do use habitat in similar ways to trout and salmon, but they grow more slowly, so it can take a discouragingly long time to see results – and anyway, the Environment Agency has always been liberal with annual stockings of little chub, dace, roach and barbel from Calverton fish farm.

Maybe, too, it’s because lots of the problems affecting the barbel and bream zones of our rivers are actually much more systemic and culturally ingrained than problems in the troutier headwaters. As Mark writes in River Habitats for Coarse Fish:

Even classic art from the nineteenth century portraying idyllic river scenes often depicts destructive forces. One such well-known example is John Constable’s 1819 painting, The Hay Wain, in which the wagon that gives the painting its title is being driven along the bed of a river, cottages and roads are built right up to the bank top, wooden-shuttered banks displace the natural riparian habitat, the floodplain is converted for agriculture, and the banks are excessively trampled by stock. 

In fact, many classic English landscape paintings depict bucolic vistas in which rivers are disconnected from their floodplains (often with some bank reinforcement or trampling) and the river channel is plied by heavy boats, blocked by weirs, mills or locks, or is otherwise in a condition that may be culturally meaningful yet is very far from natural. Our modern perception of rivers, even in such classically idyllic depictions, differs substantially from the truly natural environments in which fish evolved.

Today, thanks to the modern catchment-based approach to river management (spawned by the European Water Framework Directive) everyone’s looking at our waterways in a much more holistic way, and scientists and anglers alike are starting to apply the knowledge that coarse fish often want to move around river systems just as much as better-known migratory game species.

For instance, I’ve just read this timely article by my colleague Chris Gardner at the South East Rivers Trust, in which he reveals his research on a school of bream that clearly wanted to migrate staggeringly long distances in very short spaces of time:

During my PhD in 2006, I tracked the movements of 80+ adult common bream (4-7lb) over four years in a long 40 km reach of the Lower River Witham, a very uniform fenland river in Lincolnshire. My bream were tightly shoaled and relatively immobile in a deep tributary off the main river at the upstream extent of the reach during the winter, moving short distances of, on average, about <5 km a month, up and downstream.

In the spring, they became highly mobile moving on average 30 km a month utilising the entire length of the river available to them, with one individual moving over 120 km in a single month! At this time they were visiting shallow tributaries off the main river, before using these for spawning in late May / early June. Once they had spawned, they spread out and spent the rest of the summer in the main river foraging, again moving on average 20-30 km a month up and downstream. In the autumn they moved back upstream to the deep tributary for the winter. This same yearly pattern was observed throughout the study.

As we spend more time studying more species, in river catchments which are increasingly friendly to the free flow of fish, I’ve no doubt that we’ll discover even more stuff like this to astonish us. And in the meantime…

Just like most of those the trout-focused manuals that came before it, River Habitats for Coarse Fish is designed to empower ordinary anglers with the knowledge and confidence to start making a real difference to their own river, and thus to their own fishing. If you have any interest in either of these, it’s my strong recommendation to get hold of your own copy today… and maybe buy a few for your fishing pals as well.

After taking a break for a few issues, I’m delighted to say that I’ve just had another article published in Fallon’s Angler…

… this time revisiting (from a very different angle) a few days I spent exploring the chalkstreams of northern France last summer with Jeremy Lucas and a couple of pals from the South East Rivers Trust:

The river curves away from us in the thickets, and we struggle down to a boggy fringe of reeds. The far bank is park-like and closely mown, and while there’s something I don’t quite fancy about the bungalow in the distance, or the concentration-camp spotlights on the corners of two square ponds surrounded by chain link fences, the whole stretch is clearly marked on the map as part of the local fishing association’s beat. The bed of the river looks silty, glinting with shoals of cans and bottles that must have drifted down from Ligny. Keith, all six feet seven of him, ploughs confidently across and gives me a hand out of the water. We creep along the bank…

Editor Garrett Fallon usually asks for something in the region of 2,000 words, so I’m hugely grateful to him for letting me shoot well over that word limit in pursuit of my subject (which quite apart from spookily-familiar chalkstreams also includes dogs, war, big grayling, and some lesser-known but still scalp-tingling poetry from Robert Service).

For all the obvious benefits of social media and microblogging, most publishing formats aren’t getting any longer, and having the freedom to develop a full, polished story arc is a very real luxury for any writer. I’m probably not the only one who feels this way: in fact I’m almost certain Dom Garnett, Bruno Vincent, Chris Yates, Kevin Parr, Dexter Petley and several other contributors to this issue feel exactly the same…

Issue 7 of Fallon’s Angler is now available from the magazine’s website and a few selected outlets – if you’d like to read more, please do click here to get your copy today!

In my circle of closest fishing pals, it’s almost an article of faith that the bigger a river gets, the moodier and more unpredictable it can be. Small streams are where you go to hone your short game – fishing light and stealthy, casting to fish you can see or at least locate with an educated guess. Then, when you think you’re death from above on the chalkstreams and little urban gritstoners, you make your pilgrimage to the bigger spate waters to be tested. 

When the flies come off on these big rivers, the fish respond, and you can immerse yourself in truly technical hatch-matching for trout that may run several orders of magnitude larger than their little cousins in the tributaries. When there’s no hatch, you can often pack up your nymph box as well as your dries, because the fish are tucked up resting under the banks and logjams, nowhere near their feeding stations. Over the course of many seasons, the Irwell, Welsh Wye, Calder and Eden have all tested our mettle with their squirrelly hatches and elusive trophy fish. But of all those big, moody, unpredictable rivers, probably the biggest and most challenging in our personal fluviology is the Usk…

The second issue of Fallon’s Angler has now been released, complete with my account of fishing the River Usk in Wales last summer (and extensive memories of spectacular blanks and stunning successes from years before that).

Once again it’s a huge honour to see my words appearing between the same covers (back story here) as beautiful features by Chris Yates, Dominic Garnett, Dexter Petley, Tom Fort, Jeff Hatt, Jim Burns, Garrett Fallon himself, and many other writing fisherati.

Click here to get your copy today!

Where has this summer gone? Between publication of my Balsam Bashing book, a few freelance copywriting gigs up in London, helping to recruit new staff for the Wandle and South East Rivers Trust and watching over the Wandle’s biggest river restoration projects yet, experimenting with a radical new approach to ultralight fly-fishing, and exploring new stretches of the Exe, Usk and Wiltshire Avon, several months have suddenly disappeared downstream.

Fish were caught (sometimes quite unexpectedly – maybe more on that soon), the bank balance looks a little healthier, and I took a few good photos, but what else happened in that time?

Well… I did get some other writing done.

First up, I’ve been highly honoured to have my work included in the launch issue of a new magazine that takes a robust and novel approach to niche publication. Publisher and designer Garrett Fallon believes (not without reason, and not unlike many other genres) that angling literature has become debased, devalued and even economically unviable in this still-young age of the internet. So he’s set out to swim against that current with a new print magazine, Fallon’s Angler, which aims to commission proper long-copy articles and recompense their authors properly for their time and effort.

Particularly in this context, it’s quite a thrill to see my biography (and my article on a wildwood stretch of the River Meon) appearing alongside fishing-writing superstars like Tom Fort, Chris Yates, Jeff Hatt and Dom Garnett, and I hope there’ll be plenty more opportunities in the future. If you’d like to see this noble experiment survive and thrive, copies of Fallon’s Angler are available here for just £8 each.

By contrast, both of my other pieces of fishing and environmental writing this summer have been published in almost-conventional ezines. Apart from the club blogs which I used to edit, electronic publishing is a new departure for the Wandle Piscators, but the first issue of my local fishing club’s ezine is a real cracker, a 58-page blockbuster including my own article on the Fish Where You Live philosophy which seems to underpin the whole human angle of urban river restoration:

For me, as I’m sure for many members of the Wandle Piscators, the phrase Fish Where You Live means the simple luxury of being able to wander out of my own front door on a summer’s evening, strung-up rod in hand, for an hour or two of headspace and fishing on a river that’s preferably no more than an easy walk away, even in the middle of one of the world’s great cities. 

Even if we didn’t fully recognise it at the time, I think this was the original vision of the Wandle restoration project: to get this former sewer back to a state where it could once again be a place for people to fish where they lived…

The full article starts on page 19 of the Piscators’ Chronicle, and there are plenty of articles by other club members too: mountaineering in Slovenia, fly tying and riverfly monitoring on the Wandle, barbel fishing on the Severn, chub on the little-known Beverley Brook…

Finally, for now, do you remember all that rain at the start of this year? Since 2005 I’ve been contributing very occasional environmental articles to the Redstone Review, a locally-based but globally-interested paper edited on the east slope of the Rocky Mountains by Susan De Castro McCann.

For obvious reasons, flooding is still a big topic along Colorado’s St Vrain River, and my article on the UK perspective appears on page 17 of the May/June issue of the Redstone. At the end of the driest September since records began, and only a few months after I wrote this piece, it already feels oddly dated (floods of chalk groundwater in Kenley High Street, anyone?). But I guess that was exactly my closing argument:

Like it or not, human memories have always been desperately short, and what we like to rationalise as a comfortable temperate zone can sometimes throw a spectacular tantrum, even without wild cards like climate change and all the other things we still don’t know about our little blue planet. 

Maybe the best we can hope for is courage to do what the scientists tell us, and find a house on a hill, but still not too far from a trout stream, on the odds that they’ll be right.

(Photo 1: Fallon’s Angler)