This year I’ve been spending a bit of time with the Vision Glass Streamer 7ft 6in 6wt rod, assigning it the very specific role of firing small streamers into nooks and crannies in tiny brooks here in Somerset.

Admittedly, for the vast majority of my streamer fishing this season, I’ve been using either 10ft 5wt or (arguably even more specialist, yet weirdly super-versatile) 10ft 6in 3wt Helios 3’s from Orvis…

… but some of my real close-to-home water is so narrow and tunnelled with trees that neither of those long rods will physically fit, and temporarily splitting them down into sections, Neil Patterson style, tends to raise fatal doubts when there’s always a chance of striking into something out of all proportion to the diminutive size of the stream.

So, what of the Glass Streamer? As I mostly expected from fibreglass, even six-inch fish will bend it into quite a satisfying curve, and I’m looking forward to finding some of the real lunkers in 2025.

Vision’s own recommendation seems to be for using the Glass Streamer on ‘smaller to medium size rivers’, though I still can’t quite imagine loading it up with a full WF6 line and corresponding leader (perhaps that’ll come later). But it’s been good fun flicking a kind of euro-nymphing / mono rig set up, which is often all you need at small stream ranges with a fly that’s just weighted enough to carry itself to the target, towing line behind it like a harpoon.

(I think I saw ‘Elliezium’ using her Glass Streamer in mayfly time, so that might be another excuse to bring it out?)

Other points: I love the vivid lime green colour, and I’m still conflicted on the unconventional two-piece blank: quick and easy to set up, yet not quite optimised for travel.

And… confession time… my inner design freak tackle tart absolutely yearns for colourful agate in that bare chrome stripping ring. But maybe that’s for when I slip further down the glassy slope and commission something custom built and crazy beautiful from Sandy Nelson or Warren McCarthy… stranger things could happen!

As the start of trout season creeps round again, I’m feeling incredibly proud and privileged to feature in the latest issue of the beautiful Fly Culture print magazine – this time alongside work from Richard Baker, Adrian Grose-Hodge, Henry Giles, Ben Jailler, Matt Eastham, Dan Osmond and many others.

Editor Pete Tyjas asked me to write about the experience of leaving one well-loved river and moving to another. So that’s what this is… and a record of realising that spelunking around in the sources of rivers and rocks is steadily becoming indistinguishable from fly-fishing itself, and the simple but complicated importance of being able to fish where you live.

Regular readers may notice some themes that are similar to my previous Limestone Chemistry piece which appeared in Fly Culture this time last year, and they’d undoubtedly be correct. Writing finds its own way downstream, and larger bodies of work often settle in natural places.

You can pick up your Spring 2021 copy of Fly Culture here: thanks in advance for reading!

Mere decades ago, these were waters that still ran black with coal dust and the toxic effluent of steel mills and other industries. Today, many Welsh urban rivers still suffer from litter, drainage misconnections and misbehaving sewage treatment works, but if you look carefully, you’ll find wild fish among the remaining shopping trolleys: trout (some of them very big indeed), grayling, barbel and even salmon…

Some writing projects can be a slow burn between concept and publication, and that’s OK.

I think it must have been in autumn 2019 that Ceri Thomas asked me if I’d share some of my favourite Welsh fishing spots in a feature for the new Fishing in Wales website. Of course, I said, and turned it round in time for publication sometime in spring 2020, but we all know what happened this time last year…

Thanks to the most excellent C-19 vaccination programme, though, 2021 is looking a lot more promising for fishing travel. And urban fisheries hold great potential if you’re hunting for beautiful big wild trout that may hardly have seen a fly in the last year and a half.

So, click here to find my favourite 5 Welsh urban rivers. Then get your vaccine shots as soon as you can, and maybe I’ll see you out there on the banks.

(Spoiler: I’m all about the Usk, Taff, Rhymney, Ogmore and Afon Lwyd. But you’ll still need to check that article to find out exactly why!)

… means Trout in Dirty Places in Italian, and this week I’ve been surprised and thrilled to find out that I’ve featured in this article about urban street fishing as an antidote to lockdown and C-19, in the Italian newspaper Corriere della Sera.

For urban and rural dwellers alike, being able to #FishWhereYouLive, or anywhere close to home, is a blessing that’s not lost on those who are lucky enough to experience it – and in fact I’ve recently been writing something on this subject for publication in Fly Culture in a few weeks’ time.

Stay safe, y’all, and watch this space…

(Images: Corriere della Sera)

Way back in 2016-17, I had the immense pleasure of taking part in a project to produce a beautiful coffee table book called The Fly Fisher: The Essence and Essentials of Fly Fishing.

By all accounts, it’s been hugely successful – so much so, that its publishers Gestalten have just released an updated second edition.

All my original profiles of flyfishing campaigners, ambassadors and influencers are still there, and so is my chapter on urban flyfishing… complete with Duncan Soar‘s unforgettable photos of the M60 motorway embankment towering over the junction pool of the Tame and Goyt in the edgelands of Manchester.

Among the other updates, it’s great to see that the environmental hook has been honed even further, including the new #PlasticInTheBasket concept: if you fish with a stripping basket, why not fill it with litter to take away with you when you leave, as part of the global effort to reduce plastic waste in our rivers and oceans? (Pro tip: no stripping basket? a bag will do just as well!)

The updated edition of The Fly Fisher is now available direct from Gestalten and from all good bookshops… and if I do say so myself, I think it might make a perfect gift for yourself or someone special this Christmas…

(All images: courtesy of Gestalten)

Out now, in the Spring 2020 issue of Pete Tyjas’s excellent Fly Culture magazine, is an article I’ve written called Limestone Chemistry.

As the title suggests, it’s a geological, post-industrial and piscatorial study of my years-long love for a little limestone stream, not too far from where I’m living now.

A previous, shorter version of this piece once ran in S&TC’s Gamefisher magazine, but the couple of years since then have given me a chance to expand and update it quite significantly… lots of currents have come together here, and of all the pieces I’ve written, I really think this might be one of my favourites.

Thanks in advance for reading it: you can pick up your copy here.

The kind of fish-imitating flies known as streamers have fascinated me for what feels like forever – maybe ever since I was sitting in my high chair at my parents’ kitchen table looking at the pictures in 1970s LL Bean mail order catalogues, which I now suspect were full of classic Maine-style streamer patterns like Carrie Stevens’s Gray Ghost.

Forty-something years later, streamers still aren’t universally accepted on this side of the Big Pond, mostly because of the Victorian values that continue to hang around British fly-fishing culture – but where the rules (or lack of them) have permitted, these flies have given me some of the best moments of my fishing life so far. My very first trout from the Wandle, for example, was lured by a little black Clouser Minnow, while a similar pattern swung downstream into the tunnel under Manchester airport’s runway helped me make this one of the most iconic locations of Trout in Dirty Places. I’ve also managed to save more than one trip to the Alps with big bunny streamers in dirty or rising water.

Over the years, I’ve fished streamers on a lot of different rods (some of them quite unsuitable, but unavoidable under particular circumstances) and I’ve come to understand that a good streamer rod is a bit of a unicorn. Ideally, it needs to be powerful enough to throw a heavily weight-forward line and reasonably large fly without collapsing, yet light enough that you don’t feel you’re swinging a club all day: fast and accurate, to hit small targets and impart fish-grabbing movement to the fly, yet sensitive enough to feel delicate takes (not all streamers get eaten with a classic smash-and-grab) and even do backup service as a dry fly or nymphing rod in an emergency.

Add to all that my own particular preference for 10-foot rods on almost any water, and yes, I think that’s a unicorn I’m hunting for.

In 2015, soon after George Daniel published his American streamer bible Strip-Set, I got in touch with him to compare notes and ask which rods he rated, and banked the valuable intel that he preferred the Orvis Helios 2 in a 10-foot 5-weight. After that, I finished teaching myself all the lessons I’ve mentioned above, with a range of other different rods from 2- to 6-weights, and by the time I looked seriously at the question again, Orvis had launched the Helios 3.

Accurate from anywhere, they said.

A rifle in a world of muskets, they said.

Strategically reinforced blank, using materials otherwise reserved for military helicopter blades, producing reduced horizontal and vertical tip vibration, less swing weight, fewer casting variables, and it’s all been tested on a custom-built robotic casting rig, they said.

OK, that’s got my attention. (As did this).

So, for the last few weeks, with huge thanks to the Orvis marketing team, I’ve been test-driving the Helios 3F in the 10-foot 5-weight configuration. It’s travelled with me nearly everywhere, from West Country rivers to Highland lochs in the far north of Scotland, and it really does seem to keep the promise of the copy in the catalogue.

From rivers to lochs, the H3 has felt just as comfortable firing a tight loop of line under branches 30 feet away, to lure a big wild brown out of her bankside eddy with a 3-inch beadhead streamer, as hammering 90 (well, maybe 80) foot casts into the teeth of a gale on Loch Veyatie, and detecting the tug of a 12-inch baby ferox a couple of feet under rolling waves. With all the other streamer rods I’ve been using so far, I suspect I might have struggled to get near those fish.

Mainly I’ve matched the H3 with an aggressively-tapered Sunray El Guapo full-floating line, and a range of Airflo polyleaders: shorter and heavier for rivers, longer and lighter for lochs and other stillwaters. For throwing much bigger streamers on a regular basis, you might want to go up a couple of line weights, but I’m as confident that I can be that the super-stable tip and lower-blank strength of this 10-foot 5-weight make it fully capable of handling the vast majority of streamer fishing for trout in the UK.

The H3’s cosmetics are said to be based on snowsports, golf or mountain biking hardware, and one or two of my fishing pals have seen the photos and asked sarcastically when I joined the ‘White Stripes’ – apparently the nickname for H3 aficionados because of the striking white flash on the rod’s blank, just about the handle. To begin with, I didn’t quite know what to make of this design decision, either, but experience suggests that it really doesn’t matter: the H3’s technical performance means your attention is all out there, at the end of your line, totally focused on where your fly is working in the water. The rest of the rod is finished in a much stealthier matte grey, but if you find that white flash really bothering you, you can always cover it with joint tape. (For what it’s worth, I haven’t noticed any fish-spooking effect so far – perhaps because of the operating ranges for streamer work – and in Scotland the splash of white actually made the H3 easier to find where I’d temporarily left it in the rocks and heather in favour of a lighter dry fly rig).

Somebody, maybe even another reviewer of the H3, has said that the mark of a great rod is that you can forget you’re using it – the rod just does what you tell it to do, even when that’s pretty unrealistic. By that measure alone, as I’d hoped, this feels like a standout streamer rod for UK waters, accurate and powerful enough to boss a medium-sized streamer on an aggressively-tapered fly line, and handle big wild river trout up to 3lbs+ with some authority – yet sensitive enough to suggest what the streamer is doing even when I can’t see it, and make it fun to catch trout of almost any size. It puts a smile on my face and makes me keener than ever to fish the streamers that fascinate me, and I can’t reasonably ask for more than that.

Finally, I think this is the unicorn I’ve been hunting for. Now I’m just going to have to work out how to get it into my stable on a permanent basis…

Over the past few years, I’ve found that the Sportfish Show at Theale has quietly become one of the fixed points of my fishing season.

If anything, I spend less time at shows than I used to – if you’re not careful, you can end up investing more of your precious free time chin-wagging in marquees or conference centres than actually stalking fish on the river bank, and surely that’s not the point.

Free time needs to be allocated wisely, especially in fishing season (which, if you take grayling and coarse fish into account, is now effectively year-round) and I’m less and less inspired by the big, generic country shows, where fishing has become an obviously poor relation of the made-to-measure shotguns and luxury garden furniture, and even stalwart book-sellers scarcely feel it’s worthwhile to attend.

By contrast, the newer generation of focused fly-fishing shows don’t demand thousands of pounds in pitch fees from nichier designers and makers, who might be worried enough about petrol prices and somewhere to stay overnight – and I think the friendly, egalitarian feel of the Sportfish Show has done a lot to drive this new approach. (Hell, I benefited from it myself, when I spent a day selling Urbantrout caps and copies of my Pocket Guide to Balsam Bashing to a constant stream of INNS-bashing early adopters in 2014).

So, true to form, this year’s show offered the chance to meet startups such as Vicuna Dubbing, as well as bump into established celebrities like Jeremy Wade and Simon Gawesworth, who took time out from launching new books and explaining fly-line tapers to go head to head, lure vs fly, in a slow trickle of early mayflies from the Haywards Farm lake.

Pete Tyjas and Marc Bale were there on the Rio stand, and I finally managed to meet the Ripplebox inventor Josh Richards after a couple of years of back-and-forth by email and social media. Peter McLeod, Paul Procter, Nick Measham and Claire Zambuni were there too, all keen to discuss new projects, and I had a good chat with Geoff Wood about the power and accuracy of the Orvis Helios 3. Geoff Wilcox reported huge success from the river restoration project I helped to deliver near Bulford on the Avon last summer, and even Charles R-W skidded in for a few moments, en route to a mayfly hatch somewhere much further west (and who could really blame him?)

The morning crowds thinned out quickly, but after all that socialising, it was quite a relief to sit down with a pizza and beer with the Bloxham PR squad, and watch lots of kids catching their first trout from the new Kingfisher Pond.

Every Sportfish Show feels a little different, depending on the weather and the mix of exhibitors and hot new products, and getting the chance to mix with the most creative minds in the fly-fishing world is more than enough to keep me coming back year after year. I’ve already got the second weekend of May 2020 inked into my diary!

(Photos 1, 3 & 4: Bloxham PR)

Autumn can be one of the best times of the fishing year. But it’s all too precious and fleeting, so how can we really make the most of it?

Friends who’ve fished with me in recent years will know that when I’m on the water in the shoulder seasons, I’m increasingly likely to reach for either dry flies or streamers. I’ll happily fish nymphs, of course, but I like the conscious gear change between the other two techniques – both involve hunting the fish, but reading the water in very different ways.

This means I’ve really enjoyed writing a couple of recent features for Fishtec – one on fishing dry flies at this time of year, and the other on streamers (in a stillwater flavour). If you’ve not seen them already, please do click on the links below:

• Dry or die! Floating flies for September trout
• Top tips for fry feeders

As I’ve recently been agreeing with my fishing pals, there’s nothing like this time of year, especially because we all know winter is coming. Get out there and fish while you can!

The process of putting together each issue of the Flyfishers’ Journal usually starts soon after the previous number has been signed off to press, but sometimes it goes back much further than that, and the latest issue is surely a case in point…

I think it must have been sometime in late 2016 when I was chatting to Fennel Hudson in the Club about his series of articles for the Journal on the subject of ‘rewilding fly-tying’, and our conversation turned to the River Stour in Kidderminster. As it happened, I’d fished this river too, so we both had another glass of wine, and I issued him with a challenge: to return to those waters of his youth, scavenge the kind of materials that would fit his definition of a ‘rewilded fly’, and go fishing for insights, and maybe trout, in this urban river which had once run every colour of the rainbow.

In due course, he rose magnificently to this test, and submitted an article which I lined up for the Winter 2017 issue. Meanwhile, however, I’d also been out on some less-than-conventionally-pastoral water, guiding Graham Thomas on his first visit to the Wandle, the closest chalkstream to the Flyfishers’ Club, as part of the Wild Trout Trust’s annual charity auction. As we ate our sandwiches on the bank, Graham wondered if I’d like him to write an article for the Journal… and a bigger idea began to take shape.

Thus, thanks to Fennel, Graham, and a touch of editorial synchronicity, this issue has a noticeable urban-fishing flavour – complete with Mike Duddy’s ‘good cause’ feature from the Mersey Rivers Trust, and Duncan Soar’s cover photo of the grayling-filled pool where the Mersey is born, at the confluence of the Tame and Goyt, under the shadow of the M62 motorway. After the Toxteth riots, Home Secretary Michael Heseltine realised that true urban regeneration could never happen while the river through the heart of Liverpool and Manchester was still an open sewer. And now it’s enough to gladden any Flyfisher’s heart that the return of salmon to this mighty river system isn’t just a dream, but a very imminent probability.

Speaking of anadromous fish, it’s said that sea-trout fishers tend to be slightly secretive, and perhaps that’s why we don’t see many articles about this kind of fishing in the Journal. So we can afford to be very grateful to Bob Bradley for his deeply immersive account of one particular sea-trout river, together with a suite of beautiful line drawings dashed off by the truly multi-talented Neil Patterson. As a special bonus, we’ve also persuaded Marcus Janssen to review Steffan Jones’s new sea-trout bible.

And finally, this issue would be incomplete without praising another of the Club’s well-known and generous authors. Andrew Herd has recently co-authored the astonishing Blacker Trilogy, and he has also won the Peter Lapsley Award 2017, for his article ‘A Lot of Old Rubbish’ which appeared in the Winter 2017 issue. Inspiration indeed for all other Members of the Club to follow in his footsteps (and maybe inspire the themes of many future issues of the Flyfishers’ Journal).