Four years ago, give or take a few days, Sally and I took our final walk up the Wandle to hand over our keys to the estate agent who’d (mostly) been helping us to sell our house by the river in Carshalton.

As much out of habit as conscious farewell, we stopped and peered over the bridge at Papermill Close… and yes, there was a trout, finning gently below us, suspended in our little urban chalkstream’s characteristically crystal-clear water. That moment told us, just as clearly, that our work in south London was done.

Or almost done. Transitions can take time to do right, and it’s now two weeks since I finally stepped down from my 13-year role as chair of the South East Rivers Trust. This week, I’ve just been helping to train the first volunteer riverfly monitors for the towns in the hills around the Somerset Levels: giving residents of Cheddar, Wookey, Wookey Hole, Wells, Shepton Mallet and Croscombe the tools they need to keep a knowledgeable eye on their local rivers as part of my TWIST (Transforming Waterways In Somerset Towns) project with the Wild Trout Trust.

Trout in the Town forever. Onwards and upwards (and westwards!)

Throughout the Covid-19 lockdown and subsequent restrictions here in the UK, lots of brands have made a special effort to stay connected with their customers through digital channels – and fishing shops have been no exception to this trend.

Early in the lockdown, Farlows’ Jonny Muir took the opportunity to start a series of in-depth interviews with fly-fishing people on the store’s Facebook platform.

Guests have included internationally-recognised fly-fishers like Paul Procter, Charles Jardine, Pete Tyjas, Simon Gawesworth and Henry Gilbey…

… which meant it was quite a surprise (not to mention a massive honour) that he asked me to join him for a chat about urban river restoration on Friday 17 July.

That afternoon, we spent more than an hour talking about Trout in Dirty Places, the Wild Trout Trust’s Trout in the Town project, and reflecting on all the stages of restoring a stretch of urban river like the Wandle at Hackbridge.

We reckoned we got a live audience of a consistent couple of dozen at least (pretty good for furlough Friday pub time as lockdown was easing, we agreed). And of course another benefit of the Farlows LIVE format is that the recorded interview is still sitting up there on Facebook, waiting to be replayed any time that’s convenient: click here to go straight to it.

Thanks if you tuned in to take part a few days ago. And thanks in advance if you haven’t yet, but you’re just about to click that link and watch it now!

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 to serve as Chairman of the Wandle Trust and South East Rivers Trust for some time yet. But from now on, there’s certainly the recognition that I’ll be taking trains and tube-lines to fish my favourite pools on the Wandle, instead of simply strolling out of my own front door…

Not being completely immune to irony, I definitely found it interesting that SES Water also picked last week to stage their by-now-traditional pre-Christmas meltdown of the recirculation pumps that keep the upper Wandle flowing at times when the aquifer has been drastically depleted for public water supply – leaving freshly-spawned wild trout eggs high and dry in their redds for the third year in succession.

Thanks to our restoration work, the Carshalton arm of the Wandle won the Urban category of the UK River Prize in 2016, and was also the first water body in the UK to achieve ‘good ecological potential’ under the European Water Framework Directive. But all the new gravel, wood and thalwegs in the world can’t compensate for no water at all, and we’re getting very seriously worried for the survival of the trout in this stretch.

Please keep an eye on my Twitter feed (and the Wandle Trust’s) for any further updates, and grab a copy of Trout & Salmon to read while you’re waiting.

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.

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 crap steadily improving its health for the last 15 years.

It’s probably fair to say that I wasn’t fully expecting my impromptu riverside interview to run as the full voiceover… but that’s just how we crazy creatives roll.

Jeremiah’s keen eye and directing and editing skills have made a beautiful little film that’s already been watched more than 500 times on YouTube, and I’m looking forward to doing much more work with him.

More very soon, we hope!

Regular readers of this blog will know how much I enjoy contributing occasional articles to Eat, Sleep, Fish, the monthly not-for-profit ezine published by my good pal Pete Tyjas from his base at the Devon School of Flyfishing.

For most of the 2015 season I’ve been fishing a Vision Kalu reel, as part of a range of rigs that’s also included the Sunray lines which I wrote about a few weeks ago.

And frankly I’ve been loving the subtle heat it’s helped me bring to landing a whole shoal of different fish – from swaggering south London trout to personal-best French grayling – all culminating in that unsolicited 7lb Scottish salmon on (wince…) 3lb tippet.

So, when I thought I could see space on the interwebs for an in-depth review of the Kalu’s features and benefits…

… the 4th birthday issue of Eat, Sleep, Fish looked like just the place:

Weighing in at 121g, the 3/4 size is heavy enough to balance the latest generation of long, light dry fly and nymphing rods, as well as shorter rigs. I’ve enjoyed hanging the Kalu off the Greys Streamflex XF2 10 foot 2 weight, the Sage ESN 10 foot 2 weight and the Marryat Tactical 10 foot 3 weight this season, and it’s proved a great match for all of them… 

For the full low-down, please click on over to issue 48 of Eat, Sleep, Fish to read my full review of the Vision Kalu.

(And then, while you’re still in the mood, check out my review of Vision’s new Urban boots on Urbantrout.net too!)

It’s not every day you get interviewed on your home water for an international fishing ezine. So when Germany’s SCALE Magazine offered to send writer-translator Tankred Rinder (also editor of Forelle und Aesche) and photographer Veit Dresmann to south London as part of their round-the-UK road trip in September…

… I jumped at the chance to catch up with Tankred again and tell him more about London trout and the Wandle restoration project in general.

Click here to read our interview in English or German (pages 152 to 165, complete with work-in-progress shots of the Carshalton stretch of the upper Wandle) in the December 2014 issue.

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)

As I’ve recently noted over on my Urbantrout blog, this is the time of year which can show even the best angler exactly what he’s been failing to catch all season… and early winter on the Wandle is no exception to this universal law.

It’s a curious fact that since we saw that first pair of trout cutting redds on New Year’s Eve in 2007, the peak of activity actually seems to have crept a little earlier as each spawning season rolls round. By mid November this year, one of the Wandle Trust’s catchment officers had already spotted the telltale signs of trout getting down to some concentrated gravel cleaning. 

When I walked downriver the following afternoon, the trout were still there: two big fish cruising the daylight shallows like nuclear submarines, with their grey backs half out of water and clear wakes veeing off their dorsal and adipose fins…

The latest instalment of my Urbantrout Diaries column has now gone live on Flyfishing.co.uk, complete with stunning freeze-frame photos by one of our local project partners.

(And since I wrote this piece, even more redds have appeared in other areas of the upper river, including the Riverfly monitoring site where we found the first recorded wild-spawned Wandle trout fry of the modern era… which all gives rise to well-founded hopes that this could be the most productive spawning season yet).

In the meantime, while the trout have been getting down to business, Duncan and I spent the last few days quietly working away on building a website for the new South East Rivers Trust.

I’ve done most of the front-end copywriting and UX design, while Duncan added photographic genius and handled all the hosting and other really important and complicated infrastructure behind the shiny (yet deceptively informative) exterior.  It’s all intentionally designed to mirror the look and feel of the existing Wandle Trust site, with full facilities for taking on its own personality to reflect the wide new range of rivers we’ll be trying to help improve in the next few years.

On and off the water, 2013 may be drawing to a close… but we’re already looking far into 2014 and beyond.

(Photo 1: Lysanne Horrox)

Thanks to Paul Sharman there’s an excellent feature about the Wandle river restoration story in the latest issue of The Angler, the Angling Trust’s new-look membership magazine, which has started dropping through letter boxes over the weekend.

To conclude the feature, Paul asked me for a testimonial about the Angling Trust’s role in the Wandle’s restoration, which naturally I was more than happy to provide:

Without great help from the Angling Trust and Fish Legal at a very critical point in the Wandle’s history (after the catastrophic pollution in 2007), the river would now be in a much more precarious state. 

And the Wandle Trust itself would not be in a sustainable position to look after the river in the long term – and even be able to think about sharing what we’ve learned and helping local people to look after other rivers across the south east of England.

There’s plenty more detail in the article itself, but I think that sums it up…