Fallon’s Angler, issue 2: The mighty Usk
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!
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