As part of my busy and newly-expanded role with the Wild Trout Trust, where I’m now leading comms activity as well as continuing to develop urban river projects across the south of England, I’ve recently written a couple of articles for the Sportfish website…

… describing how WTT’s river restoration projects are focused on improving habitat – which really means habitat complexity – on waters all over the country:

• Making our rivers healthy again: Why put the wiggles back?
• Better connections: Some of the Wild Trout Trust’s recent river projects

I’ve also written a similar article for the Farlows website:

• Making chalkstreams messy again – for fish, birds and insects

So, if you’re even slightly interested in the idea of how structural complexity is just as important to rivers as the quantity and quality of water that flows along them (or doesn’t…?) please click on the links above and enjoy finding out more. 

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!

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!

We all know early season fishing can be a gamble.

And we all know gambling’s not for everyone.

That early April morning, you could bet your shirt on what most people were thinking about their chances of decent fishing that day.

Strong winds and heavy rain across the whole chalk country?

No dice. They’d all be folding right there.

Waiting for better odds.

Warm sun. Strawberries. Big creamy Mayflies.

But hold that thought.

Strong winds and heavy rain…

… on the Ginger Beer beat of the Test?

Stack all my chips on LDOs.

So that’s how it played out.

I met my fellow addicts Paul, Marina, Nick, Patrick, Claire, Laura, and Lola the trout bum spaniel in the fishing lodge at Kimbridge, and we steeled our nerves with strong coffee before betting everything on red.

(Red-spotted trout, that is).

And Lady Luck smiled.

LDOs hatched.

The sun came out.

Trout showed us they were players too.

Legendary Orvis rods were bent. Smooth, solid reels were compared and tested.

And a sneaky side bet on a peeping caddis sometimes turned up trumps.

Because in the end, when you’re fishing the early season, Fortune asks just one question.

How lucky do you feel?

(Photos 1 and 6: Paul Sharman)

Update: thanks to Zambuni PR for this link!

A few weeks ago I got back from a flying visit to the Pas de Calais with my fishing pals Jeremy Lucas, Keith Wallington and Jacques van Niekerk, and published a short account of part of our visit on my Urbantrout blog…

Steep chalkstream headwaters with constant year-round flow can only mean one thing… historic harnessing for hydropower. Which also means that the valley of the upper Aa offers more than a few opportunities for the kind of post-industrial edgeland exploration we love best (and which other, less epicurean fly-fishers, may pass by on the other side!) 

At Ouve-Wirquin, for instance, now a sleepy rural town of less than 600 inhabitants, the Aa flows past (and under, and through) an industrial complex which was once a paper mill, then became a welding factory, and was finally abandoned for decades before being converted into a motor museum showcasing the pride and joy of les Brigades de l’Aa – a meeting of motoring and industrial heritage in a place that nature was already rewilding for itself…

Whether we’re talking about gradient, environmental management or even ticket prices, these enchanting little waters of the Artois plateau don’t always bear much resemblance to the usual English definition of chalkstreams.

In many ways I think it’s more accurate to describe them as high-gradient rivers playing fugues around the idea of chalk and limestone chemistry – but they’re utterly fascinating, and I’m hoping to write much more about them in due course.

In the meantime, if you’ve not read it yet, please do click over to Urbantrout.net and check out my urban fishing report from the River Aa at Ouve-Wirquin…

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.

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)

In September I took a trip down to Dover and discovered another little urban chalkstream that’s spookily similar to the Wandle:

Long before recorded history, the Dour was responsible for creating one of Britain’s earliest natural harbours, wearing a deep notch into the chalk cliffs and providing Neolithic boatmen with a safe landing-place in a strange new land. Since then, this little four-mile river been exploited for the usual rich mix of industrial processes, including tanneries, corn, paper and sawmills, and iron foundries for the military garrison that fortified Dover against continental incursions for most of a millennium. And on our own first sight of the river, a couple of weeks ago, the whole of our South East Rivers Trust team found it hard to suppress a sense of déjà vu…

Just like our home water on the Wandle, the Dour’s spring-fed sources have been landscaped as water-features in manicured public gardens, tidily edged with stonework and toe-boards that now seem ripe for ripping out and softening with native plants. Sometimes, from bridges across concrete channels and wide mill-ponds, you catch glimpses of astonishingly large trout, the kind of trout you’d be happy to see in any chalkstream: leviathans that hang around just long enough to be photographed under stern No Fishing signs before fading into silty weedbeds or ivy-tangled undercuts. 

But that’s where some of the similarities between these urban chalkstreams end – because unlike the easily-accessible Wandle, the Dour becomes progressively tougher to get at, the further it plunges down its post-industrial valley…

Please click through to read the full latest episode of my Urbantrout Diaries, which has now been published on Flyfishing.co.uk …

Can it really be 10 years since I wrote my first article for Flyfishing.co.uk?

Well, yes, it probably can.

Since 2003, Simon Lewin’s little Fish&Fly website has grown up into a truly international publishing brand that’s now known as MacNab Media. And while I’m still sometimes rocking that vintage LL Bean realtree fleece (possibly the first camo-print fishing fleece ever seen in Europe or the UK?) fashions have moved on too, and so has my own writing career.

With so many other changes afoot, I’m all the more thrilled to be working with Simon’s successors again, contributing a new series of features dubbed The Urbantrout Diaries for reasons which are probably already kinda obvious.

Please click through to read my first episode, which has just been published today!

Between bursts of freelance copywriting and other life interruptions like running the launch of the new South East Rivers Trust, the last couple of months have had a kinda bookish flavour in and around south London…

First there was the very enjoyable task of reading and reviewing a proof copy of my good pal Charles Rangeley-Wilson’s superb forthcoming Silt Road: the Story of a Lost River for Salmo Trutta, the Wild Trout Trust’s annual journal which should be hitting doorsteps right about now.

There’s been a second signing session for Chalk Stream Fly Fishing, this time joining all my fellow contributors to inscribe pre-printed labels which will be pasted into the leather-bound collector’s edition. Reviews have been appearing too, and one of my favourites so far, from Graham Mole in January’s Trout & Salmon magazine, says:

Chalk Stream Fly Fishing: A 21st Century Anthology is a goldmine of wisdom and information for trout fishers.

This book has been written by members of the renowned Salisbury Angling Club. Chapters include a contribution on fly-life by highly respected entomologist Dr Cyril Bennett and there are explanations of chalkstream ecology and seasonal tactics.

Other chapters reveal how to present the fly, nymph-fishing, grayling expeditions and even fly-fishing for coarse-fish. And the final chapter is a must-read – a scholarly look at the future from River Wandle expert Theo Pike…

And then here was the pleasant shock of ducking into Waterstones on Piccadilly to shelter from one of this month’s sudden hailstorms, on the way back from a client meeting in the West End – and being confronted with a whole stack of books entitled Lost in London.

Hang on, I thought, I’m sure that rings a bell.

So I flicked through the pages… and sure enough, there were two double-page spreads on the Wandle, one of them quoting me as a local conservationist and angler on how we’ve developed the Wandle Trust and Piscators over all these years (something I’d talked about with Lost in London editor Lucy Scott almost a year ago, and then mostly forgotten).

What with Caught by the River, last year’s River Wandle Companion, and now Lost in London, the lineup of books on my shelf quoting things I’ve said to their authors is suddenly looking longer than the row I’ve actually written… but I’m working on this.

Next up is another exciting and possibly even groundbreaking environmental writing project I’m developing with my very inspiring publishers at Merlin Unwin Books.

More news when I can reveal it. In the meantime, that’s my summer’s writing sorted…