This is my second year in the hot seat as editor of the Wild Trout Trust’s annual journal Salmo Trutta. And once again it’s been an astonishing privilege to work with so many talented experts to produce 94 pages of trouty, rivery gorgeousness, including…

• Six pages of rod licence artwork (and the glorious front cover image shown above) from David Miller
• Interspecies meetings on the stream with Avi Shanker and Robin Canniford
• Heavy metal trout in hard rock rivers with Dan Osmond
• Martin Salter marking the new(ish) UK government’s homework
• Chalk stream mapping and restoration with Mike Blackmore
• An extract from Michelle Werrett’s beautiful Song of the Streams

And lots more besides…

Wild Trout Trust members should now have received their copies of Salmo Trutta 2025: membership costs just £49 (or £26 if you’ve retired) and comes with a complimentary copy as soon as we can get it into the post to you.
Sign up via the charity’s website or phone +44 (0) 23 9257 0985 if you haven’t already!

Last autumn the Flyfishers’ Club (where I’m editor of the biannual Flyfishers’ Journal) took an important and very welcome step forward into the 21st century by voting in favour of welcoming women as members for the first time since the Club was formed in 1884, by a solid majority of 75%.

Naturally, I wanted to celebrate such an historic occasion with a suitable image on the front of the following issue of the Journal, and I set myself a very specific brief for this composition: dynamic, modern, celebratory, showing a man and a woman fishing together joyfully as equals, with a brightest possible future ahead.

In practice, as I’d rather expected, this wasn’t so easy to find: the one pic I really wanted had already (and quite deservedly) been snapped up by a film production company, so I had to start thinking laterally. But in the end, with lots of help from my photographer buddy Duncan Soar, and the Journal’s designer Stuart James, we produced a watercolour-style image which I think captures the moment quite perfectly.

Along with a blockbuster article from Peter Hayes on two millennia of flyfishing illustrations (often in the form of church wall paintings) across Britain and Europe, the other dominant theme of this issue of the Journal is concern over the fate of our Atlantic salmon.

Throughout 2024, worrying headlines just kept appearing: for example, scientists reporting the lowest number of juveniles in the Dorset Frome in more than 20 years of monitoring, against the background of a general population crash by over 80% in the last 40 years, and salmon having now been added to the IUCN Red List alongside elephants, pandas and polar bears.

Many Norwegian salmon rivers also suspended fishing last summer. So this issue of the Journal has a certain theme of wild salmon ecology and conservation, including our ‘good cause’ feature from the Atlantic Salmon Trust, and my own review of Henry Giles’s interesting new book, The Secret Life of Salmon.

Both remind us that we do live in times of change – but that we can all try to ‘be the change we want to see’, and that’s another stirring New Year’s resolution (early or late) for every one of us…

‘Shifting baseline syndrome’ is an idea which may never be more relevant than on the English, French and Danish chalk streams. These placid little rivers have undergone radical alterations, even in the past 100 years, yet our human memories are inevitably too short to register such changes clearly.

Enter Edwin Alfred Barton, a London doctor who arrived on the chalk streams of southern England in the years between the First and Second World Wars, just in time to witness their waning years as working agricultural landscapes.

Barton was an avid fly-fisherman who served as President of the Flyfishers’ Club in 1934, and Editor of the Flyfishers’ Journal from 1931 to 1937. He was a talented photographer too, who immortalised the chalk valleys with glass-plate images of extraordinary sensitivity and skill. Some of his photos appeared in his own books (and indeed in the Flyfishers’ Journal) but they’d never been collected in one place – until last year, when Andrew Herd and Jon Ward-Allen published them all together in E.A. Barton: The Lost World of the Chalk Streams.

This new volume is a worthy tribute to a photographer who has sometimes been called ‘the Ansel Adams of the chalk streams’: an understatedly beautiful book which contains valuable environmental insights and historical details mixed with the alchemy of early 20th century photography, and curated samples of Barton’s own writing.

So, E.A.B.’s self-portrait on the banks of the Test at Leckford is showcased on the front cover of the Flyfishers’ Journal for Summer 2024, and it sets the tone for the whole edition. There’s an introductory feature and photo essay from Andrew Herd himself, followed by in-depth discussions of our chalk streams’ past and future, including features from Mike Blackmore (‘The Great Chalk Dream’), Uffe Westerberg (replumbing our rivers and sewage systems for a more sustainable future), John Knott (examining a fascinating set of early 1800s fishing diaries) and more.

As always, it’s a pleasure to occupy this Editor’s chair… whilst also slightly daunting to remember that the polymath Dr. Barton once sat here before me!

(The Flyfishers’ Journal is a complimentary benefit for all Members of the Flyfishers’ Club, and it’s also available to non-members by subscription).

Salmo Trutta is the Wild Trout Trust’s prestigious annual journal, now in its 27th issue, and after several years of helping the brilliant Denise Ashton with commissioning, proof reading and other matters, 2024 has been my first year fully ensconced in the editor’s chair.

Of course, like most publications of this kind, Salmo Trutta is much more of a team production than an individual effort, and I’ve really enjoyed working with the whole roster of world-class writers and deeply knowledgeable scientists listed over on the WTT website. Not to mention, too, our ‘ace designer’ Rebecca Hawtrey!

(Whisper it softly, but this year’s overall theme, restoring our rivers’ physical habitat, also gave me a chance to evoke a beautifully dynamic stretch of the Usk which I’ve loved since the very first time I fished it – illicitly, as it turned out, but that’s all part of the story).

WTT members should now have received their copies of Salmo Trutta 2024, and membership costs just £44 (or £23 for retired folks) and comes with a complimentary copy as soon as we can get it into the post to you. Sign up here if you haven’t already!

Apart from his reputation as an outspoken environmentalist and dedicated salmon fisher, King Charles III has also been Patron of the Flyfishers’ Club for many years…

… and the latest edition of the Flyfishers’ Journal records the gifts presented by the Club to commemorate his coronation in May 2023.

These included boxes of specially-tied salmon flies (one of which caught him a grilse on the Thurso the very next day!) as well as trout flies for his grandchildren, and three fully-dressed salmon fly brooches for Queen Camilla, one of which is shown on the front cover.

This issue of the Journal also celebrates the Flyfishers’ royal connections with the River Em in Sweden – dating back to 1926 when Prince Gustav Adolf invited the first party of English guests to sample the sea-trout fishing there, an era revisited in detail by my Swedish research colleague Martin Sandgren.

There are features, too, from Neil Patterson (fry-fishing in Neuquen), Patrick Mileham (ancestral voices from the Salisbury Avon) and Bob Bradley (continuing the Avon theme with musings on Ollie Kite) as well as an important piece about imitating the Olive Upright hatch from David Marriott and Andrew Farr, and Barry Ord Clarke’s step-by-step tying interpretation of the classic Avon fly, the Pheasant Tail Nymph.

Last but not least, this time round, our chosen ‘good cause’ is the Mayfly Project UK, which provides opportunities for children in foster homes to learn about fly-fishing, conservation and the outdoors with safe mentors – with an inspiring article from founder and executive director Susan Skrupa. Please support this worthy charity if you can!

(The Flyfishers’ Journal is a complimentary benefit for all Members of the Flyfishers’ Club, and it’s also available to non-members by subscription).

Earlier this year, the Flyfishers’ Club achieved an amazing coup by acquiring a cased set of six copies of Izaak Walton’s The Compleat Angler – representing all the versions of the book which were published in IW’s own lifetime.

To celebrate this momentous addition to the Club’s Library, we somehow persuaded the talented fly-fishing photographer (and my own good fishing pal!) Duncan Soar to shoot the books on location – and his luminous photos now take pride of place in this edition of the Flyfishers’ Journal.

By tradition, the Summer issue of the Journal always includes the announcement of the annual Peter Lapsley Award for excellent writing during the previous year, and our judging panel all observed that this year’s strongest contenders had developed noticeably environmental themes.

In the end, Graham Thomas won the latest award for his article about the River Usk, with Greg Belcamino’s account of ecological crimes against the Hoosic River as a close runner-up. In this edition, Greg’s Letter from America returns to environmental subject matter with a deep dive into the challenges facing the remaining populations of Californian steelhead, and our ‘good cause’ article comes from James Wallace, profiling the UK’s exciting new charity River Action, whose board includes river campaigner extraordinaire (and Member of the Flyfishers’ Club) Feargal Sharkey.

And finally, on a personal note, I’m very grateful to Alan Hancock for his warm and heartfelt obituary for Allan Hardy: a quiet polymath, a conservationist, and a much-missed, convivial Flyfisher. Fittingly, Allan’s own final article, published in this issue, studies the legendary huchen, which have been threatened by environmental degradation for many years, but may now be making a tentative comeback in some European tributaries of the Danube system.

(The Flyfishers’ Journal is a complimentary benefit for all Members of the Flyfishers’ Club, and it’s also available to non-members by subscription).

Mayflies in midwinter: the latest issue of the Flyfishers’ Journal has been landing in the midst of a week-long deep freeze for much of the UK…

… but I hope it’ll bring something of the warming hope of a springtime hatch to this beautiful-but-Baltic season.

Cyril Bennett is on the front cover, hunting bugs in his native habitat, and this issue celebrates his generosity in lodging his collection of high-resolution mayfly photographs with the Flyfishers’ Club for permanent safe-keeping. Two of his favourite photos appear on the centre spread, accompanied by Andrew Farr’s profile of Cyril’s skills as an entomologist and photographer.

In fact, there’s a subtly mayfly-related theme throughout the magazine, together with a ‘good cause’ article from the Cancer & Pisces Trust, a study of fly-rod and fast-jet carbon nanotechnology from Bob Bradley, Intupsification with Peter Hayes, and SWFFing materials ancient and modern from John McGill and Nigel Haywood.

Normally you’d have thought mayflies-to-SWFFing would be a tough segue to pull off, but every now and again, in the course of editing this Journal, something so serendipitous comes along that I’m forced to believe that the fishing gods really are watching and pulling the strings.

This time, the connection arrived in an email from Uffe Westerberg in Denmark, telling me about his fishing pal, Per Schaap, and his techniques for capturing photos of seagulls and hobbies hunting mayflies on Danish chalkstreams.

It’s a brilliantly alternative angle on spending time by the water when the trout aren’t eating the big bugs yet…

… not to mention a salutary reminder to some of us to get the long lenses out when the hatch charts begin warming up again next year, and stop relying quite so completely on snapshots with our mobile phones!

(The Flyfishers’ Journal is a complimentary benefit of membership of the Flyfishers’ Club; it’s also available to non-members by subscription).

On the few occasions when I’ve tried saltwater flyfishing – also known to its real cognoscenti as SWFFing – around the coast of Britain, I’m happy to admit that I’ve not been very successful.

Yet if the fish were fairly insignificant (mainly small pollack or coalfish lured up from forests of kelp with sinking lines and heavy Clouser Minnows) the experience certainly wasn’t. Out there on the rocks, humbled by boundless horizons, connected by crashing surf to the churning of planet-sized processes… this was elemental immersion at a level that’s rarely possible to achieve on even the mightiest loch or salmon river, much less on my usual placid trout streams.

Of course, I’m very far from the first to have felt the pull of those primordial forces, or appreciate the sporting opportunities to be found at the constantly-shifting edges of sand, sea and sky, and that’s what I’ve tried to suggest in this issue of the Flyfishers’ Journal.

Thanks to a timely introduction from John Knott, this summer’s theme was inspired by John McGill and the first of two meticulously-researched articles on the origins of saltwater flyfishing in the UK. Subsequent conversations revealed that the Club has its own in-house SWFFing experts too, and I’m incredibly grateful to Nigel Haywood, who hasn’t just contributed his own expert piece on SWFFing’s Victorian heyday, but also reviewed James Batty’s recently-published Fishing from the Rock of the Bay, and even opened his personal saltwater fly-box for detailed inspection.

Meanwhile, Barry Ord Clarke has photographed step-by-step tying instructions for his spectacular Hoodlum saltwater streamer pattern – deadly for Nordic sea-trout, but highly recommended on this side of the North Sea as well – and Steve Pitts has written about BASS, the Bass Anglers’ Sportfishing Society, and its ability to bring anglers’ concerns about the sustainability of bass stocks to the highest levels of international fisheries negotiation.

All told, the latest issue of the Flyfishers’ Journal has turned out quite the seaside feast of SWFFing inspiration, and I’m hoping it’ll even launch a few readers on their own coastal explorations this summer and autumn!

Mayflies must surely constitute some of the most perfect symbolism of a flyfisher’s sport. Beautiful, fragile and famously ephemeral. Patient and enduring, living stoically and nearly-invisibly among dark stones and silt for a year or more… before emerging together into light and air for a celebration of life that seems all the more urgent and spectacular because we’ve also have been anticipating this transformation for so long. (Not least, the Mayfly hatch is also an annual event which sometimes gives non-flyfishers a hint of what they’re missing!)

At a time when many Members of the Flyfishers’ Club have started cautiously re-emerging from the worries and restrictions of the COVID-19 pandemic, it’s felt quite right to mark such a moment with a special issue of the Flyfishers’ Journal inspired by the metaphorical rebirth of our beloved Mayflies. And thanks to very many energetic and talented contributors, that nymphal idea has hatched and taken flight beyond all original hopes and expectations…

Duncan Soar accepted the commission of photographing the ‘Champagne Mayfly’ which finds itself immortalised on the front cover, and Paul Collins composed a long and amusing account of the Club’s Young Members’ Mayfly Day on the Orvis Ginger Beer beat of the Test at the end of May. From a practical Mayfly-fishing point of view, Peter Hayes has provided an erudite and entertaining study of what a trout is really looking for when it’s focused on a hatch, while he and Andrew Farr also reveal the combination of back-room detective work and high-llyn derring-do that was needed to capture some elusive specimens of the Claret Dun (and how this has now very nearly completed their restoration of the Club’s historic Natural Fly Collection).

Tying outsized flies is often an integral part of the Mayfly-fishing experience, and there’s a magnificent close-up image of a CDC Mayfly Spinner on the page opposite this issue’s Editorial. Both photo and fly have been created by Barry Ord Clarke, a supremely talented tyer who became a Member of the Flyfishers’ Club in 2020, and has now been voted Fly Tyer of the Year 2021 by Fly Tyer Magazine. Thanks to Barry and our mutual publisher Merlin Unwin, the complete tying sequence for the CDC Mayfly Spinner appears on page 40, and I’m hoping to build step-by-step instructions like these into an interesting series in the future. (I’ve also reviewed Barry’s latest book, Fly-Tying for Beginners, in this issue’s book reviews section).

With our fishing horizons gradually expanding again, this Journal also aims to offer inspiration in the form of Norwegian salmon river recommendations from Morten Harangen, tales of Russian fishing guides from Simon Bath, and Bahamian bonefishing with Graham Stephens.

And last but not least, our customary ‘good cause’ article is focused on the Wild Trout Trust’s Mayfly in the Classroom project – an engaging way to bring the life cycle of the Mayfly right into the school curriculum, or even your own home or fly-tying club…

(The Flyfishers’ Journal is a complimentary benefit of membership of the Flyfishers’ Club, and should have started landing on Members’ doormats a couple of weeks ago; it’s also available to non-members by subscription).

Late May / early June means it’s time for the summer issue of the Flyfishers’ Journal.

Truth to tell, this wasn’t the easiest issue to be responsible for editing, including as it does some very poignant Appreciations for friends and fellow Members of the Flyfishers’ Club: recent past president Paddy Laverty, author and historian Tony Hayter, and the tragically early-departed (and maybe very distant relation of my own) Tim Pike.

But I’ve tried to brighten the cover with a spectacular bonefishing shot from Bob Bradley – who also won the latest Peter Lapsley Award for the best writing to appear in the Journal during the past year –  and the inner pages with predictably excellent articles contributed by Neil Patterson, Greg Belcamino, Andrew Bett, Miles Beharrell and others. This issue’s ‘good cause’ feature comes from the Wild Carp Trust (hat tip to Nigel Hudson) and there’s also the startling revelation of a new mayfly – Siphlonurus aestivalis – for the UK list (hat tip to Craig Macadam and Andrew Farr).

Maybe slightly against the odds, I think the latest issue is another 72 pages of excellent writing and personal reflections, and I hope it’ll provide lots to contemplate through a summer which may continue to see some of our pre-Covid-19 fishing travels quite constrained. If we can’t fly to Cuba, Japan or Montana at the moment, we can still read and dream!

(The Flyfishers’ Journal is a complimentary benefit of membership of the Flyfishers’ Club, and should have started landing on Members’ doormats a couple of weeks ago; it’s also available to non-members by subscription).