Writer, fly-fisher, river restorationist
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. […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
For the second year running I’ve been greatly privileged to contribute a feature to S&TC’s Gamefisher magazine – this time on the hot topic of rewilding, and how it’s actively taking place in Ennerdale on the western edge of Cumbria: Because water flows downhill, rivers are the sum total of everything that’s happening on the […]
Thanks to a very kind referral from Simon Cooper at Fishing Breaks, the Guardian got in touch to ask me to list 5 favourite wild fly-fishing places in the UK (urban wilderness not included this time!) for a special Wild Britain supplement. So, naturally, I did. Check ’em out here… (Image: the Guardian)
Interspersed with lots of other freelance copywriting work, I’ve recently contributed a few more features to the Fishtec blog. Once again, if you haven’t read them yet, please click the links and enjoy! The green menace: fighting back against invasive non-native plants in 2018 Countdown to stillwater opening day: Fishtec’s review of the UK’s top […]
Cover: Setting Sail, by Bruno Vincent. Inside: Appreciations for Orri Vigfusson, by Neil Patterson and Adrian Latimer. Salmon flies for Iceland, Norway, Scotland, Wales and the English chalkstreams, by Alex Jardine. Grayling Research Trust work, by Robin Mulholland. Psychedelic craziness on the Varzuga, by Henry Giles. Re-tying 19th century flies from a forgotten creel, by Andrew Herd. […]
