This month, working with the Wild Trout Trust has meant happily converging several different strands of my professional interests (again) and helping to promote the brilliant annual Wild Trout Trust charity auction.

As I’ve said once or twice on my Urbantrout site, it’s clear that more and more fly-fishers are using the WTT auction as their guide to planning whole seasons of exciting adventures… so why not highlight this benefit as part of the auction’s publicity campaign?

From this thought, the #WTTseasonofadventures social media hashtag was born, together with lots of other collateral including this interview-style feature which I wrote for the Fishtec blog, profiling keen WTT supporters John and Steve, and the range of adventures they’ve enjoyed thanks to the auction.

Update: the 2019 WTT auction has now ended, raising more than £63,000 to help make wild trout happy. The auction will return in spring 2020.

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 10 reservoir fisheries
• How to support the Wild Trout Trust

Just before Christmas last year, I got a call from a German design and publishing house which was working on a big new fly-fishing book project and needed another writer to join Andrew Herd to pick up some interviews at short notice.

Would I like to come on board?

Took me about 3 seconds to answer that one.

After all, it’s not every day that you get to interview and write profiles on new media ambassadors and campaigners like Maddie Brenneman, Zan Kuncic and Rok Rozman of Leeway Collective, Chase and Aimee Bartee of Tight Loops, Fred Campbell of Hooké, and Jonas Borinski of Brothers on the Fly.

Somehow, among all the interviewing and profile-writing, I also managed to get the Gestalten folks interested in the idea of including an extra chapter on urban fly-fishing and river-mending, complete with Duncan’s epic-scale photos of one of our missions to Manchester, a couple of autumns back.

And just like that, three months later, The Fly Fisher: The Essence and Essentials of Fly Fishing is here.

As you’d hope and expect from a design-led publisher whose own website says…

Gestalten is best known for its more than 600 books about contemporary creative culture, the majority of which are conceived in house. They document and anticipate vital movements in design, lifestyle, illustration, architecture, fashion, photography, travel, and art. Providing both inspiration and practical value, they explore new creative fields in ways not yet seen before

… this is a book that’s beautiful to look at, packed with full-colour, full-bleed photography.

It’s full of forward-thinking messages too. Urban fly-fishing is just one of several strong, contemporary environmental stories, alongside Brothers on the Fly and their new-media promotion of causes like catch and release, and Leeway Collective’s efforts to save many Balkan rivers which are threatened by hydropower developments. (In time, I think you might see more of this from me).

And of course (not to get too political or anything) at a time when many people and nations seem to be getting so much more isolated and inward-looking, this book stands as positive proof that contributors from countries all over the world can come together to produce something globally collaborative and absolutely epic.

I’m sure the fact it’s all about fly-fishing isn’t just a coincidence. At all.

The Fly Fisher: The Essence and Essentials of Fly Fishing is available direct from the publisher and Coch-y-Bonndu Books.

(Photos: Jan Blumentritt, who together with Thorsten Strüben deserves a huge shout for pitching this whole idea to Gestalten in the first place!)

OK, so maybe sitting down to write a massive grid of emails for a charity healthcare marketing campaign doesn’t sound like the most excitingly creative way to spend your day.

Unless, of course, you’re an integrated marketing copywriter geek like me.

In that case, you’ll know that this is authentic, painstaking, too-much-caffeine-and-chewed-down-fingernails wordsmithing. The actual heart of the craft.

Thanks, Arthur London, for giving me the opportunity to be part of your team on this amazing job for Diabetes UK. I did hope it’d all turn out well…

(Photo: Diabetes UK)

The last two years have been one hell of a fly-fishing experiment.

A major highlight of life as a freelance copywriter is getting to hear about new products and services – and, better still, writing about them – long before they reach the general market. In the last few months, for instance, I’ve written copy and created marketing concepts for a major financial services brand, a horticultural charity and a recruitment company. It’s fairly unusual to work with anyone directly involved in the fly-fishing industry, but earlier this year I also got to do some development copywriting for a new fly-line business, and that’s how I came across Tom Bell and his Sunray lines.

Now, I’ve been an ultralight fly-fishing freak from way back. There’s nothing more satisfying than putting the sneak on a big, wild, wary fish, preferably with a dry fly and a rod as long and light as you can get away with, and at this end of the game, it’s those tiniest margins of stealth and lightness that often seem to make the difference.

Ultralight lines and delicate furled leaders were one thing, but when Jeremy Lucas published his excellent book Presentation Fly Fishing last year, it immediately grabbed my fullest attention. Jeremy’s proposition centred on tweaking a basic Euro-nymphing leader into a micro shooting head for fishing dry flies, by adding a short length of thicker, heavier braid to a thin 0.47mm copolymer running line.

I spent the summer of 2014 testing this rig to its limits, discovering that it did indeed deliver supernaturally delicate presentations and astonishing drag-free drifts – to the extent that you could get away with lining spooky fish repeatedly, and still catch them once you landed your fly in the right current lane. The envelope had definite edges in terms of range and accuracy, but if you really bore down, you could usually deal with the first by means of stealthy wading (sometimes on hands and knees, making good use of SWAT-style knee pads), and the second didn’t matter so much when you could make multiple presentations over the same fish. By the end of last season, Jeremy’s presentation leader had helped me land wild trout over 3lbs on dry flies, and I was a happy man.

Come spring 2015, and the brief from Tom to work on his Sunray copy, and I spotted a new, full-geek level of possibility. Sunray lines, I learned, are all about micro-thin diameters: light-absorbing compound coatings bonded to barely-there monofilament cores to make lines that were significantly thinner and sneakier than anything we’d seen before.

Intriguingly, the range included a FIPS-competition-legal 0.55mm Euro-nymphing line. Would this work better than 14 metres of copolymer as the running line behind Jeremy’s ultralight shooting head? It did. Accepting a little more sag off the rod tip, and a little more drag as a result, the infinitesimal extra mass of a real fly-line gave much more accurate dry fly presentations on this hybrid rig.

Of course, as you’d expect, the Sunray World Championship Nymph line also runs exceptionally well in its original spec on the same class of 10ft 2wt rods: practically invisible, super sensitive, and capable of cutting through water with virtually no resistance when a good fish takes your fly. This final benefit hit me rather forcibly when I suddenly landed a personal-best 19” grayling from a torrential stretch of the Aa in France, followed by an unsolicited 7lb salmon on 3lb tippet from the Ken in Galloway. Without such a line as part of a finely balanced system, I’ve no hesitation in saying, neither of those fish would have come anywhere near their brief encounter with my landing net…

In the meantime, another piece of the jigsaw had also slotted into place. Have you read Jeremy Lucas’ book? I asked Tom one day. Highly recommended, and he might like to talk to you about lines too. Within a matter of months, the Sunray Jeremy Lucas Presentation Line took flight – a new taper that delivers on much of the low-impact-stealth-and-dry-fly-delicacy promise of the original micro shooting head idea, while firmly staking all the problems of accuracy and range (though further research with this taper shows that you’ll also start paying with rising levels of sag-and-drag under some circumstances, so this line has definitely developed, or departed from – take your pick! – the pure original concept behind Presentation Fly Fishing). Humans are notoriously wired with short memories and a frantic yen for the Next Big Thing, but the JL line went to Slovenia with me in September, and now I’m kinda wondering how I managed to catch any fish at all before this summer…

Over on his North Country Angler blog, Matt Eastham suggests quite rightly that Sunray’s products are fast gaining a cult following which threatens to expand into widespread acceptance some time very soon, and until then it’s great to be here on the ninja-stealthy-when-everyone-else-is-crashing-around-in-great-big-jackboots ground floor.

In 50 years’ time, it’s perfectly possible that we’ll be feeding hologram flies to trout on the end of weightless fibre-optic or force-field fly-lines. Meanwhile, it seems to me, all the ongoing UK-based R&D behind this new generation of Sunray lines is giving us some of the most intriguing ultralight presentation gear in the game today.

Like I said… it doesn’t happen often, but I’m glad copywriting and fly-fishing sometimes converge.

In gaps between briefs for several fascinating freelance copywriting gigs in busy London agencies, I’ve recently been devoting a little extra time to new product development for my Urbantrout eco-brand…

… launched in 2013 and gaining a satisfyingly culty underground following among them as knows (look at that lucky orange hoodie on West Country fishing guide Pete Tyjas!)

This week, after inordinate squinting at pantone reference cards to get the tone-on-tone exactly right, I’m stoked to launch a new hyperstealth colourway of the instant-classic Urbantrout fishing hoodie – now with dark-green-on-olive logos for even more blend-into-the-background on your favourite urban river.

Like all the other Urbantrout hoodies and t-shirts, these new hyperstealth hoodies are ethically produced with WRAP certification, and 10% of profits will go directly to help fund urban river restoration projects such as CATCH in Wincanton.

Have you been thinking of picking up a new fishing hoodie for the new river fishing season? If so, click here to check ‘em out in the Urbantrout shop and grab yours today!

Despite the obvious presence of a brace of hardback books in my portfolio, more than 90% of my freelance copywriting work these days is digital. Take two of my most recent jobs, for example…

The first involved working with a PR company to launch a revolutionary new multi-joint fitness system which may in time replace most of the kit you currently use at the gym.

Genuine step-changes are apparently rare in the rehabilitation, elite sports performance and leisure equipment markets, but MuJo’s revolutionary 360-degree axial cams are definitely all that. As a result, writing the copy for this website meant learning very rapidly about a fascinating new field of medical science, and translating it for a range of highly technical audiences. MuJo’s new website is here, and this sometimes-creaky former rower will be keeping a close check on how their product range develops.

Then there was a job that arrived as an extension of my role as Editor of the Flyfishers’ Journal: a brief to evaluate and update the Flyfishers’ Club website – which involved working closely with the Club Secretary and webmaster to assess and reorganise pre-existing information, research and write interesting new content, and make sure everything looked and felt consistent with the Club’s historic traditions and modern identity.

For membership reasons, much of the new site (including an integrated ‘virtual club room’ forum) is now behind a secure login screen, but you’ll get a good sense of the Flyfishers’ from these public areas (and regular readers of this blog might also recognise one or two of my own photos from the image slider on the front page… hint: Usk trout and my trusty Marryat 3-weight dry fly rod!)

As a professional freelance copywriter, I’d be delighted to cast an experienced eye over your website and other digital marketing materials. 

Take a look at my full portfolio here, and don’t hesitate to get in touch at any time.

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)

Now and again in my day job as a freelance copywriter, I get a sneak preview of a product or service that makes me think Damn, why didn’t I come up with that one myself?

Luckily, after that brief moment of wonder and regret, my next reaction is usually Wow, I’m really glad to be part of letting this loose on an unsuspecting world.

Which is exactly what happened a few weeks ago when I took a last-minute copywriting brief on this new crowdfunding and -sourcing website called kriticalmass.

The brand’s key strapline, We power good, had already been written by John Hegarty, long-time art director partner of my good pal Neil Chalkstream Chronicle Patterson (who was apparently also the brains behind Audi’s never-been-bettered Vorsprung durch Technik line).

In the next phase of development, the founders hired me to spin their big idea out into engaging, emotive words for the front end of their site, including these introductions to what makes kriticalmass stand out from the rest of the (already crowded) crowdfunding marketplace:

Powering good is all about making someone’s day a little brighter. It’s answering a call for help. It’s adding your voice to a cause. It’s whatever you make it, as long as it puts a smile on someone’s face. Including yours. 

Good ideas are scary. That’s what makes them good. And that’s why it can be tough to get the support you need. But once you’ve decided to take the next step… good things happen through the power of the crowd. 

Good stories involve everyone, and that’s how you, your staff and your community can benefit from being part of kriticalmass. Pick a project that’s meaningful to you, put your full resources and expertise behind it, then share the story with the world.

Oddly enough, in some not-so-spare time recently I’d been speculating about launching a little crowdfunding appeal myself at some point.

Now, when that happens, it might have to be here…

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)