This month I’ve been absolutely thrilled to see my long-awaited article about the Wandle appearing in the January 2018 issue of Trout & Salmon, which started dropping on doormats and news-stands last week.

It’s not a valedictory – the big move from south London to Somerset has happened for family reasons, and I’m still intending to serve as Chairman of the Wandle Trust and South East Rivers Trust for some time yet. But from now on, there’s certainly the recognition that I’ll be taking trains and tube-lines to fish my favourite pools on the Wandle, instead of simply strolling out of my own front door…

Not being completely immune to irony, I definitely found it interesting that SES Water also picked last week to stage their by-now-traditional pre-Christmas meltdown of the recirculation pumps that keep the upper Wandle flowing at times when the aquifer has been drastically depleted for public water supply – leaving freshly-spawned wild trout eggs high and dry in their redds for the third year in succession.

Thanks to our restoration work, the Carshalton arm of the Wandle won the Urban category of the UK River Prize in 2016, and was also the first water body in the UK to achieve ‘good ecological potential’ under the European Water Framework Directive. But all the new gravel, wood and thalwegs in the world can’t compensate for no water at all, and we’re getting very seriously worried for the survival of the trout in this stretch.

Please keep an eye on my Twitter feed (and the Wandle Trust’s) for any further updates, and grab a copy of Trout & Salmon to read while you’re waiting.

Here in south London, trout season opens later than elsewhere, and it’s just another quirk of fishing in the 21st century that social media isn’t letting me forget it. 

Starting in early March, my Instagram and Twitter feeds have steadily been filling up with photos from big trout hunters in Scotland, Eden, Derbyshire, Wales and the West Country. If it’s not the trout themselves, it’s the flies that have been carefully tied to catch them: Jinglers for Large Dark Olives, and plenty of March Browns in case this hatch lives up to the promise of recent Easter weekends and sends the trout into what witnesses can only describe, with a kind of religious awe,  as a feeding frenzy…

My latest article has just appeared in issue 9 of Fallon’s Angler, and it’s a compare-and-contrast of early season fishing in the south and the north (for the record, I’m a big fan of both, but it’d definitely be easier to live somewhere not in the south at the kind of cabin-feverish time when I wrote this piece!)

Click here to grab your copy from the Fallon’s Angler shop today.

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!

Regular readers of this blog will know how much I enjoy contributing occasional articles to Eat, Sleep, Fish, the monthly not-for-profit ezine published by my good pal Pete Tyjas from his base at the Devon School of Flyfishing.

For most of the 2015 season I’ve been fishing a Vision Kalu reel, as part of a range of rigs that’s also included the Sunray lines which I wrote about a few weeks ago.

And frankly I’ve been loving the subtle heat it’s helped me bring to landing a whole shoal of different fish – from swaggering south London trout to personal-best French grayling – all culminating in that unsolicited 7lb Scottish salmon on (wince…) 3lb tippet.

So, when I thought I could see space on the interwebs for an in-depth review of the Kalu’s features and benefits…

… the 4th birthday issue of Eat, Sleep, Fish looked like just the place:

Weighing in at 121g, the 3/4 size is heavy enough to balance the latest generation of long, light dry fly and nymphing rods, as well as shorter rigs. I’ve enjoyed hanging the Kalu off the Greys Streamflex XF2 10 foot 2 weight, the Sage ESN 10 foot 2 weight and the Marryat Tactical 10 foot 3 weight this season, and it’s proved a great match for all of them… 

For the full low-down, please click on over to issue 48 of Eat, Sleep, Fish to read my full review of the Vision Kalu.

(And then, while you’re still in the mood, check out my review of Vision’s new Urban boots on Urbantrout.net too!)

Thanks to all my fellow Members of the Flyfishers’ Club who contributed articles to the Summer 2015 issue of the Flyfishers’ Journal, our latest issue is now apparently cruising at 35,000 feet to many corners of the earth as essential in-flight holiday reading… a global affair in all senses of the word.

There’s a brace of brilliantly tangential features from Jim Bennett on fishing memorabilia and environmentalism in Paris, and from Antony Pinsent, whose investigation of the famous ghillie Rob o’ the Trows took him all the way Down Under to New South Wales in the bootprints of Sir Thomas Makdougall Brisbane.

Elsewhere, Nick Measham reports on an early season trout fishing road trip from Cumbria to Scotland with Paul Procter, Morten Harangen reveals the secrets of the magical Grini Pool, Greg Belcamino writes from New York and Montana, and Neil Patterson presents a volcanic Chilean episode from his new book, Flyfisher’s Chronicle. This edition’s In My Fly Box comes from my salmon-fishing pal (and old Wandle comrade-in-arms) Charlie Harman, and our customary ‘good cause’ feature focuses on the foundation of the Rivers Trust movement through the lens of the Westcountry Rivers Trust, which celebrated its 20th birthday last year.

From a personal point of view, it’s also been very poignant to announce the first winner of the Club’s inaugural Peter Lapsley Award, which went to Peter Martin for a masterful short story, The Venerable Trout, published in our Winter 2014 issue. The judges agreed unanimously that it strongly evoked all the patience and excitement of fly-fishing, as well as human nature, local traditions, the quest for the perfect fly-tying material, and finally the skills required to land the trout of a lifetime.

Peter’s certificate (and bottle of champagne) were presented by Liza Lapsley after the Club’s AGM on 16 June. The hunt’s already on to find our winner for 2015…

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!

Though I say it myself… I think this winter’s Flyfishers’ Journal has turned out to be a proper Christmas cracker.

Highlights of the latest issue include contrasting Icelandic articles from Neil Patterson and Nigel ‘Fennel’ Hudson (also starring Tim Pike, John Hotchkiss and David Profumo), Andrew Herd’s examination of Jimmy Wright’s fly-tying legacy to the Tweed, Peter McLeod’s In My Fly Box feature on flies for blue water fly-fishing, and Greg Belcamino’s Letter from America (always a fascinating look at our sport from my counterpart at the Anglers’ Club Bulletin and Past President of the Anglers’ Club of New York).

As I’ve noted in my Editorial, a theme of friendship on the water definitely runs through this issue of the Journal, and our now-traditional ‘good cause’ embodies this idea with an feature on Fishing For Forces, a charity whose objective is helping recovering servicemen and women by ‘taking the wounded to the waterside’ and introducing them to the wonderful sport of fly-fishing.

And then there’s a flashback to that afternoon in June which I spent photographing Morgan Jones and Nick Steedman on a supernaturally beautiful stretch of the upper Itchen – a day which produced a cracking image for the front cover and several others for the Mayfly Weekends photo essay, before landing Duncan and me with a baffling blank on an otherwise picture-perfect evening on the Avon – but we won’t talk too much about that!

Once again I’ve really enjoyed working with such a talented bunch of writers, photographers and designers to produce another issue of the venerable Flyfishers’ Journal.

So… a very Merry Christmas to all my fellow Members of the Flyfishers’ and readers of this blog alike, rapidly followed by a happily fishy New Year. As Neil reminded me just the other day, it’ll be Mayfly again soon…

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.

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)