Writing an article isn’t just writing an article. It’s also writing the right article, and then finding the right place to get it published. Sometimes this can feel a lot like the painstaking process of fishing itself…

Three casts later, as I tracked the nymph round and felt it lifting through the currents, just as I’ve fished so many times for deep-water grayling in the Alps, the salmon took. 

Unlike that moment when you stick a big trout, and it’s all fireworks and kick-bollock-scramble, the world actually seemed to slow down, and there was lots of time to think. The salmon stayed slow and deep, except when it pulled unstoppably and crashed three times on the surface, and I knew I had to stop it working down to deeper water…

So, I reckon I finally got the right article written about a fish which I may have mentioned once or twice already on this blog, and I’m really thrilled that it’s now been published in issue 8 of Fallon’s Angler.

Apart from telling the story of that unsolicited salmon from the River Ken in Galloway, I’ve also included some unavoidable discussion of the effects of industrial-scale hydropower and blanket coniferous forestry on Scotland’s landscape and rivers, and by extension many other parts of the British uplands. (Spoiler alert: not so good, but if we look hard enough, we can still see some reasons for hope).

Copies of Fallon’s Angler are always available direct from the magazine’s website, or from a few independent outlets. Go on, get yours today…

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!)

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.