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 marquees or conference centres than actually stalking fish on the river bank, and surely that’s not the point.

Free time needs to be allocated wisely, especially in fishing season (which, if you take grayling and coarse fish into account, is now effectively year-round) and I’m less and less inspired by the big, generic country shows, where fishing has become an obviously poor relation of the made-to-measure shotguns and luxury garden furniture, and even stalwart book-sellers scarcely feel it’s worthwhile to attend.

By contrast, the newer generation of focused fly-fishing shows don’t demand thousands of pounds in pitch fees from nichier designers and makers, who might be worried enough about petrol prices and somewhere to stay overnight – and I think the friendly, egalitarian feel of the Sportfish Show has done a lot to drive this new approach. (Hell, I benefited from it myself, when I spent a day selling Urbantrout caps and copies of my Pocket Guide to Balsam Bashing to a constant stream of INNS-bashing early adopters in 2014).

So, true to form, this year’s show offered the chance to meet startups such as Vicuna Dubbing, as well as bump into established celebrities like Jeremy Wade and Simon Gawesworth, who took time out from launching new books and explaining fly-line tapers to go head to head, lure vs fly, in a slow trickle of early mayflies from the Haywards Farm lake.

Pete Tyjas and Marc Bale were there on the Rio stand, and I finally managed to meet the Ripplebox inventor Josh Richards after a couple of years of back-and-forth by email and social media. Peter McLeod, Paul Procter, Nick Measham and Claire Zambuni were there too, all keen to discuss new projects, and I had a good chat with Geoff Wood about the power and accuracy of the Orvis Helios 3. Geoff Wilcox reported huge success from the river restoration project I helped to deliver near Bulford on the Avon last summer, and even Charles R-W skidded in for a few moments, en route to a mayfly hatch somewhere much further west (and who could really blame him?)

The morning crowds thinned out quickly, but after all that socialising, it was quite a relief to sit down with a pizza and beer with the Bloxham PR squad, and watch lots of kids catching their first trout from the new Kingfisher Pond.

Every Sportfish Show feels a little different, depending on the weather and the mix of exhibitors and hot new products, and getting the chance to mix with the most creative minds in the fly-fishing world is more than enough to keep me coming back year after year. I’ve already got the second weekend of May 2020 inked into my diary!

(Photos 1, 3 & 4: Bloxham PR)

According to the great John Gierach, publishers may well have invented book signings to keep writers humble… and that’s certainly how it felt for the first five spookily-quiet minutes of Coch-y-Bonddu’s  ‘meet the author’ session during this year’s CLA Game Fair at Blenheim.

Maybe we’re putting them off, suggested Peter Hayes, all sitting here looking like experts. So Peter, Dom Garnett, Malcolm Greenhalgh and I started chatting among ourselves instead, and it wasn’t long before a swarm of grinning acquaintances emerged from the crowd to accuse us jovially of neglecting our public. You can’t have it all ways… but it’s entertaining to try.

Thanks to all those good folks at Coch-y-Bonddu and the Angling Trust, my day in the Game Fair’s Fishing Village passed in a blur of book signings, too-quick catch-ups and some degree of sardonic speculation (does his Grace know he’s got invasive signal crayfish duking it out with native damsel nymphs in his lake, and a Himalayan balsam problem near Gate C?)

Between fits of writerly responsibility I did manage some reciprocal sneaking across the road to see the gang the Wild Trout Trust stand, as well as the Wandle Piscators at the Fly Dressers’ Guild… and a stroll down the hill at the end of the day to check out a couple of rods I’ve been reading about recently in Jeremy Lucas’ latest book, Presentation Fly Fishing.

(I’ve fished ultralight for years, but having been generously sent a sample of Jeremy’s revolutionary dry fly presentation leaders, I’m happy to admit that his super-delicate leader-to-hand technique is more than a few light years beyond. So now I wanted to get hands and eyes on the long, ultralight Streamflex XF2s – Euro comp-style 10ft 2wt and 11ft 3wt respectively – which he praises so passionately for casting those leaders).

As luck would have it, dropping in on the Hardy & Greys stand also led to a fascinating chance meeting with pro staffer Finlay Wilson, whose articles on Scottish rivers and the Flow Country I’ve been enjoying for years in the pages of Trout & Salmon and FF&FT.  Neither of us were actually packing a French or Lucas-style leader to throw onto those lovely little XF2s, but with luck it won’t be too many seasons before we’re comparing big fish on crazy-light rigs somewhere on the Tweed or Annan. Or maybe somewhere grittier…

And isn’t that mostly the point of the Game Fair? You never quite know who you’ll run into, but you can always predict it’ll be fun.

To celebrate the launch of my new Pocket Guide to Balsam Bashing this week, I’ve been highly honoured to set out my stall at two separate Sportfish events…

… first an all-day signing session at Farlows on publication day (complete with wine and snacks generously laid on by Brian Fratel and Sam) …

… and then sharing a stand with Fishpal’s effervescent Anne Woodcock on the Saturday of this year’s Sportfish Show.

To say we were at the epicentre of the fair’s energy doesn’t start to describe it, with Orvis on one side, Savage Gear on the other, and all the big guns from Sage and Rio (Marc Bale, Travis Campbell and my old casting guru Simon Gawesworth – not the first time I’ve mentioned him and the Sportfish Show in the same sentence!) immediately opposite.

Many other good pals including Paul Sharman, William Daniel, Funky Toby Merigan, Mark Hamnett, Charles Jardine, Mark Anderson and Graham Waterton also dropped by for a chat and a signed copy or three…

… and all too soon it was time to hit the road back to south London again, to get ready for early morning riverfly monitoring and helping to run this month’s Wandle Trust river cleanup. (If you make a career in writing and river restoration, that’s the deal you apparently sign up for… and I wouldn’t live it any other way).

Big thanks to Allan Shepherd, Chris Ryan and everyone at Farlows and Sportfish for their massive enthusiasm and support this week. Balsam Bashing time is officially here!

Having been quite closely involved in bringing World Rivers Day to the Wandle for the first time in 2008, it’s going to be a real buzz to see this year’s global festival marked by the official launch of the Wandle Valley’s HLF landscape partnership projects.

I’ll be spending this Sunday at the Wandle Piscators’ fishing event at Merton Abbey Mills, catching up with fellow writers Charles Rangeley-Wilson and Dominic Garnett, and maybe helping a few urban fly-fishers get ready for the colder months with my Urbantrout eco-branded hoodies and beanie hats.

If you’re anywhere near south London on Sunday, drop in at the William Morris between 12 and 5pm to say hello!

… first for a book-signing event and generally big night out at the Hillsborough Hotel microbrewery in Sheffield, complete with pints of deliciously hoppy Wobbly Wader beer (with 10p per pint generously donated to SPRITE, Paul Gaskell’s local Trout in the Town chapter, how could we fail to drink our fill?)

… then, a couple of weeks later, down to Theale to help Kris and Shaun run the Wild Trout Trust stand at the Sportfish Show, and naturally talk to anyone who’d listen about the joys of urban fly-fishing and river-mending.

Year on year, this opportunity for big-brand traders and product developers to meet their customers face to face just seems to get more internationally popular.

So it was a solid-gold opportunity to play with shiny toys and catch up with mid-Atlantic friends new and old: Marc Bale from Sage, Mark Hamnett from Partridge and Marryat, Toby Merigan from Funky Fly Tying, Luke Kozak from Woodland Water & Gardens, Paul Sharman from Fish& Fly, and the bloke who began all this my one-time fly-fishing mentor Simon Gawesworth from Rio.

(You’ve got to admit this guy’s good: the shock of seeing Trout in Dirty Places in print, and fully understanding what he’d started, didn’t seem to put him off his powerstroke at all…)

But best of all I loved the chance to sign a few more copies of Trout in Dirty Places, and meet and talk to people who’d already started reading and enjoying it.

For any writer, this is bound to be a strange, satisfying and slightly surreal buzz: for me, as a bloke who’s usually a totally anonymous freelance copywriter, there’s the extra little jolting realisation that this book with my name on it is out there in the wild, making a life of its own, getting people thinking, fishing and restoring their local urban rivers.  And who can say where that will lead?  On several levels at once, this can sometimes feel like quite an awesome responsibility…

No surprise, then, that the very next morning found me back pulling rubbish out of my own little Wandle. You can take the writer out of the river, but you can’t… well, you’ve been reading this blog, you know the rest!

Over the next couple of months, I’ll be signing copies of Trout in Dirty Places on the Wild Trout Trust stand at the BFFI (23 – 24 June) and the CLA Game Fair (21 July).  

If you’re visiting either of these, don’t forget to stop and say hello…