This year I’ve been spending a bit of time with the Vision Glass Streamer 7ft 6in 6wt rod, assigning it the very specific role of firing small streamers into nooks and crannies in tiny brooks here in Somerset.

Admittedly, for the vast majority of my streamer fishing this season, I’ve been using either 10ft 5wt or (arguably even more specialist, yet weirdly super-versatile) 10ft 6in 3wt Helios 3’s from Orvis…

… but some of my real close-to-home water is so narrow and tunnelled with trees that neither of those long rods will physically fit, and temporarily splitting them down into sections, Neil Patterson style, tends to raise fatal doubts when there’s always a chance of striking into something out of all proportion to the diminutive size of the stream.

So, what of the Glass Streamer? As I mostly expected from fibreglass, even six-inch fish will bend it into quite a satisfying curve, and I’m looking forward to finding some of the real lunkers in 2025.

Vision’s own recommendation seems to be for using the Glass Streamer on ‘smaller to medium size rivers’, though I still can’t quite imagine loading it up with a full WF6 line and corresponding leader (perhaps that’ll come later). But it’s been good fun flicking a kind of euro-nymphing / mono rig set up, which is often all you need at small stream ranges with a fly that’s just weighted enough to carry itself to the target, towing line behind it like a harpoon.

(I think I saw ‘Elliezium’ using her Glass Streamer in mayfly time, so that might be another excuse to bring it out?)

Other points: I love the vivid lime green colour, and I’m still conflicted on the unconventional two-piece blank: quick and easy to set up, yet not quite optimised for travel.

And… confession time… my inner design freak tackle tart absolutely yearns for colourful agate in that bare chrome stripping ring. But maybe that’s for when I slip further down the glassy slope and commission something custom built and crazy beautiful from Sandy Nelson or Warren McCarthy… stranger things could happen!

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 Carrie Stevens’s Gray Ghost.

Forty-something years later, streamers still aren’t universally accepted on this side of the Big Pond, mostly because of the Victorian values that continue to hang around British fly-fishing culture – but where the rules (or lack of them) have permitted, these flies have given me some of the best moments of my fishing life so far. My very first trout from the Wandle, for example, was lured by a little black Clouser Minnow, while a similar pattern swung downstream into the tunnel under Manchester airport’s runway helped me make this one of the most iconic locations of Trout in Dirty Places. I’ve also managed to save more than one trip to the Alps with big bunny streamers in dirty or rising water.

Over the years, I’ve fished streamers on a lot of different rods (some of them quite unsuitable, but unavoidable under particular circumstances) and I’ve come to understand that a good streamer rod is a bit of a unicorn. Ideally, it needs to be powerful enough to throw a heavily weight-forward line and reasonably large fly without collapsing, yet light enough that you don’t feel you’re swinging a club all day: fast and accurate, to hit small targets and impart fish-grabbing movement to the fly, yet sensitive enough to feel delicate takes (not all streamers get eaten with a classic smash-and-grab) and even do backup service as a dry fly or nymphing rod in an emergency.

Add to all that my own particular preference for 10-foot rods on almost any water, and yes, I think that’s a unicorn I’m hunting for.

In 2015, soon after George Daniel published his American streamer bible Strip-Set, I got in touch with him to compare notes and ask which rods he rated, and banked the valuable intel that he preferred the Orvis Helios 2 in a 10-foot 5-weight. After that, I finished teaching myself all the lessons I’ve mentioned above, with a range of other different rods from 2- to 6-weights, and by the time I looked seriously at the question again, Orvis had launched the Helios 3.

Accurate from anywhere, they said.

A rifle in a world of muskets, they said.

Strategically reinforced blank, using materials otherwise reserved for military helicopter blades, producing reduced horizontal and vertical tip vibration, less swing weight, fewer casting variables, and it’s all been tested on a custom-built robotic casting rig, they said.

OK, that’s got my attention. (As did this).

So, for the last few weeks, with huge thanks to the Orvis marketing team, I’ve been test-driving the Helios 3F in the 10-foot 5-weight configuration. It’s travelled with me nearly everywhere, from West Country rivers to Highland lochs in the far north of Scotland, and it really does seem to keep the promise of the copy in the catalogue.

From rivers to lochs, the H3 has felt just as comfortable firing a tight loop of line under branches 30 feet away, to lure a big wild brown out of her bankside eddy with a 3-inch beadhead streamer, as hammering 90 (well, maybe 80) foot casts into the teeth of a gale on Loch Veyatie, and detecting the tug of a 12-inch baby ferox a couple of feet under rolling waves. With all the other streamer rods I’ve been using so far, I suspect I might have struggled to get near those fish.

Mainly I’ve matched the H3 with an aggressively-tapered Sunray El Guapo full-floating line, and a range of Airflo polyleaders: shorter and heavier for rivers, longer and lighter for lochs and other stillwaters. For throwing much bigger streamers on a regular basis, you might want to go up a couple of line weights, but I’m as confident that I can be that the super-stable tip and lower-blank strength of this 10-foot 5-weight make it fully capable of handling the vast majority of streamer fishing for trout in the UK.

The H3’s cosmetics are said to be based on snowsports, golf or mountain biking hardware, and one or two of my fishing pals have seen the photos and asked sarcastically when I joined the ‘White Stripes’ – apparently the nickname for H3 aficionados because of the striking white flash on the rod’s blank, just about the handle. To begin with, I didn’t quite know what to make of this design decision, either, but experience suggests that it really doesn’t matter: the H3’s technical performance means your attention is all out there, at the end of your line, totally focused on where your fly is working in the water. The rest of the rod is finished in a much stealthier matte grey, but if you find that white flash really bothering you, you can always cover it with joint tape. (For what it’s worth, I haven’t noticed any fish-spooking effect so far – perhaps because of the operating ranges for streamer work – and in Scotland the splash of white actually made the H3 easier to find where I’d temporarily left it in the rocks and heather in favour of a lighter dry fly rig).

Somebody, maybe even another reviewer of the H3, has said that the mark of a great rod is that you can forget you’re using it – the rod just does what you tell it to do, even when that’s pretty unrealistic. By that measure alone, as I’d hoped, this feels like a standout streamer rod for UK waters, accurate and powerful enough to boss a medium-sized streamer on an aggressively-tapered fly line, and handle big wild river trout up to 3lbs+ with some authority – yet sensitive enough to suggest what the streamer is doing even when I can’t see it, and make it fun to catch trout of almost any size. It puts a smile on my face and makes me keener than ever to fish the streamers that fascinate me, and I can’t reasonably ask for more than that.

Finally, I think this is the unicorn I’ve been hunting for. Now I’m just going to have to work out how to get it into my stable on a permanent basis…

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)

We all know early season fishing can be a gamble.

And we all know gambling’s not for everyone.

That early April morning, you could bet your shirt on what most people were thinking about their chances of decent fishing that day.

Strong winds and heavy rain across the whole chalk country?

No dice. They’d all be folding right there.

Waiting for better odds.

Warm sun. Strawberries. Big creamy Mayflies.

But hold that thought.

Strong winds and heavy rain…

… on the Ginger Beer beat of the Test?

Stack all my chips on LDOs.

So that’s how it played out.

I met my fellow addicts Paul, Marina, Nick, Patrick, Claire, Laura, and Lola the trout bum spaniel in the fishing lodge at Kimbridge, and we steeled our nerves with strong coffee before betting everything on red.

(Red-spotted trout, that is).

And Lady Luck smiled.

LDOs hatched.

The sun came out.

Trout showed us they were players too.

Legendary Orvis rods were bent. Smooth, solid reels were compared and tested.

And a sneaky side bet on a peeping caddis sometimes turned up trumps.

Because in the end, when you’re fishing the early season, Fortune asks just one question.

How lucky do you feel?

(Photos 1 and 6: Paul Sharman)

Update: thanks to Zambuni PR for this link!

I’ve got a thing for a really good fabric print.

It certainly started when I was working at the big old Liberty department store in the mid-1990s, first on the shop floor, merchandising a 15-yard wall of silk ties, and later in the buying offices, where I’d spend hours rifling through fabric swatches, picking out just the right colours and ranges for the next season’s collections.

Those were the years when I first saw the Wandle, too. William Morris and Arthur Lazenby Liberty had their printing works at Merton Abbey Mills, one of my aunts gave me a hand-carved Liberty printing block rescued decades before from a junk shop in Guildford (at a time when all the prints were being transferred onto silk screens, and the precious old blocks were being dumped or burned) and I took the tube down to Colliers Wood to see where it all began…

All that was a long time ago, of course. But a really good fabric print can still make the hairs on the back of my neck stand up, and that’s exactly how I felt on finding the Kryptek family of prints a couple of years ago.

When I started developing a little eco-branded range of fishing products for the Urbantrout website which I’d set up as the continuity blog for my book Trout in Dirty Places, I wanted to offer gear that you probably couldn’t get elsewhere. Funky rasta steelheader beanies, hoodies for non-tweedy urban (and other) fishing… and camo caps that might give a traditional old ghillie apoplexy.

That’s partly why the range is still quite small. But I’m satisfied that it’s helluva different, and here, finally, are the kind of camo caps I really, really wanted.

According to the ‘battlefield to back country’ developers’ notes…

Kryptek patterns utilize multi-level layering techniques by incorporating background shading and random geometrical foregrounds to create a three-dimensional effect that ensures the utmost in concealment at both close and long ranges… Kryptek Highlander is specially designed for those geographical regions that are varied… increasing stealth when pursuing a wide range of quarry in mixed terrain.

So… impressive stealth pedigree for starters (Kryptek is shortlisted as one of three potential patterns for the US Army’s Future Soldier programme), plus crisp, graphic lines that to this old print buyer are nothing short of beautiful, channelling just the kind of nervous, random geometric ripple you see on sun-dappled river currents, coloured with every shade of green, brown and grey you’ll find on the margins of urban streams and rural rivers alike.

By now you’ll have gathered I’m just a tiny bit excited to have these things for sale in my Urbantrout store, not to mention prowling the Wandle’s banks…

“Have nothing in your houses that you do not know to be useful or believe to be beautiful”. I reckon old William Morris would approve.

Update: For the 2017 fishing season, I’ve restyled these caps with exclusive 3-D rubber badges. Click here to take a look.

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.

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.

If you want to stroll the banks of a manicured chalkstream, or cast a fly across a well-appointed salmon river, there’s plenty of old-school tweed and waxed cotton to help you look the part. 

Alternatively, if you’re planning a week’s survival camp in Norway or Kamchatka, with nothing to keep you alive except bear-spray and space-tech fabrics, the catalogues are crammed with choice. 

But what if you’re one of us – the new tribe of urban fly-fishers – who just wants to fish where you live, blend into your busy urban surroundings and remain undetected by everyone except (perhaps) other members of your own movement? 

That’s why Urbantrout fly gear is here.

Over on my Urbantrout site I’ve recently been launching my new eco-brand: Urbantrout-badged street-style fly-fishing gear.

(If you’ve worked beside me in the busy buying offices at Liberty’s department store, or anywhere at the fast-moving convergence of urban fly-fishing, charity marketing and fundraising, and corporate social and environmental responsibility… none of this may come as a complete surprise).

And here’s one other important thing. 

Every year, we’ll donate a full 10% of Urbantrout-branded product sales profits to urban river restoration projects. 

Our reasoning is that without the hard-to-fund projects that are constantly improving our inner-city fisheries as a precious common resource, few of us would be fishing these urban rivers at all. 

We’ve been greatly inspired by the generosity and environmental advocacy of global brands like Orvis and Patagonia, and while we’re vastly smaller (for now) than these industry leaders, we’re just as passionately committed to environmental responsibility. We’ve no idea how much difference we’ll be able to make by donating this deliberately high percentage of our profits, but we want to give it a hell of a good try…

Last Saturday saw our official launch on the Wild Trout Trust stand at the British Fly Fair International, and the whole introductory range of hoodies, t-shirts, fishing caps and window stickers is now available to buy online.

Fish where you live, rock your urban fly-fishing, and wear Urbantrout gear to show your support for the urban river restoration movement!

Anyone who’s fished with me will know that I like to take a light line approach whenever possible – fishing with ultralight rigs matched with 3-weight lines or lighter – for their uncanny ability to deliver delicate presentations, cushion vicious strikes on fine tippets, and still land hefty fish of all species with speed and safety.

I’ve had a few conversations about this approach with fellow practitioner and West Country guide Pete Tyjas, so he ended up asking me to write a feature about ultralight fly-fishing for his not-for-profit monthly ezine Eat, Sleep, Fish.

Other commitments got in the way for a while, but finally here it is, fronting up issue 17 of Eat, Sleep, Fish.

Please click over to read and enjoy!