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!

I knew all those years of working in charity marketing agencies would come in handy some day…

This autumn – apart from editing the latest issue of the Flyfishers’ Journal and hitting a really important new publisher’s deadline of my own (announcement coming soon!) – I’ve also been pulling together the Wild Trout Trust’s autumn newsletter, which is now available to download as a pdf from the WTT website.

The newsletter includes my own feature on recent practical urban river restoration work on the Somerset Frome, and a summary of why river restorationists like to put whole trees into rivers, often in the form of ‘tree kickers’ which mimic all the benefits of naturally-fallen or beaver-deposited timber…

It’s a little-known fact that most of the UK’s rivers are functionally starved of the wood which they’d naturally contain. Together with historic channel simplification for agriculture, industry and urbanisation, this severely inhibits their ability to create (or recreate) complex, dynamic hydromorphology and associated high quality in-channel habitats.

‘Tree kickers’ are a low-cost, commonly-used river restoration technique for carefully adding and retaining large quantities of wood in river channels, so as to mimic biological processes including natural tree fall, as well as wood which might be introduced by keystone species like beavers. They’re especially useful for improving habitat in high-energy rivers like the Frome – generating complex currents around their trunks and branches, adding woody diversity to the channel, and producing localised areas of bed scour and sediment deposition.

Kick-starting these geomorphological processes is beneficial because they make microhabitats for a wide range of insects, fish, birds, animals and plants: for example, scouring out pools for fish to shelter from very low or very high flows (increasingly important for climate change resilience) while simultaneously providing shade, refuge from predators, feeding, spawning and nursery habitats. LWM also provides a diversity of complex surfaces for algae and invertebrates to colonise, boosting the lower levels of the aquatic food web.

Eventually, many tree kickers end up being pushed parallel to the bank, accumulating permanent deposits of silt, and becoming entrained and vegetated as a new low-level bank line. At this point, we can come back and remove the steel cables – and perhaps re-use them for new tree kickers somewhere else!

Click here to explore the rest of the Wild Trout Trust’s autumn newsletter.

Four years ago, give or take a few days, Sally and I took our final walk up the Wandle to hand over our keys to the estate agent who’d (mostly) been helping us to sell our house by the river in Carshalton.

As much out of habit as conscious farewell, we stopped and peered over the bridge at Papermill Close… and yes, there was a trout, finning gently below us, suspended in our little urban chalkstream’s characteristically crystal-clear water. That moment told us, just as clearly, that our work in south London was done.

Or almost done. Transitions can take time to do right, and it’s now two weeks since I finally stepped down from my 13-year role as chair of the South East Rivers Trust. This week, I’ve just been helping to train the first volunteer riverfly monitors for the towns in the hills around the Somerset Levels: giving residents of Cheddar, Wookey, Wookey Hole, Wells, Shepton Mallet and Croscombe the tools they need to keep a knowledgeable eye on their local rivers as part of my TWIST (Transforming Waterways In Somerset Towns) project with the Wild Trout Trust.

Trout in the Town forever. Onwards and upwards (and westwards!)

As the start of trout season creeps round again, I’m feeling incredibly proud and privileged to feature in the latest issue of the beautiful Fly Culture print magazine – this time alongside work from Richard Baker, Adrian Grose-Hodge, Henry Giles, Ben Jailler, Matt Eastham, Dan Osmond and many others.

Editor Pete Tyjas asked me to write about the experience of leaving one well-loved river and moving to another. So that’s what this is… and a record of realising that spelunking around in the sources of rivers and rocks is steadily becoming indistinguishable from fly-fishing itself, and the simple but complicated importance of being able to fish where you live.

Regular readers may notice some themes that are similar to my previous Limestone Chemistry piece which appeared in Fly Culture this time last year, and they’d undoubtedly be correct. Writing finds its own way downstream, and larger bodies of work often settle in natural places.

You can pick up your Spring 2021 copy of Fly Culture here: thanks in advance for reading!

Mere decades ago, these were waters that still ran black with coal dust and the toxic effluent of steel mills and other industries. Today, many Welsh urban rivers still suffer from litter, drainage misconnections and misbehaving sewage treatment works, but if you look carefully, you’ll find wild fish among the remaining shopping trolleys: trout (some of them very big indeed), grayling, barbel and even salmon…

Some writing projects can be a slow burn between concept and publication, and that’s OK.

I think it must have been in autumn 2019 that Ceri Thomas asked me if I’d share some of my favourite Welsh fishing spots in a feature for the new Fishing in Wales website. Of course, I said, and turned it round in time for publication sometime in spring 2020, but we all know what happened this time last year…

Thanks to the most excellent C-19 vaccination programme, though, 2021 is looking a lot more promising for fishing travel. And urban fisheries hold great potential if you’re hunting for beautiful big wild trout that may hardly have seen a fly in the last year and a half.

So, click here to find my favourite 5 Welsh urban rivers. Then get your vaccine shots as soon as you can, and maybe I’ll see you out there on the banks.

(Spoiler: I’m all about the Usk, Taff, Rhymney, Ogmore and Afon Lwyd. But you’ll still need to check that article to find out exactly why!)

During these strange days of lockdown (in the course of which I’ve been temporarily furloughed from my Wild Trout Trust urban river role), we’ve all started adapting to new ways of working.

Formal meetings and family gatherings alike have moved onto digital platforms, where it’s likely that many of them will stay for the foreseeable future – and some of them maybe forever, saving lots of time, cost and carbon emissions on roads and public transport.

Other changes have been felt too, and this includes WTT’s decision to delay printing this year’s issue of the membership magazine Salmo Trutta until later in 2020, meanwhile publishing it online for the very first time.

I’ve already written about my speaking trip to Maryland last September, here and on the WTT website. Now, thanks to Salmo’s editor Tim Jacklin, I’ve been able to go into more detail on some of these themes – getting to know the amazing Maryland chapter of Trout Unlimited, and exchanging knowledge and insights from our shared enthusiasm for restoring urban rivers as assets for their local communities. And, of course, the unrivalled experience of hunting wild, native brook trout with some of these guys in the Appalachian mountains:

True to form for urban river restorationists, we finally sniffed out a proper Dirty Place: a long double-barrelled culvert under a highway, where the shrunken creek ran thinly over a refrigerated concrete sill before sliding into the deepest pool we’d located all day. There, an astonishing shoal of twenty or thirty trout were facing downstream in an eddy scoured along one wall, where they kept their mouths zipped firmly shut in what we later decided must have been a pre-spawn sulk, pointedly ignoring an escalating sequence of midges, caddis, shrimps, and finally streamers (which I found the five-foot loaner rod lobbed into the head of the eddy with surprising efficiency).

Up on the bank, an ankle-twisting berm of rubble and slag from Civil War furnaces, I could hear Tom and Scott asking each other why they’d never fished this pool before, and arguing about the dark shape in the water that had to be a log. “It hasn’t moved since we got here… it’s way too big for a brookie!” Eventually, none of us could stand the suspense any longer, and I waded up slowly into the scour to see what was really in there. Small fish exploded in puffs of silt around my ankles, and the dark log resolved itself clearly into a brook trout no less than sixteen inches long, black as night apart from the diagnostic bright white edges on its fins.

Jet-lagged or not, that’s a real-life hallucination that will stay with me for years to come.

In many ways, this goodwill visit already feels like a relic from a previous age of innocence – it may be a very long time before many people feel able to squeeze themselves into sealed tubes flying between continents again – and a good thing, too, for the health of the planet. None of us can afford to emerge from lockdown and carry on doing everything exactly as we’ve always done it before, and this is a truth that applies equally to those of us who have already been rationing our travel carefully.

All this means that my personal mantra of Fish Where You Live feels even more like the way of the future. But I’ll always be grateful to have experienced how Maryland’s river restorationists fish where they live, in the course of this epic little trip of a lifetime.

Jet Lag and Brook Trout is published in the 2020 issue of Salmo Trutta on the WTT website: click here to read it (and much more!)

Out now, in the Spring 2020 issue of Pete Tyjas’s excellent Fly Culture magazine, is an article I’ve written called Limestone Chemistry.

As the title suggests, it’s a geological, post-industrial and piscatorial study of my years-long love for a little limestone stream, not too far from where I’m living now.

A previous, shorter version of this piece once ran in S&TC’s Gamefisher magazine, but the couple of years since then have given me a chance to expand and update it quite significantly… lots of currents have come together here, and of all the pieces I’ve written, I really think this might be one of my favourites.

Thanks in advance for reading it: you can pick up your copy here.

“Hi Theo, any way we can coax you across the Pond to speak to an audience of Maryland Trout Unlimited and our river project partners around Baltimore?” said the email from Tom Gamper in August.

“We’ve read Trout in Dirty Places, and appreciated how it laid out the team effort to turn urban streams back into natural and cultural recreational resources. We’ll also get you on some local water. What d’ya say?”

However glamorous the urban river writing and restoration life might look at first glance, it’s really not every day that I get an invitation to spread this kind of love in person, all the way from Dirty Places Britain to the similarly post-industrial cities of America’s eastern seaboard.  So… what could I honestly say to this question but a great big ‘yes’?

Those five days in October proved quite the flying visit in all senses of the phrase, but in addition to listening to my presentation about urban river restoration here in the UK, Tom and his generous colleagues made sure I got a true taste of Maryland’s rivers and landscapes: from urban waterways like the Jones Falls and Dead Run, to the Gunpowder Falls tailwater (including the otherworldly Hemlock Ravines – a stronghold for these iconic native trees against the invasive woolly adelgid aphid) and tiny brook trout streams in the Appalachians.

Just beside the Joe Brooks memorial on Big Hunting Creek, I found it especially fascinating to spot some textbook American river restoration structures – wedge dams, stone and log revetments and other current-pinching interventions – right there in the wild where they’d first been designed to make life better for wild trout. And of course, since Baltimore has a rich industrial history of brewing, it was only natural to sample a few (very tasty) local beverages at brew pubs like the Rockwell Brewery and the Brewer’s Art…

Throughout these long and fascinating days, we also compared and contrasted our experiences of Trout in the Classroom and other community outreach programmes, and agreed that we’d love to see many more connections between US and UK river restorationists in the future.

In the meantime, I’ve just written up some of these recent adventures for the Wild Trout Trust blog: click here to read more, or here to find out more about the amazing work of Trout Unlimited’s Maryland chapter.

The end of last month saw the culmination of much of my Trout in the Town work so far: holding the Wild Trout Trust’s latest Urban Conclave, and launching our new Urban River Toolkit.

When Merlin Unwin published Trout in Dirty Places, my guide to urban river fishing and restoration, in 2012, it was everything we wanted in terms of celebrating these mostly-forgotten waterways, and profiling the groups who were already looking after some of them.

Naturally, I’d made sure to include as much as possible about riverfly monitoring, community cleanups, weir removals, tree kickers, and health and safety precautions – pointing people towards improvements they could make on their own rivers. But I still felt there might be something even more detailed, the flipside to all that fishing stuff, which wouldn’t necessarily interest a general angling readership: all the nitty-gritty, hard-knocks experience of running an urban river project, year in and year out, a kind of super-niche operating manual in its own right.

Off and on, I pondered this for the next few years. And then I joined the Wild Trout Trust, with a brief to develop urban river projects across the south of England. The Trust already had a solid suite of urban river restoration guidelines, written by my colleague Paul Gaskell in 2010, but we’d all learned a lot more since then. Was this the perfect opportunity to bring these ideas together?

It was. And the result is WTT’s new Trout in the Town Urban River Toolkit: 98 pages of practical, empowering suggestions for local people to help their urban rivers to recover from centuries of abuse (or simply being overlooked and under-appreciated in recent years).

As you might expect from the combined experience of Paul and me, the Toolkit includes nearly 20 years of tried and tested guidance, including:

• Understanding urban rivers and their surroundings
• Organising river cleanups and other events
• Inspiring and motivating volunteers
• Funding and fundraising
• Practical aspects of running an urban river group
• Exciting project ideas
• Case studies from successful Trout in the Town groups
• Getting your group accredited as an official Trout in the Town chapter
• And much, much more…

Paul’s massive expertise in digital publishing has meant that we’ve been able to publish the Toolkit in a truly 21st century way: as a free-to-download pdf from the WTT website (plus helpful appendices) as well as a £15.99 print-on-demand version via Amazon, for those who prefer to study a hard copy, with all proceeds to WTT.

Thanks to the Mersey Rivers Trust, we were also able to launch the Toolkit at an Urban Conclave in Stalybridge, on the banks of the River Tame, which featured in Trout in Dirty Places, and has garnered so much notoriety in recent months as one of the most heavily microplastic-polluted rivers in the world. Delegates from urban river projects across the country gathered to hear presentations from urban river experts like Mike Duddy, Simon Ogden, Mike Forty and Joe Pecorelli, and they all went home with copies of the Urban River Toolkit (and maybe Balsam Bashing too).

So what’s next, now I’ve scratched this long-time itch?

First, a trip to talk to Trout Unlimited Maryland about Trout in Dirty Places, the Wandle project, and all things Trout in the Town. And then, I hope, lots more enquiries about the Urban River Toolkit, and new urban river projects to start thinking about.

If any of this has inspired you to start improving your local urban river, please get in touch!

Autumn can be one of the best times of the fishing year. But it’s all too precious and fleeting, so how can we really make the most of it?

Friends who’ve fished with me in recent years will know that when I’m on the water in the shoulder seasons, I’m increasingly likely to reach for either dry flies or streamers. I’ll happily fish nymphs, of course, but I like the conscious gear change between the other two techniques – both involve hunting the fish, but reading the water in very different ways.

This means I’ve really enjoyed writing a couple of recent features for Fishtec – one on fishing dry flies at this time of year, and the other on streamers (in a stillwater flavour). If you’ve not seen them already, please do click on the links below:

• Dry or die! Floating flies for September trout
• Top tips for fry feeders

As I’ve recently been agreeing with my fishing pals, there’s nothing like this time of year, especially because we all know winter is coming. Get out there and fish while you can!