Editing, Flyfishers' Journal, Writing

The Flyfishers’ Journal: Winter 2024

Last autumn the Flyfishers’ Club (where I’m editor of the biannual Flyfishers’ Journal) took an important and very welcome step forward into the 21st century by voting in favour of welcoming women as members for the first time since the Club was formed in 1884, by a solid majority of 75%.

Naturally, I wanted to celebrate such an historic occasion with a suitable image on the front of the following issue of the Journal, and I set myself a very specific brief for this composition: dynamic, modern, celebratory, showing a man and a woman fishing together joyfully as equals, with a brightest possible future ahead.

In practice, as I’d rather expected, this wasn’t so easy to find: the one pic I really wanted had already (and quite deservedly) been snapped up by a film production company, so I had to start thinking laterally. But in the end, with lots of help from my photographer buddy Duncan Soar, and the Journal’s designer Stuart James, we produced a watercolour-style image which I think captures the moment quite perfectly.

Along with a blockbuster article from Peter Hayes on two millennia of flyfishing illustrations (often in the form of church wall paintings) across Britain and Europe, the other dominant theme of this issue of the Journal is concern over the fate of our Atlantic salmon.

Throughout 2024, worrying headlines just kept appearing: for example, scientists reporting the lowest number of juveniles in the Dorset Frome in more than 20 years of monitoring, against the background of a general population crash by over 80% in the last 40 years, and salmon having now been added to the IUCN Red List alongside elephants, pandas and polar bears.

Many Norwegian salmon rivers also suspended fishing last summer. So this issue of the Journal has a certain theme of wild salmon ecology and conservation, including our ‘good cause’ feature from the Atlantic Salmon Trust, and my own review of Henry Giles’s interesting new book, The Secret Life of Salmon.

Both remind us that we do live in times of change – but that we can all try to ‘be the change we want to see’, and that’s another stirring New Year’s resolution (early or late) for every one of us…