The Flyfishers’ Journal: Summer 2019
Members of the Flyfishers’ Club (and other readers of the Flyfishers’ Journal) will know that we often like to give each issue a certain thematic look and feel. This time, the 70th birthday of the Club’s Patron, HRH The Prince of Wales, has given us all the excuse we’ve needed to go with a decidedly Welsh flavour.
Allan Hardy has translated a typically entertaining essay from Stéphane Rault, recalling a fishing trip to Lake Vyrnwy. I’ve also persuaded Ceri Thomas to reveal five of his favourite flies for Welsh waters (some of them still quite unconventional in the British context, but every one of them tried and tested: another landmark article in this series which aims to inspire current Members at the same time as reminding our successors of how we’ve been fishing at the start of the 21st century).
And of course there are full details of the special commemorative framed fly presented to HRH, along with a box of fishable variants, just in case this keen flyfisher ever feels the need to break the glass to present the ‘Duke of Rothsay’ to a waiting salmon…
Speaking of which: 2019 is the International Year of the Salmon, a global initiative which aims to protect these iconic fish by bringing many countries together to share knowledge, raise public awareness, and take action to save salmon populations on several spatial scales. To mark this worldwide event, I’m delighted to have commissioned an article from Jayne Mann at the Rivers Trust, and I hope that further articles in the Winter 2019 issue will continue this important theme.
Meanwhile, Peter Martin has written a spooky short story about a ghostly presence on the Wandle (accompanied by fabulous line drawings from Neil Patterson), Tim Benn jumps in his time machine to bring back a missive from the Club a hundred years from now, and Greg Belcamino’s Letter from America urges us to re-think everything about the tackle we carry around with us on the banks.
Last but not least, this issue of the Journal also introduces The Flyfishers: A History of the Flyfishers’ Club, written by Andrew Herd and published this summer. It’s everyone’s strong suspicion that only a writer with Dr Herd’s fluency, encyclopaedic knowledge and sense of humour could ever have contemplated a literary task like this History, much less carried it to such a triumphant conclusion, and clearly I’m not the only Member of the Club who’s deeply immersed in his complimentary copy.
I’ll see you sometime on the other side…
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