Writer, fly-fisher, river restorationist
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
… means Trout in Dirty Places in Italian, and this week I’ve been surprised and thrilled to find out that I’ve featured in this article about urban street fishing as an antidote to lockdown and C-19, in the Italian newspaper Corriere della Sera. For urban and rural dwellers alike, being able to #FishWhereYouLive, or anywhere […]
Way back in 2016-17, I had the immense pleasure of taking part in a project to produce a beautiful coffee table book called The Fly Fisher: The Essence and Essentials of Fly Fishing. By all accounts, it’s been hugely successful – so much so, that its publishers Gestalten have just released an updated second edition. […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
The process of putting together each issue of the Flyfishers’ Journal usually starts soon after the previous number has been signed off to press, but sometimes it goes back much further than that, and the latest issue is surely a case in point… I think it must have been sometime in late 2016 when I […]
