Writer, fly-fisher, river restorationist
As some of the dust starts to settle (or not…) on the results of last week’s referendum on the UK’s membership of the EU, I’m clearly not the only environmental writer who’s been thinking day and night about the implications. Readers of my chapter in Chalk Stream Fly Fishing (2012) may recall that I’m very […]
It’s here… featuring Neil Patterson’s four favourite flies, John Crompton’s (k)night exercises in search of sea trout, Gary Crossley’s encounter with a naked Naiad, Stéphane Rault’s gastronomic revelations, Greg Belcamino’s advice for making trout happy on both sides of the Atlantic… … and a whole lot more, including a blockbuster article from WWF-UK on how this influential charity […]
When you’ve already been sniffing out the secrets (hmm…) of urban rivers for more years than you might care to count, it’s easy to forget that not everyone else has been on this journey of discovery for quite that long. So here’s a little guest blog post I wrote recently for my good pal Dominic […]
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 […]
Quite apart from the constant hum of creativity that means we’re now getting to play with some of the finest, most sophisticated tackle ever deployed in search of elusive fish, I think it’s fair to say that two developments – no, movements – within the last 20 years have revolutionised the lives of most of […]
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 […]
If you had to rely on your fly-fishing skills for survival (except in the sense of avoiding relegation from the next round of a game show…) would you live to tell the tale? This was the self-set challenge faced by Fennel Hudson in the lead article of this winter’s issue of the Flyfishers’ Journal, which was […]
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 […]
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 […]
It’s genuinely been years and years since I fished in Slovenia. Leafing back through my fishing diary, I can vividly remember exploring the Soca for the first time in 2003, and the Baca and Idrijca in 2004. Scrambling over white limestone boulders under fantastical mountain peaks, stalking evanescent trout and grayling in water as clear […]
