Writer, fly-fisher, river restorationist
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
According to the great John Gierach, publishers may well have invented book signings to keep writers humble… and that’s certainly how it felt for the first five spookily-quiet minutes of Coch-y-Bonddu’s ‘meet the author’ session during this year’s CLA Game Fair at Blenheim. Maybe we’re putting them off, suggested Peter Hayes, all sitting here looking like […]
If you want to stroll the banks of a manicured chalkstream, or cast a fly across a well-appointed salmon river, there’s plenty of old-school tweed and waxed cotton to help you look the part. Alternatively, if you’re planning a week’s survival camp in Norway or Kamchatka, with nothing to keep you alive except bear-spray and […]
Anyone who’s fished with me will know that I like to take a light line approach whenever possible – fishing with ultralight rigs matched with 3-weight lines or lighter – for their uncanny ability to deliver delicate presentations, cushion vicious strikes on fine tippets, and still land hefty fish of all species with speed and […]
Even if you only believe some of the stuff you read in the fly-fishing niche-within-a-niche of the internet, you’ll probably have picked up hints that Airflo fly-lines have suffered from a pretty mixed reputation. Sinkers like the Di7 are still legendary for their efficiency in plumbing the depths of the great Midlands reservoirs, but the […]
