Up to the Duchy beat of the Pickering Beck to do the regular invert sampling followed by a session with the rod. It was baking hot: the car said 25C at 10am, and 28C by the time I packed up at 2pm. The water was tinged by a spot of colour after some recent rain, […]
Today was my birthday – thank you, very kind, 58 since you ask – so I treated myself with a trip up to the Oxfolds Beck near Pickering. As I’ve probably said before, it’s a lovely stretch of crystal-clear spring-fed water but has been ravaged by pollution in recent years. Sewage and trout farm discharges […]
Up to the Seven at Spaunton Moor with a spring in my step and a feeling in my bones that today was going to be a good ‘un. A bit chilly, with rain forecast but the river was looking fab: I put three spiders on the Burns 7.5 footer and started gently lashing the water. […]
So the idea was to hit the weir pool stretch on the Seven with the French leader outfit, pull out half a dozen or so of the better browns then head upstream with the 7.5 ft rod and a team of spider and pull out another hatful. It didn’t quite pan out that way. I […]
Time to fulfil a long-held ambition and fish the magnificent Swale up at Richmond in the Yorkshire Dales. An hour-and-a quarter up the A1 and first stop is the garage that sells the £7 day ticket. The warm weather we’ve been promised hadn’t kicked in yet, and it was only around 13C when I tackled […]
And so the annual pilgrimage to the desolate beauty of north-west Sutherland comes around again. The ten-hour drive up to the Scourie hotel allows plenty of time for the expectation to build. Weatherwise the portents weren’t fantastic: cold, wet and windy. Still, you take what you’re given and make the best of it. This is […]
I’m not proud of this and on the scale of angling challenges it rates somewhere near the bottom. But curiosity got the better of me. We were visiting my sister, who owns a glorious 70 acre estate on the Suffolk/Essex border, a mix of pasture and woodland and with two lakes. One of the lakes […]
I thought I’d try and construct a more sophisticated coiled leader for short-range nymphing. I’d previously made one up from some old brown Maxima nylon and it had worked ok but was a bit difficult to see against the dark water. Essentially you make these things by tightly winding a length of nylon in touching […]
By and large wading boots seem to me to be something of a rip off. The pricier ones cost as much as a decent pair of hand-stitched welted leather brogues and the cheapos fall to pieces after a couple of seasons. The last pair I went through were Greys – can’t remember the model. They […]
To Oxfolds Beck on the warmest day of the year so far – 21C, bright sun and not too much breeze. This pretty spring-fed beck has been truly battered by pollution over the last few years. Intensive effort by the club with help from Fish Legal has brought about some recovery, but the water is […]