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 […]
To the wild, top section of the Seven on Spaunton Moor on a chilly May morning but with no rain predicted. We’d had virtually non-stop rain two days ago but the water was eminently fishable, containing just a hint of copper. My plan was to give the spiders another outing, so I tackled up the […]
To the lowest beat of the Seven for the first time this season. This stretch is probably the least interesting of the club’s waters in terms of features. Mostly it’s pretty slow-flowing, with the odd little riffle and the deeper weir pool. But there are some good fish here and on its day sport can […]
A spot of unexpected sunshine, so after dropping number 1 daughter at Leeds Bradford airport for a hen do in Nice I sped across to Pickering to see if the fish were moving. The temperature had dropped, only about 11C, but the water looked bonny enough: I tackled up the Hardy Marquis 7ft 3wt with […]
With rain predicted over the next few days I thought I’d make the most of the sunshine and nipped up to the top beat of the Seven at Spaunton Moor. It looked like it should be a good day, with temperatures due to rise to around 15C, and only a gentle breeze from the east. […]