INSURANCEPersonal and travel insurance is vital. Your ferry company or travel agent will be able to arrange this, but you could find cheaper and better cover through a local broker or through your own insurance agent. I use a company called Direct Travel Insurance (www.direct-travel.co.uk), a Member of the General Insurance Standards Council. They provide…

There is no short cut to getting to know a water above and below the water, the only way is to spend as much time as possible down there. It is the close season so this means we need access to the water when no one is fishing. On some waters there is no problem…

Now I want to examine in a bit more detail the mechanics of actually getting to your chosen venue. In other words, booking the correct ferry route, mastering the French road system and the unique French manner of driving which is somewhat hairy to say the least.First take a look at an example of how…

The easiest way to do this is to get a map and look for all the bits of blue on it. An Ordnance Survey map will be the best bet for this. The Landranger series is the most common and this is at 1:50,000 scale, which means that every 50,000 metres on the ground will…

The first session of the week came on a day of strong westerly winds that were cold to sit out in but in the shelter it was not too bad. I settled for the swim by the bush again as nothing could be seen in the murky margins and the pads were still yet to…

Whilst you can taste the change in the environment in April, it isn’t until May that the days stretch out and the first week or two of good weather puts in an appearance. The fishing can also be superb, and, with a multitude of species to aim for, it can be easy to become spoilt…

Despite deserving excellent mild spring conditions, all that I got was a wet afternoon clearing to cold clear skies followed after midnight by yet more rain. It all started well though as when I arrived two of the members were just packing up after a 48 hour session and one of them had caught an…

Upon my arrival the sun was shining brightly and the stroll around the banks was quite a hot one. In a sheltered bay there was a sight I had not seen since last September; carp were basking on the surface, around a dozen of them, none of any great size but they were a welcome…

At the lake this meant that the pads were slowly making an appearance and there were signs of fish everywhere. On the first session of the week the conditions were cloudy after a few hot days but with no wind there was a lovely muggy feel in the air. With no one else there I…

The bream certainly think so, and if you know of a water containing some big fish, now is probably the best chance you have of catching them. A few years ago the close season precluded fishing at this time of year for most of the country, but I can well remember tales of huge catches…