It can be a frustrating sport of ours, this fishing. There’s just so much to it isn’t there? No other sport can compare with angling for variety, and there lies the problem; so many fish and so little time. The way we cope with it is to specialise of course, whether sea, game or coarse,…

Pick Your Spot – With Care It’s very tempting to stick with what you know but this is something I have always found very hard to do. Every season I like to spend some time searching out new waters, most of them turn out to be duck eggs but now and again this approach turns…

Trolling Trolling is a huge subject, far too big to be covered in depth here, but I will attempt to go through the basics and leave the reader to find the many “wrinkles” for himself. It is a method which many people tend to use if they are fishing a water for the first time….

As August turned to September and the nights began to draw in, my son, Joe and I went in search of new swims where we might catch that PB barbel. Last month I described a number of swims we had fished where I expected there to be barbel and we were not disappointed. All of…

Boat fishing is something of a mystery to many anglers. Most would agree that the ability to get afloat can pay dividends and yet very few anglers actually take the plunge and give it a go. Those that do fall mainly into two categories; the experienced boater who’s learned the art of boat fishing the…

Some of the advantages offered by using a boat are fairly obvious while others are a little more subtle. Lets take a look at a few of them. Distance Ever sat blanking on a big water while watching shoals of fish turning over well out of casting range? I know I have, lots of times….

I can’t even remember the name of the pub on Achill Island, in County Mayo, where I heard a phrase in Irish : ‘Ronnoch mor’ but I’m sure it was uttered by a big, red-faced, 60-ish commercial fisherman called Mangan. I asked him what it meant and he said, “The great mackerel”. Now at the…

This one starts in New York, in the Time Life building on Sixth Avenue. I’d just got back from a six-week grind covering the 1990 World Cup in Italy, during which about 90% of the games were mind-numbingly boring – like, in fact, most football games. (My genes are rugby-orientated: down my way we call…

Now I wouldn’t go as far as that these days – not in Scotland anyway. But whenever I’ve been lucky enough to fish the Varzuga or the Ponoi in Russia’s Kola and hit one of those spells when I’m hooking 20 fish a day, I’ve felt that those old aristos had a point. Because the…

Away back in the early summer this year, Kevin, Michael and myself had come to a decision: we needed help from a really well-seasoned rod-and-line tuna fisherman. We weren’t so much worried over how to fight a big fish – I myself, for instance, had spent half my life chasing big saltwater fish, the marlin…