That is a big question and even experienced anglers do not always get it right. A good idea is to go to a beach at the bottom of a Spring tide and take a small notebook with you so that you can make entries concerning sandbars that are going to break the surf and make…

Pages of dire warnings about all the nasty things that can happen if you do not take the advised precautions or use the advertised lotions and potions. I am of a generation which did not have the advantage of all these hi-tech sun creams or the knowledge that inspired them. I know of people who…

Shark are the product of aeons of evolution – those deadly creatures were truly primeval predators on the prowl, following the scent slick of our rubby dubby bags up the tide – sniffing out the opportunity of a free lunch! The free lunch consisted of a whole mackerel bait concealing a 12/0 Mustad Sea Master…

If you coil these heavyweight traces and stow them in a regular size rig wallet, by the time you are ready to use them, they will be set like a high tensile clockspring, awkward to use and ready to tangle in an instant.Believe me it is so much easier to hang these traces from a…

There is one essential fact that you need to know about fishing a deep sunk wreck for a big black conger eel, that fact is that your bait has to be on the bottom!! A few feet up and you are wasting your time. So the rig has to be capable of handling a heavy…

It was a wild, desolate and beautiful place. Acres of rocks, kelp and bladder-wrack interspersed with spits of shingle and sand. Rushing green slides of clear tidal water ran like rivers in flood between boulders of granite, all of it stretching away towards the horizon. A place of currents, washed out shells, where a myriad…

We are trolling slowly homewards at the end of Major and Mrs. Bruce Kinloch’s two-day charter. It has been both a celebration of fifty years of marriage, and a quest to find a blue marlin for the Major, who – despite some forty years of service on the African coast in various civil positions –…

I cast a crab pattern dropping it quietly some two feet in front of the feeding fish. The bone moved forward. I lifted the rod tip giving some movement to the crab, the bone moved forward engulfing my crab pattern. I tightened into a good fish. For a second or two nothing moved. Suddenly the…

Knots are quite important to fishermen of course – except to those for whom they fail in such a continuous manner so as to lead a person to believe it is normal for fish to be lost in this way, and darn it, why the hell are they so unlucky ?! Personally, and thankfully (or…

Saturday, 16th. Nigel and Jenny are aboard in the midst of a steady blue marlin bite. We have gone 7 for 11 in the previous week, and two of the fish that came off should have been ours too. One disappeared after dragging a Penn 130 around behind a fender in the midst of an…