Naturally with anything new or foreign there was terrific opposition to hemp leading to various bans. Stories of hemp drugging fish were still very common when I first started using the bait in the late 1950’s.When I started trotting the Thames with hempseed, I would buy a shillings worth of mixed cooked hemp with a…

Although many game anglers tie their own flies, very few bother to make their own fly rods. I find this odd as it takes far more skill to tie a good fly than to make a fly rod. It is therefore my intention to show readers how easy it is to make a fly rod…

After my Father died when I was just 6 my angling education was taken up by my great-grandfather. The family had moved to Theale – a village 5 miles west of Reading in the Kennet valley. Grandad had lived in the village all his life and had been the village Bobby for a number of…

This picture is not really surprising since the river trout of Scotland have long been overshadowed by their apparently more glamorous counterparts, the salmon. In the glory days when migratory fish were prolific, trout were regarded as low status fish, at best a lesser substitute for the table should no salmon be caught, and at…

In Part One I explained how over the period of a couple of years of pike fishing on the River Frome I adopted and developed the technique of wobbling deadbaits. The aim was to provide a mobile alternative to lure fishing, using an attractive bait which also has good hooking properties. However, a change of…

I first visited Woldale on a beautiful spring day in the May of 1963. Dick Walker, generous man that he was , had provided me with a letter of introduction to Maurice Ingham, now head of the Woldale Syndicate.

I think we have to go back to the turn of the last century to try and get a handle on things, certainly before the Industrial Revolution the River was full of fish, of course in those days it was much different to what it is today. By this I mean it was a natural…

So what does that tell you? Simply that they have moved inshore to the feed-rich sandbanks to feed up and build their strength up for their Summer-long sojourn in the sunshine. If there is a ‘duffers fortnight’ in sea fishing, this is it. Sometimes catches of a hundred fish a boat are not unusual on…

In the November edition of the site I have written an article about winter carp fishing and all the ups and downs that go with it. So with a free week to write I thought I’d bore you silly with another of those stories from the past when carp fishing was done by the idiots…

Anglian Waters report 26/04/02 Rutland Water The best fish of the week fell to Richard Wightman from Mill Lane, Usk. Richard took a corking 9lb 5oz rainbow on a floating line and black buzzer. Gold season ticket holder Pete Bills from Papplewick, Nottingham, a Rutland Water regular, took a super 6lb 4oz brown while fishing…