As I pulled in off the road it was as if nothing had changed since my last visit in November. The stroll down the hill was the same but the lake looked stark and lifeless and the strong southwesterly wind ruffled the surface as it pushed down to the dam. Now, where to fish? I…

We left my home around 8-45 am, it was around 12 noon when we stopped off at the Cherry Tree Cafe in Sudbrook on the main road between Lincoln and Horncastle which is open 7 days a week. After a fresh brew and some toast it was back on the road. Arriving on the banks…

Last year brought about a few changes in the world of angling that may benefit all of us in the future, and the hope that by the end of 1968 we will be just a bit stronger politically by becoming a unanimous and persuasive voice to those people who are supposed to listen. The opportunities…

That’s an easy one to answer but I’m not going to here and now. Instead I want to natter about the quality and type of hooks we all use. I’ll help shoot down the anti’s in another word battle elsewhere no doubt.We all use hooks but we don’t use ‘just’ hooks. Generally, for the most…

September has certainly been very dry, most rivers are down to bare bones especially in the north of England. As I have said many times, our rivers in the north of England need two good days of rain a week. I don’t feel we can have too much rain, when the rivers are carrying a…

I tend to think of groundbait as if it were a very fine particle bait; fish will feast on the individual bits as it floats around creating preoccupied feeding. One of the advantages of groundbait is that it can be used to attract hordes of small fish, which in turn attract the bigger fish, keen…

Both of my chosen target rivers, the Severn and the Ribble have been high enough to cause flooding lately. The Ribble has found its way into Ribchester town’s car park while the Severn has carried up to twenty feet of extra water at times, so for some of the time, both rivers have actually been…

I like the idea of myself as a revolutionary figure, with guns blazing, shooting down all the politicians and greedy b****s who have done so much over past decades to reduce the values of our angling pastimes, whether it be sea angling, coarse angling, or game angling. True anglers will know that I am not…

Of course, any sane angler would pale at this suggestion, but Mr Brookes was by no means insane. He wrote his treatise in 1740 and whatever you might think of his spelling or animal welfare politics now, his text set me to thinking: Why dont we use the fruits of our countryside more often? Considering…

Heavy groundbaiting is usually carried out with a large amount of breadcrumb as groundbait, either brown or white. I personally have never found any difference in either colour though brown has a more prominent smell to us as humans and there may be truth in the possibility that a carpet of white groundbait scares fish…