Water levels are as high as they could be, insects are starting to hatch, the fish are in and growing used to the lake conditions, and the boats will shortly be brought over from their winter quarters. However, I am looking forward to far more than trout this year.I have spoken at length with Bob…

Tim Bailey runs and organises ‘The African Angler’ and it is through Tim’s enterprise that most sport fishing anglers find themselves in the searing heat of southern Egypt. It must be emphasised from the very outset that the term safari is precisely what a fishing trip to Lake Nasser is. The environment is rugged, though…

The great advantage of floating boilies is that, like conventional boilies, they are very resistant to the attacks of smaller fish. You do not need to worry about your bait not being there on the hook. There is also the added advantage that the bait, being hard, is unlikely to come off the hook when…

This sad lack of interest is often fuelled by the perception that our organisations, in particular the National Federation of Sea Anglers is impotent in the face of commercial pressure and high finance lobbying in the halls of power. As a professional observer of events and opinions concerning the ‘Sea Angling’ industry, it is not…

Yet how many trout fishers ever read pike literature, or pike anglers read big-game articles? Very few. Perhaps they have missed something by not pooling their knowledge.I am fortunate in that I get to read everything printed in this magazine, and so sometimes I get to see connections that others perhaps might miss. If indeed…

How many articles have been written on bait over the years? Probably enough to fill several books over! Yet, for those of us who have watched fishing develop over the last twenty years there has been an amazing swing in the way bait is written about. This change in our attitude to bait has, to…

This year I started my pike fishing on September 1st on the River Trent. I had not fished the river seriously since 1989, but news that the pike had grown a bit bigger was enough to get me down there. No not thirties, but one or two over 25lbs was a considerable improvement over the…

For some reason I thought I might get to fish the last few days of the fishing season for a change. For the past three years the early morning phone call of “We’ve 30 stone of smelt, on your way mate” has served to wreck my end of season plans. Still, I cannot complain, for…

The whole thing blew up while I was working flat out. By flat out I mean 16 hour days! Not that I have to work this hard most of the year, but it just happens that my greatest workload comes when I most want to go fishing! A few people such as Eddie Turner did…

During the winter the carp are under 2 or 3 feet of ice – probably feeding very little. As the ice melts and the shallow bays start to warm up in advance of the main water body, the carp move in to first feed up and then to spawn. Because carp are warm water fish…