SATURDAY21st October 2000

Personally I love to introduce newcomers to my favourite sport as I get a lot of satisfaction out of seeing them do battle with their first ever fish. I recently got a friend of mine’s lad into fishing and he loves it. What was interesting was that he got probably more enjoyment out of catching…

Back in the 1950s when I was a little kid, perch were the most common species for small budding anglers to catch. We wanted to catch roach but roach were slow off the mark to take our baits compared to the voracious stripy. Perhaps if we had used bread as our favourite bait we might…

A quick look in my local newsagents reveals around a dozen. I reckon that with the internet and regional magazines there are probably over thirty. That is around four hundred articles each month, something like FIVE MILLION words each year! Add to that catch reports, match reports, venue guides, editorial, and all the other bits…

The massive cod catches from Dungeness beach in Kent back in the 1960’s were the catalyst that spawned the dramatic development in surf fishing tackle and casting techniques that we witnessed through the 70’s and 80’s. Modified tackle and the pendulum cast gave us the ability to put big baits out well over 100-metres into…

What I have never been able to understand is the mass killing of grayling that took place in the past on some of our rivers where they were treated as vermin, it was certainly a very backward attitude. Now some of these same streams where grayling were considered vermin are nothing more than put and…

This nymph is ultra fast sinking as it has a high density tungsten bead head. Bill playing a grayling on a tungsten fly Bill with a 2lb l5oz grayling on a tungsten pattern Tungsten, for it’s size, is much heavier than the more common brass type alloys used in gold bead patterns. This makes this…