Day House on the River Lugg When booking water back in SA there was no real way of knowing which beats would be suitable particularly given that one can’t predict water levels and such. So I took pot luck balanced with some advice from clients who have fished the area as well as the […]

Gromain and Upper Llanstephan. Today’s beat was at least easy to find one of the parking areas demarcated pretty much by a suspension bridge across the river. I managed to locate that without resorting to the cell phone GPS from there was able to find the specified gate and the old railway track down which […]

Fenni Fach on the Usk.   I was most excited to be fishing the Usk having never been on this river previously it has a good reputation for some excellent brown trout fishing. The river is of moderate size but was reduced by low flows to being more than manageable from a fishing and wading […]

Grogarth  Beat # 35 of the West Country Angling Passport Scheme. This section of the Fal River one of several  rivers running into the Falmouth Estuary is one of only two West Country Passport Venues within close proximity to Truro my current base of operations. After the struggle to find the water on the Tresillian […]

Line control and playing fish. Some excellent video footage of remote fishing for large trout on social media had me all fired up. Beautiful scenery and wonderful fishing and I am not going to give the details because it may seem that I am being offensive to an angler who has put in huge […]

This post is a reproduction of an article written some time back for Fly Fishing Magazine. It is posted as a result of discussions on line with novice casters who have been struggling because they have been taught “the clock system” “Cast by moving the rod from ten to two o’clock on an imaginary clock […]

Necessity is the mother of invention that’s what I was always told as a child and I suppose that much of my life has been living proof of that adage. I regularly have to solve problems with the tools at hand. It is frequently the case that something crops up for which one was unprepared […]

aka: “The roll cast pick up” This is one of the most versatile and useful casts you will ever learn to make not perhaps technically a cast in itself but a very useful skill to master. So what is a roll cast pick up? Or perhaps we should start with “what is a roll cast”. […]

The effects of angles on torque and force or what you really need to know about physics if you are to play fish more effectively There is a little exercise that I have almost all of my clients experiment with on the river. It is a very useful one for everyone to try if you […]

Streamside Meditation – Prozac for the soul. I have recently been reading an excellent and newly released book “Lost Connections” Uncovering the real causes of anxiety and depression-and the unexpected solutions.  (Johann Hari Bloomsbury Circus Jan 18) I won’t go into the details although that may come in time. What I can do is […]

If you follow the road out of Cape Town and travel north for long enough if you wind your way over mountain passes that make your head swim and your brakes smoke. If you wend your way past dam walls and dirt roads ox s and donkeys. If you push on heading higher into the […]

Die Antwoord We have just returned from five days of fishing on the Bokong River in Lesotho. The water levels dropped each day cleared each day and the fishing got better each day although as a result the fishing equally became a tad more technical with the passing of time. On day four the “Balbyter […]

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To the fly tyer there are few things quite as exciting or for that matter daunting as the arrival of a new and as yet empty fly box. On the one hand it is a clean pallet an empty canvas on which to exercise one’s own creative spirit. On the other it is a mildly […]

“It isn’t so much a matter of feet but of inches”.. wise words from a client on a local stream trying to land a fly across a current seam between two boulders and under a tree so as to get a six inch drift drag free and close enough to a feeding fish to illicit […]

Are lead underbodies worth the effort? I remember a story from years back where a young girl asked her mother “why” whilst she was preparing for Christmas lunch “do you cut the gammon in half before cooking it Mommy?” The mother said that she had learned to cook it like this from her mother the […]

Some thoughts on our responsibilities as both anglers and people in making sustainable choices.   I can recall fishing as a youngster in the local canal a waterway that contained all manner of fish species. Carp Tench Rudd Roach Perch Bream etc.There I was rod in hand a bait of bread paste dangling under […]

Is frailty a key trigger for trout? Sometime back I published a post “The Cuckoo and the Trout” based on the genetic considerations of “super stimuli” as discussed in Richard Dawkin’s exceptional book “The selfish Gene”.. The basic premise being that some stimuli override other considerations such that in this instance a tiny […]

This is the third of a series of articles  written for Vagabond Flyfishing Magazine this one a little more detailed still and focusing on the relationship between rod flex and casting arc. You can’t escape it fly fishing is about fly casting or at least that is the starting point. So in the next […]

This is the second of a series of articles I have written for Vagabond Flyfishing Magazine this one a little more detailed and focusing on essential elements of a good cast. You can’t escape it fly fishing is about fly casting or at least that is the starting point. So in the next few […]