The Great East Cape … The Wild Trout Association Festival in Rhodes. High up in the far North Eastern corner of the Cape Province on the edge of the mountain kingdom of Lesotho sits the tiny village or Rhodes nestled in the hills of the Southern Drakensberg range. It’s an isolated spot serviced by dirt [...]

I wish I had had a better maths teacher at school it would have helped with my nymph fishing. A recent conversation with Ian Cox at the WTA trout festival got me to thinking more about something I have been considering in simple terms for some time. We were discussing weighting of flies and [...]

On the Twelfth day of Christmas my true love sent to me: Twelve hatches hatching Eleven rainbows rising Ten trout a-leaping Nine mayflies dancing Eight Spinners falling Seven nymphs a-swimming Six caddis laying Five dimpling rings Four black bass Three large fish Two careful casts And a Brown Trout on a dry fly. I [...]

The stuff of dreams or nightmares. When you close your eyes at night do you dream of a fish? I mean a particular fish which haunts your slumbers thoughts of which perhaps awake you with a furrowed and sweated brow. A fish which occasionally glints in the sunlight of your subconscious mind and fades into [...]

The more things change the more they stay the same. Or how to call a spade a shovel. Odd how things happen a few days ago I was on the water with a beginner fly angler; at least I knew he was a novice and more to the point so did he. We had done [...]

There are a couple of near all-encompassing activities for the fly angler outside of the simple fiddling at the fly tying vice or casting over a river somewhere. They equate to things like “painting the Forth Bridge” “Home maintenance” or “Mowing the Lawn”. Endless pursuits absorbers of time and effort offering temporary reward and [...]

An interesting little hypothesis: It is an annoyingly common complaint I suppose you set about doing something that you love for a living and then find that you don’t actually get to do too much of it as a result. Fly fishing guiding is no doubt one of those enterprises which on the surface provides [...]

The Wrong Trousers. I love Wallace and Grommet the attention to detail in their films is simply incredible and as a fly angler one recognises that attention to detail can be all important.  A recent review of their movie “The Wrong Trousers” got me thinking the simplest little things can make the biggest difference in [...]

“Sometimes I sits and thinks and sometimes I just sits”. There is wisdom in the classic quotation from AA Milne the man who brought us all the joyous tales of Winnie-the-Pooh:. Just sitting is something of a lost art it seems in this pressurised and hurried life we lead that one should be “doing [...]

A barbed comment: I recall an episode from my youth the only time I ever received any formal fly fishing tuition a weekend at the Arundell Arms in Lifton in Devon. The hotel is renowned for its fishing fly fishing courses and is surrounded by numerous trout sea trout and salmon rivers. I was only [...]

This week up until March 9th is the Annual Smashwords “Read an eBook promotion” providing people with the option of downloading books of all types from fiction to non fiction at discount prices. There are loads of books even free ones to suit every taste and if you are new to electronic books the promotion [...]

Ten lessons from tiny trout. I recently spent ten days in Rhodes it isn’t exactly the same as “Seven Years in Tibet” but probably closer than you may imagine. The place could be the “Centre of the Universe” but you are hard pressed to find: bread deodorant or even a pack of smokes on some [...]