Before moving on to the main business of this entry - that lovely looking common further down the page - indulge me for a moment and turn your attention to the first photograph. Not to the lake shimmering in the April sunlight (though that is a fine sight) nor to the rod (a 12ft Conoflex as it happens, swapped for a Psion Series 5 with the angling writer and photographer Henry Gilbey) nor the reel (out of sight, but a solid TFG Gear centrepin, stocked with Maxima 6lb line) but to the rod rest. 

Tags: carp

Rustiness doesn't even come close. I'm looking at things in the cupboard that are like alien artifacts. Long, slim items, smaller ones that looks like Call The Midwife bicycle baskets, others that are metallic and knobbly, heavy but without apparent purpose. I turn on the light. Hmmm, that looks like a rad. No, a rid. Ahh, I know what it is - it's a rudd. Wait a minute...All this by way of saying that with lockdown (and bubbling with our first grandson and family) I've not bothered any fish since last November. Actually, come to think of it I came home with a dry net then and the time before that. And the time before that. 

Tags: tench

Despite the startling lack of activity on these pages in recent months...nay, years...I've actually been fishing more often since the pandemic struck than I have in the last 10 years. It's a funny business, writing about fishing...

Tags: angling, bream, carp, chub, gudgeon, perch, rudd

Carp photos? What do you take me for?

Tags: carp

Sometimes it feels as though the rain has settled in for the summer. It’s had a good look round (the wettest April to June since records began) and likes what it sees, so it’s hunkered down and is here for the duration.

Tags: perch, pike, roach, rudd

Hmm, I appear to have let things slip again, so this time around I'm going to introduce a new feature into the blog - the multiple entry. This will allow me to squeeze the last four trips into a single, coherent whole thus saving you the reader and me, the author time and effort. Everybody wins...

Tags: tench

My wife asked my this morning how fast carp swim. Seriously. I love that woman. I'd been talking about the wild carp (or near as dammit wild carp - lean, little torpedoes that look more like barbel than carp) in a local lake that I hadn't fished for years. I'd forgotten what they were like...

Tags: carp

It's nights like these that I feel extremely fortunate to be living here and now. There's enough wrong with England in the 21st century - this spiteful government for starters - that it's easy to forget places like this still exist, pretty much on your doorstep...

Tags: carp, tench

It's good to be fishing with Ray again, even if we don't arrive at the same time and don't even sit together, and it feels to get re-acquainted here, at the little lake where we started fishing at this club all those years ago. June the 16th it was...

Tags: tench

Sometimes it doesn't take much to sum up a fishing trip. There's always the temptation to over-think or over-write what's gone on, but usually the fewer words you use, the better...

Tags: blank