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

It's not often that I've had my rod pulled in - or nearly pulled in. It happened on Munky Island once on the Thames when I returned from a crafty slash to find my rod, reel and everything to do with both had just...gone. I eventually spotted the tip of the butt end poking out of the water about 20 feet downstream...

Tags: roach

I nearly bottled it. Driving back from Bucks through sheets of rain (and only a poncho in the boot because the brolly's still under Marion's bed) I just thought I'd leave it. I'd get soaked, the banks would be beyond treacherous - and recalling my last visit, well...

Tags: carp