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Watch Screaming Reels on All 4! (’90s TV angling show starring Nick Fisher) One of the most entertaining, unconventional, series about fishing has to be Nick Fisher’s primetime Channel 4 show, Screaming Reels. With a format of short clips, OTT sound effects, weird visuals and fronted by a cheeky, irreverent, but ultimatley knowledgeable presenter in Nick Fisher, Screaming Reels wasn’t for everyone. I was a teenager when this show was on TV and I thought it was bloody brilliant! For context, A Passion for Angling aired on the BBC around a similar time to the first series of Screaming Reels. Like many anglers, I hold A Passion… in a league of its own as my GOAT fishing programme (although Caught In The Act has been a recent favourite). They are polar opposite series, in both style and approach, to what is essentially the same subject matter; but I can happily watch and enjoy both. In this era of online streaming services and binge-watching series box sets, Channel 4 have kindly made available all episodes of Screaming Reels series 1 & 2 to view for free; on their All 4 platform (previously “4oD”) here: http://www.channel4.com/programmes/screaming-reels/episode-guide which has given me chance to …

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This is just a quick, but very important, post. The Angling Trust is urging all anglers out there (AT members or not), to respond to an Environment Agency consultation about their “best practice guidelines” for potentially destructive and controversial Hydropower schemes. The public can add comments to the consultation without logging in to the EA website, which will help sway decisions made about future legislation imposed upon the operators of these schemes. This type of electricity-generation scheme looks set to become more widespread in the UK but through both water abstraction and the fish-mincing turbines which are driven by water flow to generate electricity, such schemes pose a massive danger to both resident and migratory fish stocks and the quality & availability of river fishing. This particular consultation focuses on setting water flow rates & abstraction limits and it’s important that angling, fish stocks and other environmental issues are given utmost consideration when setting these limits. As anglers we need to ensure that opinion swings in this direction, which is why the Angling Trust has offered advice on how to respond to the consultation, to ensure we’re all pulling in the same direction.  Please take a few minutes to read through the information and guidance on the Angling Trust website and …

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New Years resolution:  Update my blog more regularly! Three-quarters of the river season has already flown by since I last wrote, which is extremely slack of me, but hopefully there are still a few people out there interested in reading, so I’ll update on how my Summer fishing went and then I plan to do a small post on what I’ve done since (unfortunately not many fish to write about since November!), by which point I should be back in the habit of writing on here more regularly. The good news is that the fishing I did over the Summer was generally excellent!  I concentrated on a single river, the Derbyshire Derwent, and on a single species, Barbel. The regular rain certainly helped this Summer, keeping the levels topped up and keeping the barbel feeding confidently.  So many times in the past 4 or 5 seasons, I’ve heard anglers moaning – on the bank and on the internet – about the low river levels making barbel fishing difficult.  Personally, I never moaned because I still managed to find a good few fish, but I must say that sport was definitely better this season with a bit of extra water and …

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I only had time to get out fishing once between Christmas and new year.  I’d had a pike fishing itch to scratch for a while and despite conditions which were far from ideal (after the bout of mild weather and heavy rain), I decided to pike fish on the River Dove. The Dove is a spate river and therefore it’s notorious for the speed at which the level rises and colour increases. So it was to my dismay, but no surprise, that I arrived to find the river coloured and rising! I should have been barbel fishing in conditions like this but my heart was set on piking, so I had left my barbel rods at home! I stuck it out regardless and fished to the conditions as best I could, but I only got a single dropped run all day. A run I didn’t even notice at the time because my float, cast to the far bank, would only stay in the slack water if I let out a big bow of line. Not an issue in itself, however, it was an extremely blustery day and the combination of wind and the flow meant my float was constantly dancing around all …

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I really enjoy fly fishing. I don’t do enough of it, but when I get the chance to go, it’s great fun.  When it comes to using double-handed fly rods and targeting the magnificent Salmo salar, that sentence is all the more true. I’d only ever had one salmon fishing trip, which was a day and a half on the upper Tweed, almost a decade ago. I had such a great time there I’ve been wanting a follow-up session ever since. Incidentally on this trip, despite various calamities (including setting off my lifejacket inflator on a tangled cast!), I managed to land my first Atlantic Salmon, which was a very respectable 15lb in weight. The full story, which I shall one day have to tell, will inform you that despite being a complete salmon novice, I managed to land this fish alone, without a net. The angler I was fishing with had wandered a few hundred yards upstream from me and out of earshot. He had the shared net, so I had to improvise and tire the fish before beaching it and scooping it up in my arms! It was one of the proudest moments of my life! The great pretender in the …

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I managed to pick a couple of days break in the early-May rain, to fit in a 24-hour session with Shane Calton.  We visited Derbyshire’s Higham Farm Lakes and tackled up primarily for tench, but with the head of carp, bream and other species in there, we knew it would be difficult to target them solely. Higham is pretty local to me, so I used to fish this place quite regularly for the carp when I was 15 to 18, but I worked out that I have only been there once in the last 12 years! I was field testing a fair bit of Cyprinus night fishing gear, including a bivvy, a memory foam bedchair, a 3-5 season sleeping bag and a tackle barrow, which all performed superbly (Reviews on FishingMagic.com here). Before I arrived Shane had already landed a few bream in the 4-5lb bracket and as I was setting up he landed a tench of exactly 5lb, which was a very promising start. It was to be the last tench we had between us, but we each notched up carp overnight and I also had a bream and a strange fantail brown goldfish-cross thing, which I should have really taken …

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Early this year I heard about a local angling club which had been setup to open fishing on a country park lake, on Brierley Forest Park near Sutton-In-Ashfield.  This lake is within a couple of miles of both where I live and where I work, so I’d known it existed for quite some time and had heard that people would often “poach” there, because fishing wasn’t officially allowed but was turned a blind eye to.  I was really pleased to hear that a club was taking control of the lake, because one of the downsides to free, unofficial fishing is that it’s totally un-policed. Anyone could fish there, however they liked, they could leave litter, thieve fish and use questionable methods and baits without anyone to check even if they had a rod licence. Through hard work and persistence, permission was granted by the appropriate local bodies for a newly formed angling club to lease the lake and and open it up to properly managed fishing. On June 2nd 2012, Brierley Park Anglers Association* will officially open up the pond to fishing with an open day at the water, featuring various family-orientated events and who knows, maybe even a visit from one …

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This little newsflash post is soon to be followed by a fishing update, but I just have a few things of interest I thought I should share… Firstly, Carl Allman of Rio Ebro Angling, who we chose to fish the Ebro with – for zander, roach, carp and catfish – last September, acheived second place in IGFA‘s World Record Acheivement Awards, as acknowledgement of him guiding anglers to a total of 18 line class World Records during 2011 alone!  I’d like to say I was one of those anglers… but I’d be lying! Rio Ebro Angling also have a newly redesigned website (NO LONGER ACTIVE!) and I urge you to check it out if you’re thinking of venturing to foreign shores in search of fish this Summer.  There is a limit to how many bookings a single guide can take and I assure you Carl is among the best, so make your enquiries sooner rather than later. I wrote an article a little while ago, about storing and keeping worms, including lobworms and denbrobaenas (“dendras”), which is now up on my website.  If you want good, plump, fresh worms whenever you need them, without spending a fortune keeping them, take a look. I …

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To follow on from the end of my last post, I was in agony with my back.  It turned out I’d pulled some muscles down either side of my spine, around the lumbar region and for a pulled muscle, boy has it given me some grief!  It was playing havoc with all parts of my life, at work, at home, sleeping… I couldn’t even put a pair of socks on!  Worst of all it was preventing me going fishing, so something had to be done After trying various forms of pain relief, such as Voltarol, nothing was doing the trick and after all, killing the pain isn’t really getting to the source of the problem.  A friend suggested I visit a sports massage therapist for treatment and recommended Nigel Mallender’s Muscle Mend service. After the first 45 minute session last week, I felt a gradual improvement in the level of pain I felt and the range of movement in my back. Nigel showed me a routine of stretching and strengthening exercises to do each morning, which also seemed to help.  Today I had my second session and now feel no pain from my injury.  Having said that, I can feel it’s still there and I’m very wary …

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I haven’t posted a “true” blog post for a while now, I seem to have been abusing this blog and using it mainly as an interactive advertising board for other things I’ve been up to. My own fishing has been very disappointing lately (more on that later), and I turn 30 in a couple of weeks, so I’m in quite a reflective mood and thought this was an opportune time to fill in on how 2011 was for me in fishing… 2011 started off very slowly for me. A multitude of reasons have left me spending far less hours on the bank than I would have liked to, but thankfully most sessions I’ve made the most of the time I had and caught some reasonable fish. I only had chance to fit in one session before March, but then managed a couple more river sessions before the season ended.  The only fish I landed during this period were a few pike, topped off by an 18lb 13oz beauty, which I blogged about here. Once the rivers closed, my fishing mainly went on a self-induced hiatus. Buying my first home became the priority and despite ours being a relatively straight-forward purchase (so we were assured by the estate agents!), …

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