Just for Fun

Just for a bit of fun (but inspired 100% by arguments I've witnessed on social media), I asked AI to create me an image of the "mat police" / "unhooking mat police" / "carp police". Feel free to use the picture....

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If you were fishing in the 1980s and 1990s, John Wilson’s name was synonymous with angling; due to his various books, but predominantly due to his TV series. Go Fishing with John Wilson was the first of his TV shows, and his unique mixture of knowledge, enthusiasm and infectious laugh proved a hit with viewers – anglers and non-anglers alike! A YouTube user, Andy Creigh, has uploaded all of the original four Anglia Television series of Go Fishing – which he’s recorded from original VHS tapes – so those of us who can remember over three decades ago can relive JW’s on-screen charisma. Hopefully some younger anglers will now also see the earliest TV forays of this angling legend for the first time too. My own personal favourite episodes mainly revolve around the ones I had on VHS myself. These included: crucian and tench fishing at Diss Mere, small river barbel fishing on the Teme, fly fishing for mullet on a tributary of the Ebro, fishing for tench (but catching perch) from the dam of an old estate lake and then eventually catching tench whilst fishing in chest waders (Series 3, Episode 1 – Fishing Summer Lakes), and my all-time …

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Just before the end of the river season (and before the COVID-19 lockdown), I fished a very swollen Derbyshire Derwent for barbel. It was a slow day, but the river was visibly dropping as I was there. I stuck with it, dropping The Hook Bait Co’s Garlic Nimrod & Big Squid boilies behind trees and submerged bushes, and eventually my persistence paid off in the form of an 11lb 10oz barbel – a fine finish to my river campaing. I had an issue with my camera flash when I first attempted to take some sef-take photos of the fish (I ended up resting the fish again in the margins, whilst I sorted the camera out), and when I went through the images at home I had several blurry, reject photos. As I flicked through them it looked like I was dancing. It reminded me of the iconic Firestarter video by The Prodigy, so I decided to have a play with making a stop-motion parody of Firestarter by editing together the still photos. The above video from my YouTube channel is the result! It’s just a bit of fun. Enjoy!

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I’ve had a few strange happenings during fishing sessions this year. Such as a mystery animal sprinting towards me in the dark, straight into my legs before disappearing!  By the sound of it’s light, rhythmic scampering as it approached I’m pretty sure it was a stoat (definitely that kind of size) but I’ll never know! Then, just last week, I had a most unusual start to an evening barbel session on the Derbyshire Derwent.  I just had to write the story down for posterity! As I was walking to bait up a few spots I heard a faint bleat of a sheep, close by, but the only ones I could see where at the other end of the field.  Another bleat; that came from the river!  I looked below the sheer, high bank I was stood on and there was a sheep, completely stranded, above its armpits in water!   With a high bank one side and deep water the other, this sheep was well & truly stuck there.  There was a small ledge behind the sheep and, as I had my waders on, I thought if I could get the sheep onto that I could possibly lift it up back …

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Comin' at ya! With my 40 foot pole, I bring a lesson for young and old, I'm the superfly guy, the maggot ragamuffin, Snoop Maggie Maggot, gonna knock out ya stuffin', Whip fishin', whip fishin', that's what I do, I'm twice World Champion* I'm telling you, Groundbait, casters, maggots in ya catapult!

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This a short article I wrote for www.fishingmagic.com, expressing the magic and allure of river fishing, along with my hopes & thoughts about the upcoming river season. The magic & allure of river fishing I grew up in an area where there were plenty of ponds within cycling distance, but the nearest rivers that were fishable were just a bit too far away. No-one in my family fished, so I had nobody to introduce me to river fishing, which meant that my early angling years were spent primarily beside stillwater, rather than flowing. This gave rivers a certain mystery, as I would catch glimpses of them on school trips (Monsal Dale and Dovedale), family days out (Matlock Bath, Newark, Tissington, Bakewell) or a fleeting vision from a car (the powerful Sawley weir, from the M1). Often I would see people fishing, or spot fish in the crystal clear waters and I felt drawn to these tranquil, serpentine venues that were – for the most part – out of my reach. On the few occasions I was taken to fish a river something always seemed to happen (the ‘something’ was usually in the shape of an eel…). Whether it was catching …

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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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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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It’s now just two days until I head off with Shane and Dave for a week-long fishing trip to Spain’s River Ebro. We’ll be fishing with Carl & Angie of Rio Ebro Angling. I know, lucky barstools the lot of us! We booked the trip way back in February so there’s been plenty of time for the excitement to build on this (way overdue) installment of my specimen hunting roadshow! Between us we’ll be fishing for wels catfish, zander, carp and roach, but my personal goals are mainly the catfish and zeds. I’d like to join the Ebro “Ton Club” or better, preferably caught on a lure, although if it gets to the last day and I’m struggling I may have to resort to plan B, or as I like to refer to it, the “Charlie Boorman Plan”, (to catch one “by any means”!).  Hopefully that won’t mean going quite this far, but if my neck gets sunburnt and red and I pick up a bit of a Southern drawl, who knows!… Having never fished the Ebro before, I’d be happy to catch any zander from there. So far, this is my UK PB fish and if I could manage a double from Spain on a …

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This is another quick post from an internet café.  I’m on holiday, you see, until tomorrow, so burglars you’ve got one last chance! The house is actually the reason for both my blog-slackness and my wider angling-slackness for almost the entirity of the river closed season and beyond.  I finally took the plunge and bought my first place with my girlfriend, Jen. Needless to say, there was a lot more to the whole process than I’d anticipated… Still, I’ve finally started to get a few sessions in, which I’m pleased to say have yielded very few blanks. So far I’ve had barbel to around 9lb off the rivers and a good few carp off the surface on some local lakes too. I also took my 13 year-old cousin Fraser for his first-ever river session a week or so ago where, under my guidance, he managed to land a clonking new PB chub of 4lb 5oz on simple groundbait feeder techniques. Not a bad first river fish at all; I reckon I was 19 before I’d caught a chub of that size. The only thing was the pesky chub was very lively on the bank and every time I pressed the …

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