Fishing UK Specialist Angler & Angling Writer, Andrew Kennedy | Pike Perch Barbel Carp Lure Coarse British angler writing about fishing and specialist angling

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 …

Read More »

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 …

Read More »

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 …

Read More »