Any angler worth his salt knows never to allow probability to detract from possibility – no matter how overwhelming. To this end, John Bickerdyke was something of a 19th Century Jeremy Wade. He was far from gullible, and more often intent to disprove rather than corroborate, but his angling travels provided a wealth of extraordinary …
President of The Barbel Society and author of The Fighting Barbel, it is the bewhiskered ‘River Prince’ that Peter Wheat is most often associated. In truth though, he is rather adept at all forms of fishing and has a back catalogue to prove it. With The Observer, he penned books covering coarse, sea and fly, …
The poor old minnow (Phoxinus phoxinus) has an unenviable life. Everywhere he swims he finds something that wants to eat him. Even when fully grown he’ll make a meal for a ruffe, and pike a thousand times his size will make a tic-tac size snack out of him. There is danger from above, with kingfishers, …
Imagine the picture of Miss Ballantyne with her record 64lb salmon. Now consider a fish twice as big – that hasn’t nipped off downstream to get fat on a seafood diet. Surely no such Salmonidae exists? Well, maybe not in the Tay but in the rivers of Russia and Mongolia swims a true giant. The …
It is May, and for many a trout angler a time to wait for the evening sky to fill with clouds. A mayfly hatch is not only a stunning spectacle, it represents a time when even the crappiest caster can catch a fish. The mayfly (Ephemera danica) has an extraordinary lifecycle. The naiad, or nymph, …
As the mayfly clouds billow, particularly across the southern streams, and the swallows and martins fill their beaks, the sharper eyed angler might notice a larger bird swooping among them. The hobby (Falco subbuteo) is our most graceful falcon. It winters in Africa and follows the hirundine migration north, and over the last half century …
Probably the most famous trout stream in the world, the Test is also surely the most exclusive. From its source in Ashe, just east of Overton, the Test curves a forty mile route through Hampshire, sparkling across the chalk and gravel. The natural stock of brown trout, salmon and sea trout are supplemented by reared …
Having spent an afternoon fishing a mayfly hatch in the River Test, with hobbies diving around your ears, the only decent thing to do is find a riverside pub. The Mayfly, at Fullerton tends to get busy, especially on a sunny weekend, but with good reason. The location is dreamy. The inside of the pub …
…a lovely new publication ‘Fallon’s Angler’ which describes itself as ‘a medley of piscatorial prose’ and with contributors like Chris Yates this… has got to be worth following
‘Exploring a little London River’ – good read. From the world of Twitter.
Anyone who read Issue One of Fallon’s angler will have been inspired/bemused/terrified of Dom Garnett’s after dark exploits in Torquay. To recap, Dom penned a rather brilliant piece about squid fishing, and one of the most fascinating aspects was the type of lures he used. Though the body resembled that of a standard lure (imitating …
A study published in Theoretical Ecology earlier this Spring suggests that invasive species find a foothold in new ecosystems by hanging out at familiar landmarks. Species such as the Asian carp, when finding themselves in a new environment, will seek out spots that look different, in the hope that a potential mate will have the …
