Among the slightly less irritating Car Insurance commercials on television, is a series featuring Paul Whitehouse – and in a couple of them we see his character fishing. Whitehouse is a very good actor (though under-rated as many comedy actors are) but even so it is pretty obvious that he is used to wielding a …
Luke Jennings is an author and the dance critic for The Observer. Having grown up in Sussex, he trained at the Rambert School of Ballet and Contemporary Dance (established by Marie Rambert in 1920) and worked for ten years as a dancer and choreographer before a back injury forced him to look elsewhere for a …
While Fishpool recently discovered that some sharks are utterly Pathetic, one species for which such an adjective could not be less accurate, is the blue. The blue shark (Prionace glauca) is a fish of temperate and tropical waters, occurring in all but the coldest seas. It is a slender bodied shark, with large pectorals and …
Ever since Issue 27 of Bits and Pieces, Fishpool has struggled to get the skimmer bream out of his or her mind. And having threatened as much, this time the bronze bream (Abramis brama) gets a well deserved mention. This is a fish maligned by many anglers, so let us recap the negative aspects first. …
Overlooking the River Torridge in North Devon is the small market town of Great Torrington. This was the final stronghold in the West Country for the Royalist army during the Civil War and home, since 1967, to the skilled glass-blowers of Dartington Crystal. A mile or two to the north you will find Great Darracott, …
Not content with the running of one of Britain’s premier angling bookshops River Reads, in 2009 Sandra Armishaw launched Angling Heritage – a not-for-profit charitable trust created to preserve angling literature, sound recordings, imagery and letters. With fishing writer and historian Fred Buller MBE as Patron, and Chris Yates, Des Taylor and Reg Talbot active …
Rising on the Woolley Moors near Bradworthy (not far from the source of the River Tamar), the River Torridge spends much of the first half of its existence flowing east. Then, having picked up a handful of tributaries including the Rivers Lew and Okement, the Torridge veers north, cutting a path deep into the bedrock …
Tucked away on the south-east coast of Cornwall, straddling the estuary of the river with which it shares a name, is the picturesque town of Looe. A derivation of the Cornish word Logh – meaning deep water inlet – Looe is renowned for the quality of its fish and the boisterousness of its New Year’s …
The otter (Lutra lutra) has seen a dramatic shift of fortune in Britain over the past few decades. Previously persecuted, their range was limited, and away from the coasts and more remote river habitats, the mammals were largely absent. In 1927, Henry Williamson published his novel Tarka the Otter: His Joyful Water-Life and Death in …
It is a rare book indeed that can relate the subject of angling to non-anglers, but Blood knots, by Luke Jennings, succeeds as well as any. The memoir is a deep, often harrowing, insight into Jennings’ life as an angler, and has richly deserved the plaudits it has gained, though few non-anglers will see the …
