The Short Version
Fishing Haunts :
My favourite fishing haunts in wild places and what they mean to me.
Many will be in the highlands and islands of Scotland but there will also be posts on the great western loughs of Ireland, the rivers of Wales and from farther afield such as the stunning Walls of Jerusalem plateau in Tasmania.
Musings and Anecdotes:
Random, hopefully warm jottings on our cherished pastime drawn from a lifetime of casting a fly in some very special places.
To give a flavour of what’s to come my first article covers the pleasures of a bit of harmless poaching with the next exploring my year of humiliation as a conscripted member of the Army fly fishing team.
Our Issues:
This bit isn’t so gentle.
My thoughts on the environmental issues that face us and the cataclysmic effects on our sport and the declining stocks of our quarry.
There maybe a tendency to rant at times here but what I’m really trying to do is raise the issues, provoke some thought and hopefully do my tiny little bit to poke people into some action.
Because whatever we are doing now just isn’t working.
When :
Hopefully aiming to post something new every second Friday
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The Long Version
I’ve always wanted to write or at least thought that I did.
But when you try it’s hard. For all the effort you know the chances of it being read are vanishingly small. Then there’s the mechanics of getting the words into a structure or finding a tricksy turn of phrase, but when you really give it a go, a proper go, you quickly understand that to be worth the effort, it has to be more.
I am at the extreme end of introversion and to write anything meaningful with any merit or worth it soon becomes clear that you have to show something of yourself, your passions, your frustrations and for me that’s not easy.
I don’t know what I’ve written, is it a blog, a collection of essays or a hidden diary for my children to discover sometime after I’ve taken my last cast. It started as a fairly straightforward fishing diary with a few detours but the more I wrote the angrier I got so there are diversions into the various environmental catastrophes that we are suffering.
Let me explain. For me fishing is about spending time in unspoilt wild places immersed in timeless, unadorned nature with hopefully just an old clinker boat, a dry stone wall or perhaps a rusting sheep fence being the only imprint of man on the landscape.
But now no matter how far north or west I travel in these islands I can no longer find such a place. We’ve allowed salmon farms to destroy the north and west coast sea trout stocks, the great fly hatches of Caithness’s Watten and Kinross’s Leven have been decimated, my local rivers of the Wye and Usk run green with phosphates and so I could go on ……….
So I often sit at my desk seething, a bubbling magna of frustrations occasionally spilling onto the page.
But it’s not all like that, mostly I’ve revisited my favourite places and the pleasure they have given me.
So to everybody or possibly nobody who reads this please be patient I’m sure some of the early stuff is a bit clunky but hopefully it will improve with practice.
These things should always have a dedication.
To my constant companions :
Tess
Tash
Lexi