Can I make it clear that I only write what I know about so you won’t get any advice from me about using a waggler on rivers, for example. Whilst I have had excellent advice on how to do it, notably from Bob Roberts I remember, this is not an approach where I would be […]
January 4th and I’m picking the Bomb adventure up after a few days working in Scotland but I’m happy to be home, to take the Bomb rods to their limits and back. (A bit OTT I know but I’m really fascinated to know what the design can do for us.) But what do I mean […]
To be honest, something I’m always hoping to be, I wasn’t really on board with the Bomb rod, not now, not in 2022/23. I could see that match anglers might well have a use for them but I wasn’t entirely sure that the obvious Thomas Turner Classic+ audience would find them a must have item. […]
He/she who is tired of float fishing is tired of life said some sage, perhaps Dick Walker! There are endless aspects to the float I could describe in this, the last part of this mini series. Stret pegging. River wagglers. The Lift Method. Controller floats. Antenna floats. Pole floats. Dibbler and ducker floats. Loafer floats […]
I have been lamenting that the float in general coarse angling is nearly an extinct animal but not necessarily so. This week it is trotting under the microscope and the art is absolutely alive and well down on the Test, at Broadlands, if a trip there a couple of winters back is representative. That winter’s […]
There’s no doubt that to the purist, float fishing is the preferred way to catch these superb fish and indeed the method is effective, challenging and always glamorous. Back a while, I travelled to the Trent with float maker maestro Andy Field and there we caught extraordinary numbers of barbel on 5BB floats and maggot, […]
So, after blog 2, we have the outline of how I go about things. It’s all about travelling light, fishing light and fishing where the fish are. In essence I take a rod, generally now a Thomas Turner Classic+ Avon, a reel loaded with 10lb line, pouch full of replacement hooks, SSG shot, scissors and […]
What a summer and autumn it has been down on the Wye with endless big chub and, of course, barbel. Despite what you read in the media about phosphate issues, the coarse fish are nowhere near as disturbed by them as the salmonids are. Nor did extreme heat put the fish off in the least. […]
Peter Orchard, the truly brilliant riverkeeper at Longford Estates on the Hampshire Avon, put into words what I have long been fretting about. “You know, John, I think coarse fishing as we used to know it as kids will be gone in twenty years if someone doesn’t do something about it. The magic that we […]
