RH Fly Fishing

    About nine months after our last visit, Meon Springs was showing her bones, the level appeared to be about three feet below normal; we really need some rainfall soon, especially the small streams such as the River Meon. Today was going to be sunny, cloudy intervals, and highs of 24 degrees C, an Indian summer again.   Half a dozen noobs were getting ready for some tuition, and there were another eight anglers or so spread around. Representing the Fluff Club were the Professor, Moneypenny, Foggy, Threepio, and Whytee, joined by Dodgy though not actually a member. After the first hour we were joined by Lumberjack, who had taken a diversion to Arundel on the way here, having got his Springs confused! Spreading around Whitewool the low, clear water made it easy to see where the fish were at – usually holding close to the several springs in the ‘lake’s‘ bed, enjoying the cool influx of well-oxygenated water from the chalk aquifer deep below. Foggy had gone up to Coombe ...

    Every once in a while, you see something which makes you stop in wonder. In my experience this never happens when you have a camera with you; Mother Earth knows all about this, and then gives but a glimpse, leaving an image burned onto your cranial hard drive. Two such instances were separated by several years, but happened within twenty-five feet of each other.   Weston Shore, lapped by Southampton Water, has a tiny rivulet flowing into it across the stony beach at West Wood. A shingle bank has caused it to flow parallel to the Water for about two hundred and fifty yards, deepening it in places and backing it up before it spills over and through the shingle in tiny threads out into the sea . The source of this trickle once upon a time filled three ornamental ‘lakes’ before flowing through a culvert under the road to Netley, where it has scoured out a deeper channel and a pool before turning right, into its short course to mix with the seawater. Those ‘lakes’ have j...

  Lee Wulf once said “Game fish are too valuable to only be caught once”. In current times we ought to substitute ‘Any’ for the word ‘Game’. The increasing pressures on environment and climate alike mean that, more than ever before, fisherfolk have a major obligation for the welfare of the denizens of the underwater world we share the planet with. This is not merely a case of preserving our sport, we must also recognise that recreational fishers are the key guardians of all the sub-aquatic ecosystems, because of the vested interest, and also because of our world-wide spread and presence. There have been the great thinkers and writers in our sport, whether coarse, game, or salt, (and all the other subdivisions of each). During the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries, great strides were made by anglers and their associations when the pennies finally dropped and realisation dawned that we could take the sport of fishing further, alternatively, we could bring about its total demise...

    When I walk the dogs, I head to different places so I don’t become bored, (can’t speak for the dogs though). There are several New Forest walks I like, and on this particular one, on a warm day, we made a short diversion to a ford across one of the many Forest streams. While the dogs drank and splashed about in the gravelled shallows, I saw something out of the corner of my eye. Just upstream was a dark, slow pool, tailing-out into the shallow ford, and in that pool a fish had just made a classic rise, concentric rings still spreading. I watched for a repeat, but there wasn’t one before Maya hurled herself into the pool for a swim. We continued on our circular walk, but a spark had been struck, deep in the cranium. I’d read somewhere that the New Forest streams are recorded to hold twenty different fish species, including Brown Trout and its sea-running brethren. This stream, I was pretty sure, eventually became part of the Beaulieu River (it’s pronounced ‘byou-lee’). I al...