About Us

River Piddle Brownie
River Piddle Brownie

Qualifications

  • Level 2 UKCC certificate to coach game angling.
  • GAIC game angling instructors certificate.
  • L20 City and Guilds assessment qualification.
  • APGAI Advanced Professional Game Angling Instructor certificate.

I also have :-

  • An emergency first aid certificate,

  • A Good Practice and Child Protection Certificate,

  • Criminal Records Bureau clearance,

  • Public liability insurance.

I am also a member of :-
  • The Game Angling Instructors Association
  • The Salmon and Trout Association
  • The Wild Trout Trust
  • The Invicta Fly Fishing Club
  • The International Game Fish Association
  • The British Fly Casting Club
  • I am also a GAIA Mentor and an Assessor.

Game fishing was hard to find while growing up in Cambridgeshire and I didnt catch my first trout until April 1967. Up until then I fly fished for coarse fish in the slow fenland rivers and dykes.

I suppose for me, the boom in stillwater trout fishing began with the opening of Grafham in July 1967. It was also there that my interest in distance casting started, which then led to an interest in competitive casting.

Cutthroat Trout
Cutthroat Trout

I won my first casting competition in 1977 and a year later won the trout distance event at the C.L.A Game Fair and went on to win that competition for three consecutive years. In the 1980’s I rather withdrew form casting events until the emergence of the B.F.C.C. and now hold six distance casting records.

During that time I began to concentrate more on fishing and qualified for the English fly fishing team and fished a couple of times on Lough Conn and Lynn Trawsfynedd. I also practiced my river trout fishing, something of a rare beast in Cambridgeshire, and finished 8th in the first ever National rivers final on the Wharfe in 1990.

It was about this time that I became fascinated with fly fishing for sailfish. I was a winning team member of the Kenyan billfish on fly tournament four times and held the individual title in ’94 and ’98. My 54lb sailfish taken on an 8lb tippet still holds the Kenyan record for that line class.

My modest success with sailfish enabled me to write my first book which was simply a ” how to catch ” book as there wasnt really anything else available on the market at that time. Flyfishing for Sailfish (ISBN 095851024) is still available from Coch-y-Bonddu books. I also write the occasional articles which have appeared in magazines such as Trout and Salmon, Fly Fishing and Fly Tying and Waterlog.

It is very difficult to write about oneself without appearing to be a Smart Alec know all. What I am trying to show is that I have a wide range of flyfishing experience, and have been lucky enough to catch a huge variety of species of fish from places such as the Azores, Antigua, Bahamas ( Exuma, Andros, Long and Cat Islands), B.V.I, British Columbia, Costa Rica, Croatia, France, Fiji, Florida, Guatamala, Kenya, Mauritius, Mexico, NY, Seychelles, Slovenia, Tobago, and of course all over the U.K.