Stastny Novy Rok to you all – (Happy New Year). Have spent the holidays in Slovakia visiting Lucias family. With daytime temperatures of minus 5 and dropping to minus 20 at night, i thought it wise to leave the fishing gear at home. The fishing during the summer months can be fantastic but the season […]
Author Archives: Mike Duddy
Its a fact of life that canoeists and anglers often don’t rub along well together. Anglers who pay for the privilege of accessing the riverbanks are regularly disgruntled by the fact that canoeists often flout the law and float down our waterways without a care for who owns or maintains them.Many angling organisations expend huge […]
I love a good coincidence story. When i started my Salmon quest back in September the water levels on the Ribble were high. I lost more than a few flying C’s on my first couple of trips but always had a hunch that i might be able to recover them. I’m happy to tell you […]
One of the many things in life I take great pleasure form is reading a good book. Having been blessed with a rather skittish mind, I find deep analytical thought something best left to others. The study of Philosophy is an area that I could never make any significant contribution, however I am more than […]
Today i competed in my first fishing match for 23 years!As a regular reader of the maggotdrowners forum, i decided to go along to their Xmas fur and feather match to enjoy the banter and to put faces to names of people i have been swapping messages with over the last 12 months.The match was […]
After a week of hard frosts, i wasn’t overly optimistic about my chances on the Irwell this afternoon. I chose to fish a city centre swim thinking that the roach might have shoaled up in the deeper water. The city centre has produced 60lb bags of roach during the past few winters for those brave […]
Retiarius recently recommended i take a look at a website which allows you to read pdf’s of old books. Using the sites search facility I found an old tome called an Anglers’ Evening compiled by the Manchester Angling Association, printed in 1879 which had a chapter about my favourite river the Irwell. Using the dark […]
As the seasonal clock slowly turns bringing about colder shorter days, catching fish becomes much harder. On the other hand the cold weather can bring about climatic conditions which can make the fishing of secondary importance to the unique changes to the scenery. Except maybe a dewy morning in early June when can a spiders […]
A sharp overnight frost wasn’t going to make fishing easy today. I decided to have a few hours on the Ship Canal in the hope that the fish might be more active in the deeper water. I was wrong.I fished chopped worm and caster using an open end feeder in about 20 feet of water. […]
This year, i have learnt how effective gold ribbed hares ear flies are on my local river, so now that i am learning to make my own flies, its only natural that i am going attempt to make this pattern. I bought most of the materials necessary to make this fly when i bought my […]