About me

I am a licensed, qualified fly fishing instructor.

I hold:-  
an emergency first aid certificate,
a Good Practice and Child Protection Certificate,
have Criminal Records Bureau clearance
have public liability insurance
am a member of The Game Angling Instructors Association.                                                  A.P.G.A.I qualified

I am also a member of :-
The Salmon and Trout Association.
The Wild Tout Trust.
The Invicta Fly Fishing Club.
The International Game Fish Association.
The Billfish Association.
The British Fly Casting Club (and 65 yard club)  

Game fishing was hard to find while growing up in Cambridgeshire and I didn’t catch my first trout until April 1967. Up until then I fly fished for coarse fish on the slow fenland rivers and dykes. I suppose for me, the boom in stillwater trout fishing began with the opening of Grafham in July 1966. It was also here that my interest in distance casting started, which then led to an interest in competitive casting.
  I won my first competition in 1977. A year later I won the trout distance event at the C.L.A. Game Fair and in fact won the event for three consecutive years. After further successes, I rather withdrew from casting events in the mid eighties but recently took it up again with the emergence of the B.F.C.C.
 
 
 
 After I “retired” from casting, I began to concentrate a little more on my fly fishing and qualified for the English Fly Fishing team. This meant international loch style matches on both Lough Conn, and later Llyn Trawsfynedd. I practiced my river trout fishing, something of a rare beast in East Anglia, and finished 8th in the inaugural National Rivers Final on the River Wharfe in 1990.
   It was about this time that I became fascinated with fly fishing for sailfish, and still am. 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 54 lb sailfish taken on an 8 lb tippet still stands as a Kenyan record. In 1996 I came 5th in a competition that probably had the longest title ever, The Billy Pate International Invitational Billfish on Fly Tournament !
   My modest success with sailfish enabled me to write my first book which was simply a “how to catch” book as there wasn’t really anything available on the market at that time. Flyfishing for Sailfish, (ISBN 095851024) is still available today from Coch-y-Bonddu books.
   I also write the occasional articles which have appeared in magazines such as, Trout and Salmon, British Sportfisherman, 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 fly fishing experience, and have been lucky enough to catch many species on fly from countries such as, the Azores, Bahamas, B.C., Costa Rica, France, Florida, Grenada, Guatemala, Kenya, Mauritius, Seychelles, Tobago, and the U.K.