The first review for Fish & Fly was on Ed Mitchell’s book “Fly Rodding the Coast” published in 1995. The second is a book published in 2001 and is an excellent reference to fly fishing for specific species, namely Striped Bass, Bonito, Albacore and Bluefish. The methods and techniques you adopt for the Striped Bass are similar to Atlantic Bass and his reference to understanding what is termed “Edges” or areas of transition are an invaluable tool when deciding when to put time into a new area of water – whether you are working the Connecticut coastline or walking the strands in West Sussex you will be staggered by the synergies between our foreshores.
_______________________________________________________________

When I first started chasing Bass around on the West Sussex coastline the one barrier I had was getting hold of the correct information, after all the sea is a big place and putting a fly in the middle of it seems to be more of a game of chance than certain probability.

Justin Anwyl reviews "Fly Rodding the Coast" by east coast USA guru Ed Mitchell.

_______________________________________________________________

This large format book (A4 size pages) is certainly a visual feast with some 230 colour photographs. It is the first in a planned series of five volumes which will showcase the talents of 100 fly tiers from around the world.

__________________________________________________________________

Fish & Fly team member Terry Lawton gives us the lowdown on a book and DVD set from USA guru Lefty Kreh all about "Fishing Knots, Proven to Work for Light Tackle & Fly Fishing" and available from our Amazon store.

In this weeks 'Word', John Bailey explains his pleasure at refinding a book he thought lost and the important messages it contained which are perhaps more true today than ever.

Former keeper on the River Itchen at Martyr Worthy, Ron Holloway tells of his life on the river and of the life of his river!

From the books press release - "This book is not a ‘how to fish’ book. It is a story about a chalk stream river by a professional riverkeeper who has spent 30 years maintaining the self-sustaining wild brown trout beat of the Upper River Itchen at Martyr Worthy in Hampshire.
From the last ice age to the present day an informative picture is painted of the river’s heritage, development, management, land use practices, man’s influence upon the river, what a chalk stream is and how it works."

It’s not often, in my experience, that fishing and novels make easy partners. I don’t quite know why it is: perhaps writers who fish get overly carried away with the fishing and forget to write. Or perhaps fishing is so intensely personal it doesn’t translate well into novel form. But you could say love is pretty personal and there seems to be plenty of successful books about that. Or then again, you could, if you were cynical enough, say that all fishing literature is to some degree fiction. But I won’t go there.

In Praise of the Ultimate River

For centuries chalkstreams have inspired infatuation. All the qualities of a spring-fed river – constant, equable, cool, fertile – are magnified in a chalkstream. A sickle-shape of chalk downland that runs from Normandy to Yorkshire, gives birth to over a hundred of the most perfect rivers for large and fussy trout. Chalkstream is an anthology of writing that celebrates these rivers, their geology, their history, their trout and their fly fishing.

Written by Charles Rangeley-Wilson, now better known as the Accidental Angler after his recent tv series.