Chris McCully

Fishing - Nullus magnus malus piscis

Swedish grayling Over the past couple of years (2006-07) I've been lucky enough to make angling visits to Sweden, Denmark, Ireland and the UK. In Sweden, up in the far north, I've stayed at Lainio, where there's river fishing for grayling, trout and pike together with some splendid stillwater pike fishing. The grayling I've had from the river have almost invariably come to Gold-head Hare's Ears (sizes 14-16). The shot shows one of them - a fish of around 14ozs. that took late on a dripping wet August evening with the river running two feet above normal summer levels.

What interests me greatly about the grayling fishing in Lapland is the bare possibility of catching some of the gigantic grayling (4lbs. and upwards) that certainly live in the rivers. These grayling are (highly) predatory, and I often wonder about how to get at them using fly-fishing gear - large streamers? Modified Czech-'nymphing' style?

I'm attaching a link to a small piece I wrote about Lapland grayling which appeared in the Journal of the Grayling Society in 2006.

laplandgrayling.doc

Pike streamers Ireland.... Well, what do you say? In the past two years I've fly-fished in Leitrim for pike and travelled to Connemara and south Mayo in search of salmon and sea-trout.

Under this tab I'm attaching a pike-fishing piece (unpublished), and hope you enjoy it.

Pike on the fly

Sea trout from Glenicmurrin In 2007, together with the angler and photographer Rod Calbrade, I made a week-log trip to the Irish west in search of salmon and sea-trout. The trip eventually emerged as four linked feature articles in Trout and Salmon. Under this tab I'll place one of those articles - for the others, please get hold of T&S: you won't regret it (and I get nothing for that puff, not even a free copy....)

Judges_and_lords.doc

The polder Until 2007 I kept a boat at Vinkeveen, where over the period 2002-07, and together with my fishing partner Benno, we caught many pike, to all methods, and the occasional zander. Vinkeveen is one of the few waters in the Netherlands where a 30lb. pike is a realistic possibility (my own biggest to date was 118cm), and a 40lb. fish may just be on the cards.

During the early part of the pike season, and then again in early autumn, our favourite method was to use jerkbaits or big streamers, while in the colder months we used softbaits or trolled deadbaits (though we didn't use the last very often). The shot shows one of Benno's pike (around 80cm., on a re-rigged Buster Jerk) taken in 2007.

Under this tab I'm attaching a relevant chapter from The structure of pike lures, a manuscript which I re-wrote over the period 2006-07 and which now lies on the desk of an eminent angling publisher.....

Something about jerkbaits

No Text 'Polder' in Dutch is an area of drained farmland. Many of the canals left behind by the polderisation, as it were, could have been designed with the fly-fishing pike angler in mind. Some of my weekly fishing takes place in the Dutch polders, where I learned to catch pike on streamers, even in the bitterest winter months.

What I love about this form of (pike) fishing is its simplicity, even its apparent timelessness.

In_praise_of_polders.doc

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