So far I have agreed to appear on behalf of Guideline at the Glasgow Angling Centre on 5th and 6th of March and I am also appearing at the KInver Freeliners Angling Club evening on the 26th March at the community centre in Kinver, West Midlands. This event is for two or three hours and starts at eight pm I believe.

My latest fishing article, entitled ‘Gifts of the Vikings’ has been published in Trout and Salmon magazine this month. The feature assembles a collection of suoerb salmon flies designed and tied in Scandinvia. The feature includes a wealth of information about the modern style of Scandinavian flies and gives dressings for each of the featured flies. The feature has been chosen as the lead feature and also enjoys the cover slot.

I have added some new galleries to the photo section of the website and I have also added some new images to the existing galleries. The new galleries include fishing big waters, aurora and winter fishing. Hope you enjoy them!

Check out the feature pages of the site to read my heads up on becoming a star of the sport. I get hundreds of enquiries every year from parents, kids and adults whom want to know what it takes to make a living out of angling. I have tried to lay it out warts and all in this feature.

I was out with my good friend the duke last week when he informed me that he has just written and published a new book. Apparently, it’s the latest in a line of releases from Fox and goes under the banner of ‘The Mick Brown Guide to Pike and predators’ or something like that. Anyhow, I got the first copy, signed and dedicated by the old buffer and despite his advancing senility he seems to have made a good fist of it!

Seriously, this is a great book for anyone who likes predator fishing. It’s packed with rigs, tips and photos that cover the full discipline of fishing for stuff with teeth in the UK. Pike are there in plenty, as you would expect, but there’s also stuff on zander, catfish and eels.

If you are interested in purchasing an advanced copy, visit the duke’s website at www.mickbrownangling.com

 

Check out the new feature I have posted about fishing for cod in Norway. This is the perfect short break for anglers looking to experience fishing that is quite unique in one of the world’s last great wildernesses. And the best news of all is that it is less than a three hour flight away!

For those of you whom are looking for a short break with the missus with some fioshing thrown in, the North of Norway is perfect: while you fish for giant cod to over fifty pounds, the wife can enjoy some snowshoe walking, armoatherapy, massage etc., and the best part of all is that if you go in the winter you can both pop out at night to gaze at the Northern lights.

Go to the feature and follow the links to Anglewrs World Holidays – you won’t regret it! 

I’ve added a new gallery to the site of HDR images. HDR stands for high dynamic range and is a special technique that captures a vast amount of detail that is impossible to achieve in regular photography. Rather than take just one picture, to create an HDR photograph you take several pictures of the same scene at different exposures. This captures lots of detail in midtone, shadow and highlight areas that would be impossible to capture with just one image exposed for, say, the midtones or highlights. The images are then put through special software that blends all of the exposure information to create a composite with an incredible dynamic range (hence the term).

The most popular software for HDR conversion is Photomatrix. This is an easy programme to use but there are no hard and fast rules – each image has to be experimented with until you get the effect that you are happy with. Tone mapping can create images that either look like regular photos or, at the other extreme, more like hybrids between illustrations and photos.

The technique is gaining popularity and looks set to become a new art form. I’ve certainly enjoyed playing with it. 

This week I fished on Grafham trout water with the duke. With the zander in Grafham now well-established, fishing for the species at the annual lure fishing trials has taken over from pike. For the Duke and myself it was home from home stuff, the pair of us having pioneered the jig fishing/soft plastics boom that has nw swept across the UK.

With Grafham being big, windswept and deep, the fishing is challenging and on the day in question most of the boats blanked. The zander were found predominantly in forty to sixty feet of water, the method being to drift as slwoly as possible over targert areas, jigging vertically underneath the boat. 

Vertical jigging in this way takes a late of patience and concentration. A few years ago I had some lessons with Dutch jigging master, Bertus Rozemeir on a large water in the Netherlands.

When fishing in water as deep as sixty feet, only low diameter briaded lines will allow you to fish with light, sensitive jigs right under the boat: thicker lines catch the undertow and tend to get blown into a bow. Using the right rod is key too – light, specialised jig rods are the order of the day and I have great faith in a rod I bought in the states, a Loomis ‘Bronzeback.’

 

Despite the slow fishing both the duke and myself caught our fish using long, smelt-shaped plastics fished on jig heads. You can see the jig that Mick was using in the wide angle shot of him with his fish: it’s a lure from the latest range of soft plastics by Fox (soon to be launched over here). Note also the barrel-shaped jig head (also by Fox).

Vertical jigging is one of the most difficult fishing techniques to master requiring good technique and fantastic concentration. We love it!

Here’s a picture of me with a grayling caught from the Glomma river in Norway. The fish weighed around three pounds, an estimated weight based on measuring the fish from nose to fork of tail at 50 cm. A 50 cm grayling is the holy grail to fly fishers. Sadly, the shot doesen’t do the fish true justice but the capture was a very special moment.

On the day in question I was fishing with client and friend, Paul Mersh. After getting Paul set-up and teaching him the basics of nymph fishing for grayling, I rigged up a four weight with a floating line and attached a home-tied emerger mayfly pattern made entirely from snowshoe rabbit’s foot. This unusual fur is very transluscent and buoyant, making it ideal for emergers.

While attaching the fly I saw a big fish rising just a few feet out from the bank in a deep, slack pool. It was taking natural mayflies that were emerging in numbers and I simply knew by the slooping sound the fish made as it sucked the hapless insects in that it was a big one. After creeping into position on my hands and knees, I made a gentle cast and landed the fly in the rings of the previous rise to a natural mayfly.

Sweet as a nut, the fish simply rose in slow motion and sucked the fly in with total confidence. The fight, on the wand-like four weight was heart-stopping with the fish making a series of runs that set the reel spinning almost out of control. With the rod bent into a crazy hoop I finally managed to make a swipe at the fish when it sounded almost under my feet.  

I’ve caught plenty of pike over the years but this one was a little bit special. Fishing with the Duke in Norway, we found ourselves on Mjosa, the country’s biggest inland water. And when I say big I mean big! Mjosa is bigger than Lough Corrib and twice as scary.

While the above fish was caught in the daytime it was by no means typical of the other pike that we caught.

The pike in Mjosa are very unusual because they don’t behave like any other pike that either myself or the Duke have ever encountered. While some of the fish inhabited typical bays and reefs, the majority are open-water predators that lie suspended over deep water. Following huge shoals of freshwater smelt, these pike behave and hunt just like ferox trout. In the daytime they lie deep, migrating to the surface to hunt smelt at night. We caught several by trolling over deep water with shallow lures. Catching fish just a few feet down while trolling over six hundred feet of water in the middle of the night has to count as one of my most memorable and unusual angling experiences!