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Well, that's me to the right, looking serious. I'm now retired, so have plenty of time for fishing and my local fishery is Loxley Fisheries near Sheffield, a venue with carp, chub, barbel and the usual population of silverfish.

It looks like maintaining this website will be a time consuming activity but, hopefully, it will become less demanding once the initial groundwork has been accomplished.

While on the subject of this website I would like to take the opportunity to invite anglers to submit articles for inclusion within the site. Articles can be on just about anything to do with coarse fishing. If you are interested in becoming a contributor please click here to go to the contributions page.

As anyone who has run a website will know, there are costs involved. This is the reason for the advertisements and eShop - to offset costs. There are some great bargains to be had in the Amazon shop, especially in the DVD and books categories. I hope you will grab something interesting and support the continued existence of this site at the same time.

My father introduced me to fishing when I was about eight years old. I am now, as of 2007, sixty-two years old. How fishing has changed in those fifty odd years is astounding. There is simply no comparison between the way we used to fish and the way we fish today.

As a child I was the proud owner of a split cane fishing rod, a wicker basket (the antecedent of today's continental seat boxes), a centre-pin reel and various designs of cork and quill floats.

We would sit on the bank all day and often catch nothing, sometimes catch perch or roach, and if we were lucky maybe catch a bream. Carp, Chub, Tench and Barbel were the stuff of dreams, but we could get library books and look at the pictures of these dream fish so that we could identify them if we ever caught one! The problem was that the waters we fished were natural waters with a natural population of fish. The commercial, heavily stocked, fisheries of today were still far in the future.

In those days coarse fishing was a "working man's" pastime and it seemed to me, as a child, that every adult male was an angler. Coarse fishing was also predominantly a northern sport and I believe that my home town of Sheffield held the distinction of having more anglers per head of population than anywhere else in the country.

How things have changed!

Between then and now there has been a revolution in just about every aspect of fishing. Tackle, techniques, baits, commercial fisheries, and even the way we think about fishing, have all undergone a massive ground-swell of change.

We now have Spods and Rockets, open ended feeders, block end feeders, Method feeders, carbon fibre rods etc, etc, etc, and the list goes on.

But one thing will never change - and that is the pleasure of catching an elusive creature in its own domain, and the challenge of pitting your wits against the natural cunning of our quarry - the fish.

Loxley Fishery

Tight Lines

Richard Brennan

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