Paul Boote

Less of the "old" - I still have more hair (and it's mine, and still not grey, or dyed) than most of you! Flavoured, steamed or boiled ragi-flour paste, used in South India for MANY hundreds of years as both human food and mahseer bait, is THE ORIGINAL BOILIE. Locals flavour the paste with "somph" (the aniseed-smelling seeds often handed out in better Indian restaurants, post-meal, to clean your palate); "hingu" - asafoetida - that goes into many stronger curries and stinks like the devil; and others. Do NOT take commercial boilies with you. Merely take some flavours, as I do. Strawberry. Walnut. Aniseed. Seafood / lobster / crayfish type. Almost anything. But don't overdo them. TIP: Use SMALL (0.5- to 1-inch), hard, steamed ragi baits (side-hooked, not on hairs). The fish have seen far too many egg-sized baits and much much larger (I've used things the size of cannonballs) over the years...

Here's one Oscar really did make earlier: "The world was my oyster, but I used the wrong fork."

At the risk of sounding all Carradine 'Kung Fu' and "How are you doing, Zen?", I have always rather liked this one: “The wise man points at the moon, but the fool looks at the finger.” Ancient Chinese proverb

Not a classic or anything like it, but one from someone who died the other day: “I am a former piscatorial participant. I do not wish to sound immodest, but I was known in my day as a piscatorial artist - one of the finest.” Tony Banks MP – later Lord Stratford - speaking in the Commons in June 1997 about his angling career.

Merely spent much of my life having one heck of a laugh and an Angling feast, Jeep. And trying to make other fishers aware of some of the incredible possibilites out there if they were to only take a few risks that i have done, to stretch a leg and go that extra mile, both here and abroad; to see their lives and outlook transformed by the experience. I've done it pretty well all for free, and not for Cult of A Personality Brownie Points... Me? Serious about myself? Well, I ask you... You wouldn't have written that if you had ever met or fished with me. Indeed, in my time, many a respected, well-known, po-faced "serious angler" has despaired of and given up on me. I'd much rather have fun. Yet, there are some things worth becoming serious about, and one of them is when our pastime or recreation (that's all it is, lest we forget) starts playing economic and social hardball with other people's pastimes, prospects and lives. Now, to my mind, that is serious - not just for the people concerned but also for the very future of fish and fishing, anywhere.

Bitter, over-competitive, little bugger, aren't you, Jeep?

The Falklands sea-trouting, even at its best, doesn't come within a whisker of the South American mainland stuff - I knew people (people I considered old and firm friends at the time) who had fished the Falklands in depth before fishing with me on TDF and in Patagonia: "no comparison" was their universal opinion by the end of their first day's mainland fishing, after I had put them onto and into fish to 14 pounds and into much bigger ones by the end of the week. I posted summat about that IMAX film production on another board last night, a real pukka fly affair, entitled "The River Runs Through It Effect" http://www.sexyloops.co.uk/cgi-bin/theboar...t=NW;f=4;t=3564 Some interesting responses.

And when the Americans hit the IMAX screens with this 3D megabucks international feature... http://www.flyfishermedia.com/about.html I tell you, guys, we are lucky to be fishing for stuff the smart set don't want.

You clearly haven't dined with (and, on a few occasions, had fish with you - in Argentina) extremely well-to-do Brits who without irony could speak a line like: "The Kiwi trouting is doubtless very fine, but is horribly public." Verbatim quote from a man I once knew who had fished the world many times over.

Many a true word spoken in jest. NEVER underestimate, guys, just how much how much those - well, the Smart, Traditional, Control-Freak Variety, People of Substance who REALLY value their Privacy - who fish for Spotties With A Salmo Tag and a True WILD Pedigree ("Well, only oiks go after the other stuff... we're probably selling it to them, after all..."), ANYWHERE, not just here, quietly despise (amongst themselves, discreetly and charmingly, of course) the likes of US (but, by God, HOW they need us to make up numbers!). Takes one to know one etc.......

Know the feeling, Peter (see my posting in Fly Fishing Abroad / whatever thread on the Fly Fishing Board). It's not all about sizes and numbers, you know. Scratching to catch on poor water or in unfavourable conditions, and finally catching something after a lot of thought and effort can be enormously personally rewarding. A.K. Best the great American fly-dresser, a long-time fishing buddy of the author John Gierach, penned a line awhile back that I still remember: "The fishing was great; it was the catching that was bad."

I have more done more than just a bit of this 'have fly rod, will travel' stuff. Not mere 1- to 2-week agent-booked lodge packages, but months and months of independent travel and in-depth fishing from the ground up over a number of years, long before or at least some time before all the guides and their paymasters arrived. By and large, I had a fabulous time - not just with Indian mahseer that many people know about now, but with salmon, sea-trout and trout in Iceland, and with the latter two species in Argentina and Chile. I looked at an old notebook the other week and found that I had had just under 300 double-figure foreign-caught sea-trout, eleven twenty-pounders to 27.75 pounds among them (and all these as I was figuring out ways and fly patterns that would catch them; a lodge-based fisher, fishing for the same amount of time as I did, would probably quadruple the number now)... To my mind, though, there there is a definite downside to all this 'hop on a plane and cast away' stuff, and it is the effect that 'super-sexy fly fishing' can have on anglers and angling in countries which, after the first few independent-fisher pioneers have been through, suddenly become must-do, big-bucks "Destinations" on the International Flyfishing Circuit. Sudden, often highly covert and devious, big-money buy-ups and closures of waters long available at accessible cost to local flyfishers being a major problem in the last region that I did in depth during the 1990s and early '00s (twenty-two months solid fishing) - Argentina and Chile. Local fishers in these countries (and I am not talking poor, baitfishing, meat-hunter 'peasants' now, but everyone right up to top-flight flyfisher professionals in the countries concerned) lost virtually ALL of the good to half-decent water to outfits setting up and running rich men's fishing playgrounds, in the space of a very few, barely comprehensible to the local-fisher victims, years. Not merely bad for anglers but bad for the very future of Angling, in my opinion: fish and fisheries will only survive, now and in the future, if LOTS of people value them; no amount of fencing, gates, locks, bailiffs or even dog-handling security men will be able to save them from the chilly environmental winds that now blow. So, if you do decide to travel abroad to fish, then, I suggest you do what I and similarly minded, responsible fishers do before booking: take a very good look at just what you are considering buying into. SOME outfits, lodges, operators and destinations are fine - local people in the countries continue to get a look-in and benefit financially from all the fluff flickers who descend on them and their rivers in due season. Many others, however, are most definitely NOT, and merely pander to the egos of fishers (NOT 'Anglers', that would be a misnomer for such sorts) who, to my mind now, just couldn't care a toss.

Hmm... He contacting me out of the blue a few weeks ago, asking me to give a talk to his club... My two, two-month-long One Man in a Boat expeditions after Thames Trout in recent years... I have come to the conclusion that, as in a certain type of politics, there are no coincidences at a certain level of English (not British) Angling. The talk? I declined graciously, of course. No reply.

Indeed. A big, bright-silver, fresh-run, deep-bodied, hen sea-trout that repeatedly leaps so high on hook-up that, to your deep-wading eye, she seems to be (and very likely is) above you... Seeing the tail of virtually every salmon I catch now (together with all the sea-trout...) kick into gear as their strength returns as I return them... A REAL barbel. Hard, lean and slim. Uncaught. Never seen a pellet... A big, river-roach. Perfect scales and fins, unripped mouth, in any winter light, deepest gloom or briefest bright... ANY perch of ANY size... And a number of others. So many beauties.

Great fish, Jan. Ah, the Em! I read about it, as a child, in Charles Ritz's "A Fly fisher's Life', then later in Anthony Crossley's Greased-line fishing book. Accounts of huge sea-trout caught on fly from the Em when the river was owned and controlled by an aristocratic Swedish family. They turned me into a life-long sea-trout fisher who, over the years, has 'wasted' huge amounts of time at the thing and also into someone who has got up to all sorts of no good - distinctly downwardly mobile, you might say...

We / I don't have to go as far Sweden, Jan. I have had sea-trout, on fly, in WALES, of 10.25 and 13.25 pounds in recent years, and there are a few FAR FAR BIGGER fish present...

PS - ponderers and those hooking something large and spotty in the future might consult this excellent page: http://www.fishing.visitwales.com/fe/defau...1=3&n2=29&n3=32

Yet he would only have needed to find a small, resident, female brownie to do that with... Whatever the big fella was, he was up the creek WITH his paddles!

Without a scale reading and close inspection of tail shape, jaw maxillary position in relation to the rear of the pupil of the eye etc etc...? Big, late-season and winter-spawning sea-trout are UGLY - here's an Argentine horror in the twenties of pounds. http://www.lax-a.is/media/hausmynd/Seatrout_21_Alex_03.JPG I have had a number of these 'crocs' to 27 pounds, and handled three of them between 35 and 38. Beasts which I knew could ONLY be sea-trout because there were no Atlantic salmon down there (except on a very few Chilean rivers - salmon-farm escapees). If that Norwich lad's catch was genuine (I do hope it was), all we will ever know for certain now is that it was 23 pounds or so, and a migratory salmonid (and almost certainly a 'kelt', too - i.e. a spawned fish -- very very hungry after recent spawning). Some catch, whatever it was.

Astonishing. I had to travel to Argentina and Chile to catch sea-trout this size, albeit a bit prettier and more silvery than the Norwich Monster (which, I suppose, does for any posting from me now in "How far do you go?).

Okuma (or the Svendsen bods who flog you over here), are you sat comfortably? Now I'll be begin. A word of advice from PB. Make a 4-inch version of your new Sheffield centrepin (retails at around £120), with a 7/8in. wide (not 3/4in. - too narrow) drum, and you will have a winner. Put me down for couple, eh?

Like the 'Underhand Pendulum Roll' Wallis Cast (for maximum distance). All done on the move, with the tackle sliding across the water towards you ... a sudden lift of the rod together with a swift movement of the line-stripping hand ... Kerpow! Relatively easy with some lead, but more than a tad tricky with light float gear... But I'm in Aficianado / Sadsack Trainspotter Territory, now - gone!

A bobble-less Robert de Niro 'Deer Hunter' woollen hat, I hasten to add! I still wear a modern, skiier's "Beanie" version of the same in Polartec fleece for fishing in cold weather. Keeps my long hair under control, too - hate to miss a bite or a passing woman...

Uncannily like (in its text) the well-illustrated article, "The Wallis Centrepin Cast" that I wrote for 'Angling' magazine in the late 1970s. Not so much demystification, more perhaps a chance to launch a new Harrison / Peregrine rod...? PS - Does anyone remember a NASA Conference at Reading University in the mid to late 1980s when the BCC (Alan Slater of Reading was around) had a stand next to mine, and I had a 4-inch 1914-vintage Aerial mounted on a 12-foot trotting barbel rod as part of a display...? Someone bowled up and asked me "Do you know how to use that thing?" I replied: "I'll show you." So, through the tackle hall with the quickly threaded-up trotter, Aerial and light tackle, and out onto a lawn I went with a handful of people. I began to Wallis Cast. Soon the hall was emptying and I found myself with a large crowd. "Wow ... Blimey ... Never seen anything like it..." were its mutters. As I re-entered the hall afterwards, Peter Drennan (a man I knew by sight but whom I had never spoken with) left his firm's stand and came over to me. He took my hand and firmly shook it, saying summat like "Wonderful piece of casting. Must be thirty years since I saw it. That'll make them think..."

Just tried the link I posted above - no go. Try this: http://flyforums.proboards53.com/index.cgi...74173335&page=1 Contact JL&R direct, book, then book your flight whatever, and GO. Their local guides are FAR BETTER than any big-name Brits (they do the guiding for them anyway).