Simon Blanford

Fly fishing is fundamentally a very traditional sport and often a very nostalgic pastime, even when it comes to its fish. It’s hard to imagine trout and charr and salmon ever losing their association with flies and fly rods. But alongside these old standards fly fishing has gradually enveloped all sorts of other freshwater species, as well as venturing...

I doubt there are many fly fishermen who pass up the opportunity to try out something new, something that might improve their chances of catching fish. That ‘something’ could simply be a new piece of gear, one that will send the fly farther or more accurately to its target. Or, perhaps it’s some new understanding about our quarry: where they may be at...

Smelt, some dragonfish, and even some trout-perch possess it. So do species belonging to the lanternfish and the catfish families. The much-maligned piranha has one. As does the more glamorous golden dorado. And all the salmonids have one, it’s diagnostic for their group. What all these fish have in common is an adipose fin, that “mysterious little...

Last week, fishing a popular local creek, two trout refused, after some Marinaro-type deliberation, my carefully presented dry fly. Dry flies I should say. I flung a number at them. A few days ago a carp looked at my crayfish pattern, a pattern that had caught carp previously, and then, very slowly, like a person realizing they had sat next to the nutcase...

When I lived in Scotland my local water used to be a little trout river some thirty years into its post-industrial recovery. Aside from trout the river also held a large population of minnows. If I let a dry fly hang in the current below me some of these fish would gang up on it, badgering and pestering and eventually drowning the fly if I took too long...

Fishermen spend a lot of time thinking about how to catch fish. It’s in the nature of our pursuit. If we were  golfers it would be about getting the ball in the  hole. But because we are fishermen it’s all about the catching. We rarely voice this fact  quite so baldly but we do, nevertheless, spend time, particularly on the eve of a trip, considering...

The amount of scientific research that gets carried out on fish—how they live, how they move, how they evolve, even how they taste—is huge. A quick search for ‘fish’ in a database of journal papers (the end point of biological research and the basic currency of scientists) from last year found some 16,000 individual studies. That’s 44 papers on...