It’s always nice to catch a good fish in front of an admiring audience.
And naturally that niceness gets exponentially enhanced if the audience is one or more appreciative journalists who’ve joined you there for the purpose.
Unfortunately, that’s not what happened when I met South London columnist Jennifer Cox on the Savacentre stretch of the river one evening last week. Too busy discussing the finer points of casting, tackle and that thin dividing line between Wandle fishing and full-on environmentalism… I hardly got a fly on the water at all.
But in the end it didn’t matter, because Dennis, my local fishing partner for the evening, did catch a couple of good ones – on a deftly-wielded brace of maggots.
So Jennifer got to meet her first-ever Wandle chub, up close and personal, after all. (Sadly, no perch – we’re just chalking that picture up to artistic license).
And here’s what she wrote about her experience in this week’s Metro paper, the latest in our growing keep-net of media coverage for the Wandle.
Rumour has it, she’ll soon be back to cover a Wandle Trust cleanup – and maybe even learn to fish for real!
Coarse, fly or both… she’s welcome any time.