THE ULTIMATE ANGLING BUCKET LIST

7DoHoXxkA

JOURNALISM TARGET Bucket

JOURNALISM TARGET Bucket List status – result Angling journalism has long been a passion of mine. Not so much from the perspective of being in the public eye, because I hate being on photographs, as anyone who has ever seen my trade mark miserable face in the magazines will probably well appreciate. I am however a creative person at heart who likes nothing better than to get up early in the morning, park myself in front of the computer with endless cups of coffee trying to wake up while all around me sleep, and put my thoughts, findings, and aspirations out there into the public domain in the hope that others might benefit. In the early days - the self taught no prior experience learning phase if you like when I can assure you nothing comes easy, particularly to an educational stray as I was in my school years, to actually get something published was an achievement, and a very occasional achievement at that. Every article accepted rode on the back of several that weren't, which you had to take on the chin and learn from, or could have learned from, if only rejection came with some measure of constructive criticism to help avoid making the same mistakes again. But, editors being busy people, and in particular the case of Peter Collins who back then headed up Sea Angler, some simply wouldn't like you for whatever reason, despite never having met you, and as such would tell you nothing, making guidance of any sort very difficult to come by. So you would plod on, learning by a combination of default and reading what other people got published, until eventually getting a handle of sorts on what it was that editors were looking for. Probably my biggest step forward came not from the right words, but from my illustration. Few if any of the all time greats I either met or fished with, such as Clive Gammon, even owned a camera, let alone took pictures. In many cases their descriptive writing was so good you could conjure up suitable imagery in your own head without the need for pictures. 530

But endless pages of print unfortunately doesn't draw in potential spending browsers in places like WH Smiths. Good illustration on the other hand does, and magazine editors were well aware of that fact, even back in the days when black and white pictures looked little better than ink poured onto blotting paper. You can't beat a big eye grabbing catch to stimulate the urge to read on and spend money. So investing in a quality SLR camera certainly helped me, followed later by a second for transparency work when the occasional colour page started to creep in. And the rest as they say is history, leading up to digital where we find ourselves today. No more waiting for colour transparencies to come back from the processors only to have the disappointment of not a single one of them good being enough to use. The digital age has well and truly seen off disappointments and set-backs of that sort, and in that regard, I did a bit of the pioneering leg work there too, having the first ever fully digitally illustrated fishing article published of a wreck fishing trip out of Pwllheli aboard 'Judy B' skippered by Dave Carey. This was a pre-planned article trip sanctioned by my then boss Jim Whippy, who at the time was editor of Boat Fishing Monthly. As usual, I covered the trip on colour transparency film, but also took along an’ early days’ 3.3 megapixel digital camera which I used to duplicate the coverage in the hope of building a digital library for the days when this medium would eventually become the norm. On the Monday morning, I mentioned this to Jim and asked whether he could use it, to which he replied he didn't know, but if I put the pictures onto a disc and sent it through with the transparencies he would ask the publishers, who amazingly said yes. And so in 2001, the first full digital fishing article was published in BFM. Some years later, before smart phones with their onboard high resolution cameras hit the scene, I also had the first article illustrated on a mobile phone camera in 2010, again in Boat Fishing Monthly, and again from Wales, this time fishing Holyhead Deep aboard Gethyn Owen's boat 'My Way'. As you might expect, initially in the very early days, I was happy to get anything published anywhere. But with success comes bigger objectives, and when the opportunity presents itself, obviously you make the progression upwards, which usually comes as a stepped affair covering a lot of different, and in many cases now extinct magazine titles. Picture from first ever digital article So much so, that when I started to think seriously about drawing up the tick list which would eventually become my bucket list and the basis for this book, I got to thinking how satisfying it would be to target having something published in every sea angling title, which as far as I am aware I have managed, plus as many of the various freshwater titles as I could provide material to of a suitable standard beyond simply having it there just for the sake of it. Books then become an evolutionary next step in that process, though until now, with just the one under my belt, and with having had so much else on the go including my research and historical archiving, time has tended to steer me away from that particular medium. 531