Rick Humphreys of Fishsiam .com has been extremely busy over the last month filming Giant freshwater stingray productions with NHK Japan and another National Geographic production company.

Rick reports:
In the first week of February the Fishsiam team fished with Hirosumi Yamaguchi a reporter from NHK Japan. The one week shoot was attended by Dr.Zeb Hogan, Director of National Geographic's Megafish project and several Thai veterinary experts. The production was scheduled to last a week and documented giant freshwater stingray research carried out by the team at both the Ban Pakong and Maeklong Rivers .

Angling Trust: Media Release

Immediate Release

Fight for Fishing at Foremark

Thursday, 12 March 2009

The Angling Trust today launched an online petition to reverse a decision by Severn Trent Water which would see angling banned from the dam wall and East bank of Foremark Reservoir in Derbyshire.
Severn Trent Water has cited various reasons for the closure of more than two thirds of the reservoir to anglers, who have been fishing there for nearly 30 years. Their main concern seems to be health and safety, with concerns that anglers will hook passers-by or that they might fall over on the dam. There have been only 3 accidents in 29 years, all of them minor and none involving anglers hooking members of the public. They have even suggested that anglers fishing on the dam might affect its structural integrity.

The Trust is calling on all anglers to stand up and be counted to stop this nonsense. Signing the petition online takes less than one minute at www.anglingtrust.net/foremarkpetition.

---ENDS---

Rick Humphries reports from www.fishsiam.com in Thailand:

Ian Welch and the Fishsiam team land the largest freshwater fish ever caught on rod and line!

Anglers Mail journalist and fish biologist Ian Welch recently joined the Fishsiam team to assist in the filming of a documentary with National Geographic Channel featuring Giant Freshwater Stingray.

The Fishsiam team were also joined by eminent fish biologist and National Geographic Explorer Dr.Zeb Hogan in addition to a National Geographic film crew.

When I was a kid, there were several leisure pursuits that my mother said would render me blind.
Reading in poor light was one of them. Curiously, my mother lectured me endlessly about the Sin of Onan (who was punished by God because he spilled his seed upon the ground) but failed completely to mention the damaging effects of bonefishing in the tropical sun…

On this sunny day in the Bahamas, I had forgotten to bring my polarizing shades and I was on a flats boat, no more than a few hundred yards off the coast of Green Turtle Cay. The reflection off the surface of the water was astonishingly harsh and by 10.00AM, I was already ‘snow blind’.
"Be ready boss," Ronnie Sawyer kept intoning, like some kind of mantra, gently raising and lowering the long pole into the sand to move the skiff so that I was always able to cast down wind. "Get your line sorted boss," he repeated every so often, because my line was constantly wrapped around my feet, or sliding over the side of the boat into the water. Ronnie is one of the finest guides in the Bahamas and has the eyes of an Osprey.

Just when I was trying to sort out the tangle, he said in a rising tone: "Man, you better be ready quick. Throw the line, 20 yards man. You gotta cast boss. Now throw it!"

"I see nothing," I said, not for the first time, feeling rather like Manuel from Fawlty Towers.

"Fahhk boss, shitty cast."

Rod Henton considers angling targets. Size, species - it's all relative.

We never quite know how are lives are going to pan out, do we? Thirty years ago I thought I might captain England’s football team and win the world cup (I was a 5yr. old!) Twenty years ago I bought my first guitar and dreamt about playing to packed arenas with young strumpets screaming my name and throwing their underwear and lustful suggestions at me in equally copious amounts.
Many years ago I imagined myself leading a bloody civil uprising against the bourgeois regime, trying to abolish the rating system and implement their scurrilous new poll-tax plans. (I think I was trying to impress an oppressive girl…or was it oppress an impressive girl, I can’t remember)

The common denominator with all of these pursuits is, over the years, I have failed at them all miserably. This was not down to any wavering self-confidence that I may not have had the ability to complete the said tasks, but mainly, because I didn’t actually get off my arse and try. All things in life that are worthwhile require a lot of effort and your hopes and aspirations with your fishing are no different.

The title gives it away. Everyone knows that the Grayling is called The Lady Of the Stream.
If I were a boy grayling I might take exception to this, but no-one says that life’s always fair. Anyway, the feminine name is somehow right, because grayling are all remarkably beautiful, rather than handsome.

It must have been about thirty years ago when I was introduced to grayling by the late Frank Sawyer. Now there’s a thing to be able to claim. A bit like saying that one has been introduced to carp fishing by Dick Walker. I’d gone to meet him as tackle carrier and photographer for Brian Harris, when he was editor of International Flyfisher. The great old man asked me whether I’d ever caught a grayling, and when I told him I hadn’t, he spent the afternoon teaching me to snick grayling out of the deep pools of the upper Avon, using his own Sawyer nymph flies.