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About SpinFish
SpinFish Online Magazine has developed from an idea I had to launch a Spey casting school in Grantown on Spey with Charlie Whelan. Charlie had recently retired from his day job working as a spin doctor for Gordon Brown (hence SpinFish). Now resident in Speyside he had become an ardent salmon fishing fan.
Charlie is a keen angler and had come on holiday to the Highlands for a change of scene . He wanted to take up fly fishing but hadn’t a clue what to do with a fly and a fly rod having been a course angler throughout his life. As he said when I met him, ‘you get a rod, line, spool of nylon and some flies but how do you find out what to do with them, books aren't much good. How do you attach a fly to a fly line and once you do that what do you do then?’ With these questions in mind he took some lessons on fly casting from Ally Gowans while on holiday and was bitten by the fly fishing bug and one or two midges!
On relocating to Speyside for a quieter life style away from the tensions of Whitehall he decided to take up salmon fishing and off course had to learn how to Speycast. At that time I was proprietor of a little Post Office and store in Dulnain Bridge. Mr Whelan popped in for his newspapers and we got chatting about salmon fishing and Spey casting and I offered to teach him the art.
The first day of the season the following year saw us on the Spey on opening day and the lessons began, intermingled with some of Charlie’s more florid language for which he has a vast vocabulary and a well founded reputation. A quick study, Charlie soon had the basics and was fishing well enough to take his first fish while Speycasting off Upper Bend on the Grantown Association water a few months later, he had caught his first fish on his first ever salmon fishing trip to Upper Castle Grant the year before. Some people wait years for their first salmon but Charlie has Irish blood in him and no doubt he has retained some of the luck of his forebears.
A few years down the road saw us sitting chatting at the Long Pool when we got onto the subject of teaching Spey casting. I mentioned that Arthur Oglesby used run a fly fishing school on the Grantown water and Hugh Falkus did the same on the Abernethy Association water, both had sadly passed away which meant no one was offering instruction in the Grantown area.
Doom and gloom had hung over salmon fishing in Scotland for a number years and the once popular Grantown Association water was selling just a couple of hundred visitor tickets a year. Time was you could not move for fishermen in Grantown during the summer. We agreed it might be beneficial all round to the club, the town and maybe to us to start up a new Spey casting school. We were certain we could assure people that the doom and gloom was ill founded and that salmon fishing in Scotland was alive and well, and if anything, better than it ever was.
Charlie applied his PR skills to the problem of publicity and in short shift he had an interview feature in Trout and Salmon, then a major piece with Peter Oborne in the Mail on Sunday followed by a feature by Andy Peitrasik of the Guardian and a piece in the Independent. That took care of exposure pretty comprehensively give or take some smaller items in other papers, the Times, Sunday Mail, the Daily Record, oh and the Strathspey and Badenoch Herald.
For any venture nowadays you must have a website so www.spinfish.co.uk was born to provide people with details of the course, it soon grew into something more, including the first SpinFish Online Magazine.
We stopped running the courses after a couple of years (Charlie is still offering guided fishing in Speyside, see his feature) however the SpinFish web site was still up on the net. I did some ‘gardening’ on the site just to keep it tidy but looked less and less at the web site as time went by, always meaning to do something with it at some point if work and fishing permitted.
Last October I had a look on Google searching for Spinfish and found that it had achieved a good rating on the World Wide Web and it seemed a waste to just leave it sitting there doing nothing so with a mate, Robert Austin who built the original site, we did a redesign.
The original SpinFish content has been reworked and much more added. The biggest addition to the On Line magazine is the SpinFish Fishing Finder Where to Fish Directory which has turned into a bit of a monster in its infancy with over 800 contacts and venues for all sorts of fresh water and sea fishing. Not wanting to exclude any angling options SpinFish Fishing Finder Directory has information about where to fish for salmon and sea trout, wild brown trout, Arctic char, grayling and where to fish in fisheries or for pike, course fish or in the sea for cod, skate and even tuna.
Next phase, aside from adding to the Scottish Directory, will be to include directories for England, Wales and Ireland, then we will look at the rest of the world! I guess in time the Directory will be a truly massive one stop shop for finding places to wet a line.
The Online magazine will publish articles, news items and features on a weekly and monthly basis. There will be fishing reports, video clips, wild life features and a Fishers Forum plus features on where to stay and things to do while on a fishing holiday. Watch out for us at your favourite fishing spot, the guy with the camera might be me, watch especially for the video camera - we might do some thing on Your Tube too.
On top of all of that I am writing a book on line, ‘Zen and the Art of Angling’, you can watch it grow paragraph by paragraph and offer suggestions and comments,
Contributions are welcome from anyone whether it is an article, picture or fishing report, send it in and I will consider it for publication. I know there are lots of you out there who would like to write about fishing but can’t get published. You don’t have to be an ‘angling personality’, just someone who has something to say about fishing matters, jot it down and send it in. Angling reports will be especially valued and if you want to send information to me on a regular basis I will create a Fishing Reports section.
Editor and site owner: Alistair Huskie, email huskie@spinfish.co.uk
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