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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.

A keen angler Charlie had come on holiday to his favourite haunt in the Highlands for a change of scene to get away from the press hounds after his resignation from his job as Press Secretary to Gordon Brown. He wanted to take up fly fishing but wasn't sure what to do with the tackle 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  from Ally Gowans and was bitten by the fly fishing bug and several hundred 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 lesson began, intermingled with some of Charlie"s more florid language for which he has a practiced 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 Association 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 couldn't 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. 

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 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 with facts about 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, ferox grayling and where to fish in fisheries or for pike, course fish or in the sea for cod, skate and even tuna.

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.