Fly Fishing at Wherwell Estate, Hampshire.

A quiet weekend away.


This weekend the 'learning to fly fish' course was finally happening.  After lots of making arrangements and setting times we finally set off from Canary Wharf, London, about 4pm.  There were only 2 of us in the vehicle as we were meeting the others at the pub ( http://www.peatspadeinn.co.uk/ ) just after 6pm.  We made good time across London and were in Hampshire by about 630pm.

After a quick drink and a change of clothes we started dinner.  This ended up being quite a boozy affair and resulted in a few cloudy heads the next morning as we didn't finish until gone midnight.  Breakfast was a 8am and was a little tough to stomach for most of us, however as planned we set of for the fishery and arrived dead on time at 9am ( http://www.roxtons.com/fishing/venue/Test_Wherwell_Estate/ )

We were met by 2 old hands at fly fishing who throughout the day gave excellent tuition so thanks to Brian and John from Orvis for a good day.

After a brief introduction to rods, knots, casting and fly's we moved on to fishing for Rainbow Trout in the Lake.  Throughout the day we caught a good number of fish and ended up leaving will 11 magnificent rainbow trout.

As you can see from the picture below the lake was a fantastic setting and was so peaceful.  You could just about hear a dull background noise from a local road which I believe is the A303 road to Somerset and Devon.

Below you can see a team photo from the end of the day.  All six of us had a successful day and all left feeling like we had achieved a great deal as none of us had really fly fished before.

L-R - Adam, Julian, Me, Paul, Duncan, Jonny.

The days catch!

Happy New Year 2012

2012 is here and Happy New Year to all


Christmas is over now, NYE has gone and it's back to work tomorrow.  Over the next few days we'll gradually take down the decorations and pack them away until next year.  I wonder if the little one will miss them as they've been around for a few weeks now and she's always pointing to them.

Christmas day was spent at my mum and dads and from memory there were 10 for lunch so I took our old table on Christmas Eve and luckily it matched size exactly to theirs so we all sat comfortably around the table rather than banging arms all the time.  Boxing day we spend at Lisas mum and dads and the number were pretty much the same.

Josie being instructed by her older cousin on opening presents

NYE was great, we went over to a friends house and due to the number of young children we celebrated New Years on Indonesian time which meant our celebration took place a 5pm local time.  The kids loved it and we had the usual champagne etc.  We even managed to get a youtube of the 2010/2011 fireworks in London on the TV which the kids loved.  Then we had fireworks and sparklers in the garden for the kids.  We started of trying to launch a chinese lantern however the wind was possibly too high and it flew around the garden at head height then over the fence into the garden next door and proceeded to set fire to things.  Luckily the garden hose was nearby so we were able to extinguish pretty quickly.  We then had some 'quiet' fireworks for the children.  I say quiet as the young ones often don't appreciate the big bangs and rumbles.  Then onto the sparklers which were of course supervised one adult per child and held at arms length.

NYE fireworks - not a great picture but you get the idea.

On New Years day Lisa wasn't feeling too great so Josie and I spent the day relaxing, watching TV, and sleeping.  Here she is sitting in her Lego Box after turning out everything else.