Fishing, by its very nature, nourishes the imagination, feeding it with a potent fuel of hope and desire.

Promising to bring home a feed of fish is the absolute kiss of death to any chances of catching anything but a large heap of derision when you get home.

Despite my mentors advice that I would never go to heaven fishing with a weighted nymph and a float, I took it up. (As an aside, it is now amazing to me how much of the advice from my elders in those days has not come true. I have not gone blind or deaf, despite some early teen advice to the contrary. The only time I was ever involved in a car accident, I was taken to hospital, but no one seemed to take the slightest bit of notice as to whether I had on clean underwear or not. I have, as yet, been unable to test the nymph and heaven advice.)

How can you need so many rods and reels to catch a fish? , she asked, her lips pulled into that weaned on a gherkin look, as she watched me prepare for a fishing trip. Probably for much the same reason that you seem to need 30 pairs of shoes for one pair of feet, I nearly said, but decided to live for another day.

Every last cast is actually a first cast. The first cast and first chance to catch the next fish. The next time you anguish about whether to make that last cast, forget it - the anguish that is - and cast away. The next fish caught on a last cast will not be the first.

If you want to catch more fish, more often, take luck out of your fishing equation and replace it with knowledge of fish, their habitat and behavior, and you will make your own luck.

Living at a beach, near a river mouth, taught him the impotence of impatience at events moving at nature's pace.