I haven’t been fishing since I was a teenager in the early 70s, unless you count a couple of hours on a Finnish lake last summer.  Your programme has re-inspired me, at the age of 53, to get fishing again!

I was very lucky as a kid, I lived in the beautiful Tillingbourne Valley in Surrey, the Tillingbourne and miles of lovely countryside were just behind our home, and my next door neighbour, a lovely old man called Jack, was the top dog in the local Angling Society. Jack taught me so much back then and even gave me loads of equipment to get me started, including a sea fishing fibre glass rod, which I used on the Tillingbourne. I still have the rod and would never sell it. Jack also gave me some beautiful identification cards, and to this day I can recognise most fresh water fish by sight, despite other interests taking over from the fishing years ago.

I recently did a reccy of the Tillingbourne, where I spent so many idyllic days.  It is still so unspoilt, private and unknown to other fisherman.  When we were kids in the 60s and 70s the farmer would turn a blind eye to us fishing on his land, we would rarely see him, but if we did he would just smile and ask us how we were doing!

We used to catch Roach, Brown Trout and Chub mostly, although there were some monster Pike in there too. We used to have some very unconventional tactics. One of them was to climb the trees on the river bank to get a birds eye view of the fish movements in the water, we would then guide each other in to the best spots, it always worked.

One day while doing this, I saw a disturbance further up the stream by the mill, it was a Pike going for a duck,well that’s what it looked like. I could see the Pike emerge from the stream, the duck flew off and then I saw the most amazing site beneath me. It was like “rush hour in fish world”, we both saw at least 50 different fish of various sizes all heading our way in one hell of a rush to be somewhere else quick, and yes you’ve probably guessed it, the Pike was chasing them!

The farmer is now in his 90s and I will be writing to him soon to ask his permission to fish on his land again.