Welcome to my first post in Angler’s Diary.  I have set up this blog site to accompany my return to the angling world after a number of years away with my pike fishing tackle gathering dust in the garage.

Why?  Well Looking back to around 1999 I remember fishing regularly for pike, usually starting early on a Sunday morning at dawn and returning for a late brunch, thus leaving the rest of the day free with my wife.  I was fishing a confluence between the River Derwent near York and the Pocklington Canal, together with stretches of both of these waters and also the River Ouse in York.  Tales of 30 pound plus pike abounded.

I would set up two rods with popped up dead-baits with bite alarms then set back to enjoy the breaking dawn.  This was the best part of the day.

I was slowly building up my gear, added unhooking mats, monster sized landing nets etc.  It was about 2001 when I returned to the sport of scuba diving.  Something I had always liked but not always had the money.  I know a lot of people who enjoy both the sports of diving and angling – they do have water in common!  The trouble was that once I had started diving again there did not seem to be time to go fishing.  Also, for some reason I did not have quite the same urge to get my pike fishing tackle out of the garage.  At the time I was also trying to start a business on the side as a fishing tackle trader over the internet – this was not working very well either.

So the upshot was that my pike fishing tackle was left in the garage until a few weeks ago when I dug it out and started to dust it down!  Its funny how my interest in diving now seems to be waning and an urge to go pike fishing is returning.  I will need to replace and update some of my pike fishing tackle and intend publishing any interesting findings concerning value and quality of the equipment I will be looking at.

My rod and reel are actually intended as carp tackle and I thought that I might try this area of the sport as well.  As a relative newcomer to carp fishing I hope to research the various aspects of all sport fishing tackle and air the results over these posts.

Many bass fisherman in the US labeled carp as trash fish, though recently through publicity and education from groups like American Carp Society and CAG more and more fishermen in the US now seem to realise how challenging and exciting carp fishing really is.

The availability of carp and the water they inhabit will also help tremendously in the growth of this sport.  In the UK many ponds and lakes have been converted to carp fisheries and many new ones dug.  Many shops and online stores specialise in carp tackle.  In the USA a similar pattern is beginning to emerge.  Although the UK leads the way in developing purpose designed tackle and rigs, most USA anglers use American set-ups when they first get into carp fishing as a good selection of carp fishing equipment and bait is hard to find in stores within the United States.  Now that the Internet has taken up a supplier role this is becoming less of a problem.  Some online carp angling and general fishing tackle stores have been setup in the US and import the european carp gear to sell online, while others will ship directly from Europe. A very few companies are presently manufacturing their own gear in the US given the high quality of European gear, though this trend is likely to change with the future growth of this magnificent sport.  A lot of carp tackle sold both in the UK and USA is currently manufactured in China and other Far Eastern countries.

It is hoped that more interaction between UK/other European and USA anglers can be encouraged with possibly tournaments being set up or “World Series” leagues established.