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While putting this magazine together, I often wonder if there is any other sport or pastime that offers as much to its participants as angling does? I don’t think there is. Consider the almost countless variations and opportunities available to anglers. To start with you have the clear differentiation between rod- and- line and pole fishing, and the various tactics that come with each discipline. Then you have different venue styles and a broad range of species to target, each with a whole host of techniques and methods dedicated to its pursuit. You could quite literally spend a whole lifetime practising these different styles of coarse fishing and still come nowhere close to sampling them all. And that’s not counting game and sea fishing, and all that these seperate branches of the sport involve.

Many other hobbies require lots to learn, but I can’t think of another one that provides quite so many permutations as angling. It’s this, for me, which makes our sport so fantastic and is the reason it grips so many people for life. No matter how often you do it, there’s always something new to be learnt, a new tactic to be mastered or a new species to target.

Every month, when reading through these pages I tell myself I must give this tactic a go at some point or try targeting a a certain species more often. The months seem to fly by, however, and I often find myself at the end of another year coming nowhere near close to trying all the things I wanted, let alone become anyway proficient at them!

If you take golf as an example of another popular pastime, I just don’t think it offers the same flexibility as angling. If you haven’t got time to play a full 18 holes, your only real options are the driving range or taking up crazy golf. We anglers, meanwhile, have a whole host of options available to us such as a quick lure fishing session or surface fishing for carp. And while there’s plenty to master in golf, there can’t be anywhere near as much as in angling!