Globetrotting Derry rod Chris Paris shares fond memories
1. WHERE IT BEGAN
My grandad, Walter Newton, was a cabinet maker from Bethnal Green. He fished the River Lea all his life and bought a plot of land at Dobbs Weir to build a retirement bungalow. My father died when I was a baby, so we moved to a bungalow next to my grandparents. Walter took me fishing when I was six, where this photo was taken, 300 yards from home. That started my fishing life, growing up as a coarse angler and choosing universities for their fishing potential: Southampton for barbel on the Avon and Glasgow for pike on Lomond.
2. BRONZE WHALER SHARK JAWS
The 1970s passed in a blur of carp and pike fishing before I went to Adelaide to spend 1979 at Flinders University. I enjoyed the local sea fishing with Kosta Flourentzou, who gave me these jaws, and Jack Laidlaw, but expected to resume my work and fishing in England. The Thatcher government put paid to that, closing my research institute and making me redundant. Australia had been so enjoyable that I took a job at the Australian National University in Canberra, uncertain how my fishing would pan out.
3. MAURY’S REEL
I started fly-fishing for trout before going to Adelaide and caught my first wild brownie from the Swampy Plain River. I met renowned Australian fly-fisher Maury Wilson a year later. He was a cantankerous old sod, but he took me under his wing: teaching me to cast, improving my clumsy fly-tying, and making me learn entomology. Most of all, he showed me the Snowy Mountains’ lakes and rivers and the tiger-snake infested high country stream where his ghost still fishes today. He gave me his reel in 1989 after illness stopped him fishing. I’ve treasured it ever since.
4. BILL BECK’S SHACK AND BOAT
I met Bill in 1991 at Hobart airport in his Toyota Landcruiser with boat in tow. I’d come for a week’s fishing in the Central Highlands, staying in Hic-cup Hall, Bill’s primitive shack beside Little Pine Lagoon. As we neared Miena, Bill suggested a detour to Penstock Lagoon, where the Highland Spinner was launched and we had five brownies to 4½lb on wet-flies in two hours. I fished Tassie with Bill over the next 30 years. The old s
