Brand new look Trout Fisherman - out soon

• It fascinates me to see such a well known and well established fishing magazine like Trout Fisherman being completely overhauled and then relaunched. On March 26th you will be able to see the results of the new look Trout Fisherman magazine when it hits the shops, and here is a sneak preview. I know I work for them, but I have to say that I am hugely impressed by what has been going on, as you can see here. Magazines have to overhauled from time to time, and it takes a lot of hard work and vision to ring these changes. Sea Angler had the same thing a little while ago (see here), and the magazine looks better and better to me every month.

• What makes me even happier is that the powers that be have chosen one of my photos to go on the cover of the relaunch issue. Nice one !! OK, so I might be a bit biased towards their choice, but I really like what has been done with the photo of Nick Hart you can see on the forthcoming cover above. What a strong way to launch this brand new fly casting series we have been shooting recently - with words from Nick of course.

• The whole style of the magazine looks that bit "cleaner" to me, and personally I believe that is a good thing. So much information has to be crammed into these kinds of publications, and the trick is to make sure this info is put across in a way that can appeal to fishermen of very different skill levels. Plus you want a big dollop of inspiration in there. I reckon they have done this here, and the proof will be on the shelves at the end of this month.

• Those Irish bass keep on coming. Keven Brain emailed me from Kerry to tell me of more bass up to 8lbs over the weekend, all returned. I would hazard a guess that he has the spots all to himself as well.

• And from south east Ireland, I hear that my mates Graham, Pat and Cian had a ball over the weekend, with numerous bass coming to lures and baits - the biggest going a cracking 10lbs (on a soft plastic lure), to the efforts of Mr. Hill himself. Check out the full report on Graham's blog here. That is some fishing, and again it proves two points to me - there is no better shore fishing for bass that I know of than over in Ireland, and that they can have awesome fishing all year round for them if the conditions play ball. I can't wait to start "discovering" a bit of the French bass fishing, but it is going to have to go a long way to match the fishing I know of in Ireland. Outstanding stuff indeed. The urge to emigrate has never been stronger !!

• How about the rugby on Sunday ? A day to warm the heart. The first half of England v France had me jumping up and down in delight, and I can't help but feel that those forty odd minutes had been coming for a while now. We just had to let go and play rugby if that makes any sense. It had to happen sometime, and perhaps it was just good timing that it happened against the French at Twickenham, and in perfect spring weather as well. The second half could never live up to the first, but what a fantastic game. I reckon England were almost so shocked at what they had achieved in the first half that they went back into their shells somewhat. Still, we won properly, and the big test now is to see how we perform against Scotland on Saturday. If we play well and win properly, I reckon we are allowed to hope again. Perhaps even dream again. But we shall see............

• While my website is undergoing a rebuild, I have come across a great way of putting up really good looking web-based galleries of my photos, and I have put a few up recently. Check out a load of black and white photos here for starters. For more, check out the links on the right hand side page of this blog, under the "My Photos - various galleries" heading. There is plenty of bass stuff up there if that floats your boat.