Isles of Scilly here we come.....

• My wife and I are taking the 9am ferry tomorrow morning from Penzance over to the Isles of Scilly - of course our sheepdog Jess is coming with us, it is dog walking heaven over there. My folks are having the girls for the long weekend, so all in all you could say I can't wait to get back over to one of my favourite places on earth. The perfect place to spend a tenth wedding anniversary. I love my kids more than life itself, but a few days away never hurt anybody !!

• I took the photo above a few years ago now, over on the tiny island of Bryher - every single island over there simply screams fish wherever you look. Wrasse, pollack, mullet, conger, huss, you name it, the Isles of Scilly has some of the best all around shore fishing I have come across. And the boat fishing is outstanding as well - lots of sharks. I love Ireland with a passion, and the pollack fishing over there can be great, but you'll have to go a long way to better the Isles of Scilly and their own shore pollacking in those deep tidal waters.

• I am not really going over for the fishing, indeed I will try to get back out specifically for that sometime later in the year, but these long days we are getting now should give Del and I a chance to spend a few hours wetting a line together again. I hope the weather and light behaves, because the islands are such cool places to photograph fishing. The forecast looks a little "interesting" at the moment, but I don't hold much faith in any of these long range predictions. I bet we get snow now !!

• Here are a few more screen grabs of my new website that is under construction. Above and below is how the new Photo Essays pages are looking. They are meant to be very easy to get around - lively and colourful to look at and read, with stacks and stacks of info on where and how to go fishing for loads of different species all over the place. Lots there on bass of course, and plenty more to come in time.

• As you can imagine, I tend to get a fair few emails asking about fishing gear - rods, reels, lures, clothing (yeah, right, I am some kind of fashion guru ??!!), lines, you name it, and I have spent some time getting together lots of this kind of information for the new website. There is going to be a whole section devoted to fishing tackle that I am hoping will prove really useful to people, and again, it will be continuously updated. I will only ever feature fishing gear that I use or have used myself and therefore I know it does what it says. Above is a screen grab of a small part of the fishing lures page.