Devon School of Fly Fishing Team blog

2011 has got off to a good start despite a small hiccup. The hiccup I am writing about was quite an interesting one. Basically we had our website “copied”. I don’t say copied in the loosest sense but pretty much an out and out rip off. Emma was amazed at how relaxed I was about the whole thing when the site was shown to me.

I am sure this sort of thing goes on in business all the time and it can often be hard to tell if something has been either lifted, copied or down right ripped off. It might be a line here or there or just something really subtle. Sadly this wasn’t the case. Great chunks of text that I had written had just been copied and pasted in exactly the same font and where there needed to be changes because of the different river names they hadn’t even bothered to match the font but had simply written it in a different one. It didn’t look great.

The office....

I got some advice  about it but in the end the best thing was to speak to the guy. So I did just that.

It turned out that he had the site built for him by a third party and knew nothing about what had happened. He wasn’t to know and is probably like me in that I only really look at a couple of  my buddies’ sites as I like to see their fishing exploits. ( Jim, I wish I had managed to get out over Christmas like you dude!)

He took it down and no harm was done. It turns out he works on a bit of water I have always wanted to try so we talked about going to have a fish on it. I hope we do!

As I advance in years I have come to realise that life is just too short to hold grudges and it is much better to shake a hand or two along the way and leave as friends. It is even better when you leave with a fishing friend.

www.devonschoolofflyfishing    Fly Fishing Devon Fly Fishing tuition, fly fishing lessons and guiding in Devon

Well, I’ve covered a fair few miles over the last few days but there will be more of that in slightly later blogs. One of the trips I made was to Wales to our fly fishing instructor’s get together. I was lucky enough to meet up with a few people making their first steps into becoming fly fishing instructors and I was amazed by the high quality of people I met as casters, fishermen and as nice guys too. I guess our Association’s (AAPGAI) standards are high and having this sort of benchmark that makes it such a challenge to pass and such a reward when you have passed it. I was only there a short time as I had to shoot off  and whilst writing this blog have just had a call from Jim saying that sorry we didn’t get much chance to catch up…I hope we can get to fish soon fella!

I was back Monday meeting up with Chris and Joan for some fly fishing tuition who were over from the Isle of Man to learn how to fly fish. Chris had tried it once before but Joan was a newcomer. They are lucky enough to have both lakes and streams on the island so I gave them a good idea of how to approach both so that they can tackle anything the fish over there want  and we did a bit of fishing too.

It is great when people are learning together as you can show them what to spot so that if they are out and something doesn’t go to plan they can help each other out.

It was great to see Joan land her first fish! At the end of the day it started to get cool so we headed back in for a cup of coffee and in Joan’s case a hot chocolate and rum and reflect on a job well done!

It is typical we now get some rain and I guess I’ll be watching the salmon making their way further upstream.