The early years.

I've been fishing for as long as I can remember and my earliest memories are from my junior school days when I used to take my younger brother (tackle carrier) to the local cut on our summer holidays, fishing for anything that would come our way. We never really used to catch much in them days (not much better now either) but I never lost that fishing bug, although the younger brother, after several years carrying tackle on his BMX, never really got into it!

In my teens we moved to a house on Chester Road, in Sutton Coldfield, which used to be about 100 yards away from the local tackle shop (Terry Eustace's). And it wasn't long before I left school and started my first full time job working for Terry.

I remember, he used to give us our wages on a Friday and I'd hand most of it staight back to him and leave with an arm full of tackle instead. Well, it was probably more like a hand full, as riddling maggots didn't pay all that much in them days! Over the next few years I continued to work for Terry and then went to work for Richard Foster at Fosters of Birmingham. All the local legends (Dave Mallin, Wayne Dunne, John Cooper, Mark Law, Phil Calloway, Big Ron et al.) used to come to both shops and I'd spend as much time as I could listening to them and trying to glean as much information as I could about how to catch these carp.

Anyway, here's some of my photos that I've dug out from as early as I could find. Most of these are probably early 90s.