Difficult one this for several reasons, which I’ll come to further on. I have over the 20 years of this site written a few articles for it. Usually they’re a retrospective from a few years before I wrote them. I only write them if I think I’ve got something different to say on the method of fishing, type of water and so on. Quality over quantity, if you like!
In such pieces you have to include a few pictures of fish, as that’s what's wanted by the editor, words of description are not these days enough. Dumb, dumb and dumber down I guess?
By doing this, it could be argued you’re publishing your catches and indulging in a penis measuring game, biggin’ yourself up, blah, blah, blah!
I can see no way around this if you feel you have something different to say and want to share it with others. It’s simply a fact of life we all learn from one another and the way we do that is by reading what others put out there! It’s why you’re reading this!
So guilty as charge on that account!
The flip side of that is, if you put it out there for what you believe are altruistic reasons, the more you’re talked or known about, the potential is there to stuff your own fishing and friends you may be fishing with on a particular water(s).
And that did happen on one water I was fishing where I’d had a big tench from, which was an open club water. I told a friend via email about it, It got out on here I’d had the big fish using the same tactics I wrote about some months before and the clamour on here was for me to tell all about it. I agreed I would (much as I didn’t really want to at that time) with the then editor but some things need to happen to the picture. Those being the picture was mirrored, put the other way round, the background was blurred out and only me and the fish would appear on the site with the account of its capture.
All of this was done and the photo and account appeared.
Within days I got two anonymous emails from people, telling me which water it was caught on and which swim it came from. Neither me, or the mates I was fishing with at the time could get anywhere near the swim for the rest of the summer.
The moral I guess is, you write the article with pictures, you take the chances, as there’s some out there always trawling the net for information and shortcuts to big fish!!!