Shaun Harrison: All of my life I have had a fascination of water and the world that lives within. A world many never get to see or to be part of and this I find strange as I have always seen it as a totally fascinating place.

For as long as I can remember I kept fish, I had tanks everywhere, anything that would hold water would have a stickleback or two in it. Even my paddling pool was stocked with fish at one stage!

Now this fascination of our watery world soon moved on from me trying to catch creatures from the local river with my bamboo cane and net to the discovery of my Fathers old fishing tackle buried deep at the back of shed. I opened the old wooden seat box and the gems I found inside sparked a fire that was soon to turn into an inferno that has burned so strongly since that day. Little did I realise at the time but the opening of that box was to totally shape the rest of my life.

No-one in my family was interested in angling, I was self taught with the aid of library books and a simple sheer determination to succeed. My angling life moved on at a rapid rate from simply trying to get a bite from anything to realising that larger fish were no harder to catch than smaller fish so I started to use baits that the smaller fish didn’t attack all of the time. I have always had a rebellious streak in me and back in the 70’s the ‘specimen hunters’ as we were known were very few and far between compared to the general coarse and match anglers of the day and this very much suited my stubborn nature.

Here I am many sunrises and sunsets later since I started my ‘targeting big fish’ career back in 1977 and so many incredible memories, many dreams become reality and hopefully many more still to come from both my home waters and those I have to cross the water to visit.

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