A long tradition

Over the years many influential anglers have been Society members, including John Goddard, Bernard Venables, Jack Hargreaves, Sir Michael Hordern, H Cholmondeley Pennell and Alfred Jardine. Halford fished Society waters as a guest, while Skues invented modern nymph fishing on what is now one of our stretches of the Itchen.

Continuing their pursuit of knowledge and sense of fellowship, the Society maintains a unique collection of fishing records, archives and memorabilia dating back to our foundation, and offers members:

• Two main meetings every year, where we enjoy talks and presentations by experts, lively debate and a convivial lunch. We hold our AGM online
• A biennial fully-catered summer lunch party in the Woodford Valley by the river Avon
• Informal suppers at our Avon Rod Room
• Riverside workshops on a range of topics from invertebrate sampling to chalk stream technique, grayling tactics and fly fishing for pike
• Special-interest groups such as the Photographic Group, which runs its own programme of meetings, workshops and field trips. It publishes regular yearbooks and took all the photographs on this website
• A twice-yearly Journal, which has been published since 1974
• An annual pocket yearbook containing full details of all our fisheries.

Members can keep in touch through the Society’s user-friendly intranet, with its Forum, news, calendar of events, library, museum, and reports on river conditions, hatches and effective fly patterns – designed for use on all devices from desktops to smartphones. Members can also access real time information about the fishing across all our fisheries from our LogBook system which crunches the numbers produced by our online catch returns.

The Society, which incorporated in 2019, is led by an elected president who chairs a Board picked for its expertise in such fields as fisheries management, property, law, finance, science and communication.