Habitats
Kinds of water and how they behave — the geology, the flow, the seasonality and the ecology that follow. These describe types of water, never particular places.
Brackish water
Water between fresh and salt, where the species list is decided by salinity tolerance rather than by whether the water is called a sea or a river — and where pike and cod can share a coast.Canals
Man-made, shallow, narrow and almost uniformly featureless — and the most accessible freshwater in Britain for anybody without a car.Chalk streams
Rivers fed by groundwater filtering through chalk — exceptionally clear, thermally stable, and globally rare.Coastal lagoons
Shallow water held behind a barrier of sand or reef, connected to the sea through a narrow mouth — warm, productive, biologically unlike the sea outside, and very frequently protected.Commercial coarse fisheries
Purpose-built, stocked, day-ticket water — the most-fished freshwater venue type in Britain by a very wide margin, and the place most people who fish have actually fished.Coral reef
Structurally complex tropical reef built by living organisms — the most biodiverse fishing environment there is, and the most easily damaged.Deep cold lakes
Large, deep, cold, nutrient-poor lakes whose defining feature is a permanently cold bottom layer — the only fresh water that holds char, whitefish, lake trout and burbot, and the habitat those fish cannot leave.Estuary
Where a river meets the sea: brackish, turbid, enormously productive, and governed by a tide that reverses the current twice a day.Floodplains, backwaters and oxbows
The water beside the river rather than in it. Seasonally connected, enormously productive, and — in most large tropical rivers — where the fishery actually comes from.Gravel pits
Water in a hole left by extraction — clear, deep, structurally complex, and the defining big-fish water of southern England and northern Europe.Harbours, piers and breakwaters
Man-made structure that behaves like reef — the most accessible sea fishing anywhere, and the reason a great many people fish at all.Inshore ground
The shallow shelf water between the shore and the open sea — mixed sand, rough ground and reef where most boat fishing in the world actually happens.Kelp forest
Dense stands of large brown algae over hard ground — the richest temperate inshore habitat, and a genuine entanglement environment for a diver.Lowland rivers
Slower, deeper, often coloured rain-fed rivers with mixed beds — the classic coarse fishing rivers, and the ones most shaped by what happens upstream.Lowland stillwaters
Enclosed bodies of standing fresh water — lakes, ponds, reservoirs and worked-out gravel pits — where everything is decided by depth, weed and temperature.Mangrove
A forest that is underwater twice a day. The roots are the habitat, the nursery function is the point, and almost every tropical inshore fish an angler catches spent part of its life here.Mudflats and intertidal sandflats
The soft intertidal — where almost every gathering quarry in this catalogue actually lives, where a great deal of bait comes from, and the ground on which people in Britain are cut off and drowned.Open ocean
Water with no bottom in reach and no structure in sight, where fish are found by reading currents, fronts and birds rather than ground.Reservoirs
A drowned valley or a walled bowl built to hold drinking water — where most British stillwater trout fishing happens, and a body of water that behaves like no natural lake.Rocky shores and reefs
Hard, structurally complex ground with kelp, gullies and broken rock — the richest inshore habitat, and the most dangerous to fish from.Seagrass beds
Flowering plants growing in the sea. A nursery for a long list of quarry, ground a spearfisher and a flats angler both hunt, and the one marine habitat a travelling boat angler is likely to meet an actual anchoring restriction over.Spate rivers
Rain-fed rivers on hard impermeable rock that rise and fall within hours — the water most migratory salmonid fishing in the world happens in, and a fishery organised entirely around a flood cycle.Surf beaches
Open sand and shingle shores where breaking waves lift food off the bottom — featureless-looking ground that is anything but.Tailwaters below dams
The engineered river below a large dam, where water drawn from a reservoir's cold depths creates a fishery the climate could not otherwise support — and where the level can rise several feet in minutes without a cloud in the sky.Tropical estuary and tidal creek
An estuary whose year is organised around rain rather than temperature. The fishing follows fresh water arriving and leaving, the water clears and colours by an order of magnitude, and the best of it happens as a flood drains.Upland lakes and hill lochs
Cold, acid, nutrient-poor and clear, holding small trout and char in enormous numbers of small waters — the commonest freshwater fishery by area in upland Britain and Scandinavia, and the least written about.
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