Winter is the season when coarse fish such as chub, carp, roach and others seek deeper pools in the streams or lakes and become less active.

However, during this so far mild winter with minimal frost and ice I have noticed continuous fishy activity and my pond goldfish still demand to be fed instead of skulking at the bottom.

The picture is different for members of the salmon family. Having spent from two to five years at sea, salmon are now moving in from northern seas and the Atlantic to head up rivers of their birth to prepare for spawning.

If the salmon is crowned 'king of fish' then for me, the brown trout (pictured), also spawning now in the river Wandle is the most perfect and beautiful of fish, full of power and grace.

As a boy, I spent many happy hours fly fishing for trout in the remote mountains of west Wales.

Those fish were delicious, having a far superior flavour to farmed trout.

Near the cottage was a small lake fed by a fast-moving narrow, waterfall studded brook that bubbled down from a larger lake a mile upstream; full of yearling finger-sized trout fry.

While one of us held a net across the two-foot-wide stream, a friend, wellies akimbo, would walk downstream towards the net herding the little fish into it.

Anglers using the upper lake paid us three old pennies, a small fortune in those days, for each fish caught and transported by bucket up the mountain to the main lake for catching in later years.