FishingBeats - A New Way To Find Fishing
A free, open guide to England's chalk streams - Fishingbeats.com
A new project from a fellow angler — a directory of rivers, fisheries and beats, built in the open and free for everyone to use.
Planning a day on a chalk stream you don't already know is a strange exercise. The water you want to fish almost certainly exists, somewhere on the Test or the Itchen or the Wylye, run by someone who would happily sell you a rod for a day. Finding that someone is the hard part. The information lives in old club emails, half-updated websites from the 2000s, a friend-of-a-friend phone number, a thread on a forum from 2019. You spend an evening with seven browser tabs open and end up booking the same beat you fished last year because at least you know it still exists.
That information gap is what FishingBeats is trying to close.
It's a free, open directory of fishing beats in England, with a focus on the chalk streams including the Test, Itchen, Kennet, Avon, Wylye, Lambourn and others. Everything is organised in a way that mirrors how anglers actually think about the water: rivers contain fisheries, fisheries contain beats, and beats are offered through one or more providers. You can start with a river you've always wanted to fish, drill down to a specific beat, see the species, the methods, the season, the rules, the price where it's published, and then go straight to whoever takes the booking.
What it isn't, deliberately, is a booking platform that takes a cut. There's no commission, no exclusivity, no paywall. Listings are free for fisheries and providers, and the site is free for anglers to use. When you find a beat you like, you contact the people who run it. We just point you at the water.
The mission is straightforward: build the most comprehensive open guide to England's finest fishing, beat by beat. Map every stretch that has day-ticket access. Give every fishery and provider a fair, accurate page. Make it genuinely easier to find the right water on the right day, without needing to know the right people.
The directory is the foundation, not the whole thing. There's a long list of features planned beyond it including proper river and beat journals, conditions and hatch notes, season write-ups, a way for anglers to share what they're seeing on the water, and tools for fisheries and ghillies to keep their own pages current. The ambition over time is a digital platform built around chalk-stream fishing in its entirety: the water, the people who manage it, the people who fish it, and the small body of knowledge that holds it all together. Plenty of that will only work if it's built with the community rather than for it, so a fair bit of what comes next will be shaped by what people actually ask for.
A quick word about who's behind it, since it's only fair to put a name to the project. I'm thirty, Anglo-German, and a keen fly fisherman. My usual water is the Enborne, but recent days on the chalk streams have got me properly hooked and FishingBeats is partly the result. It's built out of straightforward passion for the rivers rather than a business plan, a project, not a startup, at least for now. The gap was real enough that I'd rather build the thing than carry on grumbling about it.
The directory is early but growing. If you're a visiting angler, or one of those keen-eyed locals who knows every run on a river but has never fished the next one along, have a look and tell us what's missing,a beat we haven't listed, a price that's out of date, a piece of access information that's quietly wrong, a photograph of a beat that deserves a better one. Good images are surprisingly hard to come by, and a single picture of water you know well goes a long way. That sort of correction is how this becomes useful. If you happen to be a fishery owner, river keeper, ghillie or booking agent reading this on Jason's journal, listing is free and stays free, and we'd be glad to hear from you, my website link and direct email are below.
Thanks to Fortitude Rod Co for the space. The right rod and the right water are the two halves of a good day on the river. Jason builds one of them rather better than most. FishingBeats are helping with the other.
Best regards,
Nicolas