With more deviation than is standard

The idea that I could do all this fishing and reading, plus my normal activities of daily living, and then blog in detail about every angling trip or book was always pretty unrealistic, and so it has proved. So, I think I'm just going to do an update blog post here covering several books and fishing trips in one go. Maybe I'll do a couple of in-depth book reviews later on if I can catch up. Here's the latest spreadsheet on the 2023 fishing challenge (10 species caught to date): click here and here's where the 2023 reading has reached (11 books read to date): click here For book 3, another Christmas pressie was sitting in the queue by the side of my bed, the first novel by a crime writer whose work I had never read before:  Craig Johnson . Johnson's addition to the jaded lawman genre is  Walt Longmire, sheriff of the fictional Absaroka County in Northern Wyoming.  The Cold Dish , a tale of revenge of course, is the first Longmire novel; Wikipedia tells  me that, as o...

Having finished reading my first book of 2023 (reviewed in detail here ) I was able to set out to catch the first species of the planned target of 25 species for the calendar year. For personal and logistical reasons that I'll explain below, t here was only one species that I would set out to catch first: the zander ( Sander lucioperca ). As will also become clear, having zander as species #1 allowed me a direct way to illustrate some statistical concepts and techniques. So, if you are here for some stats, you will have to read some nonsense about fishing first. Similarly, anyone interested in fishing can skip the long middle section of this post concerning statistical matters. I was a keen angler in my childhood and teenage years but there were limited places to fish in the part of Kent where I grew up in the 1970s. Within biking distance of my home there were just a couple of gravel pits. I could fish these pits because I was a member of the local angling club; but the pickings w...