As a child, Dad would take me to a local river with my net where I could catch tiddlers to my heart's content. My first taster of fly fishing was when I caught my first real trout which is still my largest catch to date. My biggie was eight and a half pounds which I took from a small Scottish fishery. Would you believe I was the first female and the youngest person both to fish the newly opened lake at the time? So a lot of records were broken and you could say my fishing career was meant to be!

Fishing isn't all my life though. I love the outdoors and go for long walks in the beautiful Northumbrian countryside. I enjoy swimming, keeping fit and, like most girls my age, I love socialising with friends and going shopping!

I'm a member of many fishing clubs and I write for various fishing magazines and website round the world, including Reel Women magazine in Australia and the Sky Sports Tight Lines website where I am the only female writer at present.

I know just how lucky I am in life so I like to donate time to non-profitable events. I annually take part in "The Big Fish" - a yearly competition held at venues all over the UK to raise money for Macmillan Cancer Patients and their families. I also donate five percent from every sale of wellingtons on my website to Casting for Recovery. This is a marvellous non-profitable organisation which helps women who have or have had breast cancer to recover using fishing as their therapy.

In April 2005, I travelled to Ireland to help with the "Jack Charlton Disabled Angling Competition" which was fabulous. The competition involved getting disabled anglers from around the UK and Ireland together in a contest which was then followed by presentations and dancing. This intense experience can be found written up in our news archive.

I enjoy taking part in conferences and events. For example, in January 2005, I travelled to Nottingham to speak at a conference aimed at encouraging more women and girls into fishing. It was a huge success and on the back of it, I helped found a girls’ fishing club at my old school. That too has gone really well with lots of laughter as well as excitement...one of the girls thought you had to catch the flies before you went out fly fishing!

More recently, I attended a conference at the Stadium of Light in Sunderland. This Big Boost event incorporated two hundred young people aged from eleven to twenty-five from the region who were all Big Boost award winners. These great young people have all run community projects in the region which have helped and benefited so many others.

In 2006, I was nominated for the North East Business Woman Entrepreneur of the Year Award and in 2007 for the Young Achiever of the Year Award in the business and enterprise category. This business experience has helped me run ladies fishing events in conjunction with Northumbria Water and the Environment Agency, raising money for Casting for Recovery.

As well as running fishingforeveryone.com, I also work full time within the fishing industry spending my working hours at the world famous Hardy & Greys company. Here, I am their public relations co-ordinator meeting fascinating people in this fascinating sport of ours.

Fishingforeveryone.com is central to my life, helping me setting up a ladies fishing club in my local area, the very first of its kind ever to be seen in the North East of England. We currently have forty members and it is growing all the time.

Over the years, fishing has made me fantastic friends worldwide and I’ve met some very talented and highly skilled anglers on the way. I love everything about fishing: it’s all about relaxation, fun, nature, action and excitement. Everyone out there can enjoy it. I just hope that with my encouragement (and that of countless others) fishing will soon become a mainstream sport for females and that we can prove, once and for all, girls really do make the best fishers!

Lucy x