Iget asked a lot what are the most influential things that I have picked up when filming underwater. Now, I could make up some bull about how this or that has been absolutely revolutionary, but that’s really not my style. In fact, often the things that stick in my mind are some of the pictures that are a lot more mundane. Take this shot for example.

We had been messing about looking at casting accuracy and I came up with the idea of tethering a marker float to a big lead and leaving it on the bottom to mark a spot I had found using a normal marker float set-up. The game then was to recast the marker set-up and get it as close to the submerged float as possible. Just how accurate was I?

With the braid in the line clip on the reel and a nice smooth cast that landed nicely I could get the distance spot-on every time of course, but direction was another thing entirely. Even the slightest deflection at my end would see the float land several feet away from the intended spot at sixty metres. A gust of wind, or slight miss-cast and it was all over.

The interesting thing though was that I knew when the cast was spot on. It might take ten goes, but eventually I would land it in line with my far bank markers and be within four or five feet of the intended target. For me, this was as good as I could get at that sort of range.

Leaving the marker float out there and casting a rig at it was much easier and I could get a drop that I was happy within a few tries. The accuracy though was surprisingly only marginally better and if it was too close to the marker then often the rig would foul the marker braid and I would end up with a right old mess.

Revolutionary? No. Interesting? Yes. These simple tests have certainly made me try harder to improve my accuracy and not settle for near enough.