The Fishing Coach

I’ve been blogging here for an incredible nine years (my first post was on 15 May 2003). Blogsome have provided an excellent service but it’s time to switch over to TheFishingCoach.co.uk.

All of my posts and images have been transferred there and apparently it works well on mobile phones and other devices. So you can join in wherever you are, even from the riverbank…

See you there.

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Hair rigs - love ‘em or hate ‘em - have one main disadvantage, particularly when tied up prior to fishing and that is you have to decide what size bait you will be using when you tie them. I like to be able to adapt my bait presentation to the conditions as well as my particular fancy of the moment such as a neutrally buoyant bait and I am fond of using small boilies or soft hooker pellets for tench and barbel.

I have found a little aid that allows me to switch from an 8mm to an 18 mm boilie, a 8mm soft hooker pellet, a couple of grains of sweetcorn or a small piece of luncheon meat, instantly and in the dark, as required, without faffing about with those nasty spikey baiting needles or those fiddly boilie stops.

These are small metal barbed spikes that tie on to the end of the hair in the place of that difficult to tie small loop. They come in four sizes: 5 mm, 10mm, 13mm and 15mm and in two thicknesses of wire, the thinner wire usually only has one barb where as the thicker wire and longer varieties have two. Be aware that the 5mm size is more like 8mm in length!

The second one down in the picture below is the finer wire and only has one barb, I would worry if I was casting a large boilie a long distance with this one but the double barbed variety really hold all but huge baits well.

I find these especially useful when fishing small boilies that the baiting needles usually split and they enable me to fish small soft hooker pellets on a hair without encountering the same problems. You can also switch to a couple of maggots or casters when using the fine wire versions. The 13mm spike allows even greater variations such a mixture of real and pop up sweetcorn to achieve different buoyancies or an 8mm boilie with a little piece of rig foam to get the same effect. I am even going to try using a plastic caster to hold various sizes of worm on the spike.

There is only one disadvantage I can forsee and that is the effect of the weight of the spike on a small bottom bait which might prevent the bait being picked up by a lightly browsing fish but this could easily be overcome by using a slightly larger spike and a small piece of buoyant material such as rig foam to overcome the weight of the spike.

I have never seen these in a tackle shop but if you search for “bait spike” on Ebay you will get several types and sizes.

Be careful when putting the bait on these as they often have a very large barb or two and would be difficult to pull out of a careless finger, I never let my less experienced students use them or barbed hooks for that matter.

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How many words have been written concerning our favourite sport over the years? How much of what is put in print is worth reading, let alone reading again?

Many modern publications are little more than the work of advertising copy writers who happen to fish and I have been a little guilty of this here at times.

Recently my attention was drawn to a quote from someone who is amongst the greatest angling writers of all time.

The artifice of fishing is displayed not only in the delusion of the fish, but to some extent in the delusion of the fisher also. Let him but have the power of persuading himself that the boy in him has never grown up, or better, let it be so without his knowing it, and the world is his oyster.

H.T. (Hugh Tempest) Sheringham (Coarse Fishing)

Oh, how I wish I could write like that!

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Just before Christmas we had our first real cold spell of the winter and it started the night before one of the school outings I so enjoy. I took three young lads, all new to the sport, to fish on the main lake at Royal Berkshire Fisheries. As we were setting up on the west bank of lake one a chap approached me and asked if I would mind if he fished just behind us on lake two. I suggested that my group were more likely to cause him annoyance rather than the other way round but if he didn’t mind a little noise it was okay with us.

The fishing was hard due to the frost the previous night and instead of a bite every cast we had to settle for three fish all day.

This lad will remember his first fish - a two and a half pound perch.

As I netted this fish I looked behind me to see that the considerate angler mentioned earlier was also playing his first fish of the day and he agreed to a group photo. His fish weighed three and a half pound so this brace totals six pounds - not something you see every day!

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I am sitting at my laptop writing this and the rain is hammering against the window driven by a cold north westerly gale. Summer seems such a long time ago, despite the mildest autumn on record.

One of the earliest EA backed events last summer was the annual Sparsholt open day when their excellent lake is open to potential students and then the general public for free coaching sessions. I have attended this event for the last few years and as usual was unfortunately far too busy to take photos. The coaches involved were also allowed our own day’s fishing during the college holidays - this is the stamp of carp it is possible to catch on the float.

Another regular summer event was Staunton Park near Havant where StreetSport organise a series of coaching days for local young people. This is about the fifth year I have been coaching at this venue, here is a group we refer to as “the usual suspects”, some of whom I have been coaching from the begining.

The carp was the first we have caught from this venue during the coaching sessions and took a single red maggot on a size eighteen hook to a two pound hooklength fished on an elasticated four metre whip. It took my student and I fifteen minutes to subdue and for ten minutes of that I was playing him and the fish.

I am still working with Slough Council and have had some new students this Summer, all of whom have started well.

I really am the luckiest man I know.

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I started my barbel fishing a little early this year with a trip to the river Wye organised by Nick Watkins, a fellow coach. We have a couple of outings together each year - here is one of our first. I have fished this river a couple of times in the past, at different venues, with barbel as my main quarry and although I caught nearly everything else the river still owed me a barbel.

We were due to meet a group of Nick’s mates who knew the river well and we had booked in to the hotel on the golf course which owned the fishing. On our arrival the first thing we did was walk the river, but so early on in the season all the banks were totally overgrown and very steep, we couldn’t see most of the river and didn’t know where the paths down to the water were. We decided to wait for local knowledge to arrive in the person of Nick’s mates and so we went to register in the hotel, sort out the tackle and discuss tactics.

When we returned to the river everyone had arrived, picked all the best swims and cut paths down to the river and we were left with a couple of less than ideal pegs. Whilst we were walking the banks looking for likely swims we were called over by another angler who produced a strange herring like fish from his keep net. He demanded that as we were both coaches we should identify this mystery fish. I suspected it might be a member of the migratory shad familly and with the judicisious use of my blackberry I was able to show him a picture of an Allis Shad which left him impressed. It was the first one I had ever seen in real life, they are becomming quite rare and are only found in a few rivers in this country but when I suggested the reason it was dead might have something to do with it being kept in a keep net, in slack, shallow water and in full sunlight, I lost another potential disciple!

We caught lots of dace and chub but only one barbel, which despite me spending most of the two days float fishing finally came to a maggot feeder. Another river added to my barbel list.

I will return to this stretch of the river later in the season - forearmed with a little more knowledge, a lot less tackle to carry and a pair of chest waders - but not his year.

It was a delight to get back to to my beloved river Kennet where over the next few weeks I was able to catch a number of barbel around the seven pound mark on a float and centrepin. Despite the low water levels which were to plague my river fishing all summer.

North of Watford! That was the plan. It’s always raining up north, Yorkshire people are even reputed to have webbed feet it rains so much up there. They must have some flow in their rivers.

A trip was arranged with Weller of the Yard, who now lives so far up north he calls Yorkshire men southerners, to meet up for a couple of days of fishing around the Boroughbridge area. I invited Graham Walker who lives near York, a fellow PAA coach and also my accountant, as he speaks the local dialect even better than I do (during my army service I served almost exclusively with Yorkshire regiments - although there is nothing exclusive about Yorkshire regiments) .

We ended up fishing the river Swale and guess what, it was low and clear with hardly any flow. On the first day we fished a narrow stretch which had a little more flow than the rest and caught an assortment of dace and small chub but on the second day we went to a wider and deeper stretch on the recommendation of the local tackle shop. Here I was able to fish a large stick float with a little more finesse and although there were not so many bites I did catch this chub.

As you can see from the photo I was able to wade out and feed straight from my bait apron, my favourite type of fishing.

After a couple of hours of constant trotting and feeding I was getting tired and decided to fish the same line with a maggot feeder while I had a bit of a sit down. The result was this barbel which fought well above its weight and nearly straightened my hook.

Another barbel from a different river.

I liked the look of the river Swale and I would like to fish it again when it was carrying a bit more colour, shame it isn’t a hundred and fifty miles further South.

The moral of this summer could be whilst some barbel fishing can be very scientific and technical and float fishing for them is fun, if your life depended on catching one from a strange water, a maggot feeder is probably your best bet!

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Once again a lot of water has flown under any number of bridges since I updated this blog and once again I have run out of excuses (to myself) for not posting, so here goes.

I usually start my spring campaign after crucian carp at Marsh Farm and this year was no exception but all I could catch was lots and lots of small to medium sized tench - not that this was much of a hardship, but I am still looking for my first four pound crucian.

In May I moved to Wylies Lake at Thatcham to continue my tench fishing and after a couple of medium sized tench over as many sessions I found myself in one of those early season tench fishing dilemmas, a swim like a washing up bowl, full of bubbles but unable to get a bite. I had started at Wylies with red maggots in a block end feeder fished as a bolt rig, with a short hook length and plastic maggots on the hook. This method had caught me most of my tench from Marsh Farm and is a good method of searching a water as it doesn’t involve ground bait which attracts the crayfish, I had also tried my favourite long rod and centrepin float fishing with a pole float and paste as bait. Both methods had already caught me a few tench at Wylies that season but everything failed to produce a bite on the day in question.

A fellow angler told me that everyone else had had the same problem that week so, in desperation, I replaced the ball of paste with a large lob worm on a size six hook. The rod I was using was a Harrison S/U stepped up float rod and a Grice and Youngs Avon Supreme that I had inherited from Roy loaded with eight pound line, I was fishing heavier than usual due to the heavy weed growth.

The result was this beautiful tench at eight pound three ounces, my second best ever.

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The interweb thingy has finally been validated by one of the leading names in angling! Peter Drennan (one of my all time heroes) has finally endorsed the whole sphere of electronic communications by launching his own company website, Drennan International.

This page will explain my enthusiasm for Peter and and his company. Whenever I see a new item in my local tackle shop with his name on it I always think “this must be good, what’s it for?” in that order! Mr Drennan doesn’t sell any rubbish and his new website maintains that standard.

I am an enthusiastic river angler (as some of you may know) and my favourite area of the website can be found under the articles section. Here you can find descriptions of various floats, their designs, evolutions and uses written by the man himself, who was part of that evolution and design process. Here is the man who wrote the book, produced, directed and starred in the film and designed and printed the T shirt!

This site is already top of my bookmark list, there is lots more content, including videos, so go on, have a browse.

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There was a time, long, long ago when I didn’t even own a centrepin and always fished with fixed spool reels. I would like to share with you my journey into the world of centrepins, especially as the man who played a major part in that journey has just passed away.

Back in the early nineteen eighties I had just completed my two or three year transition from soldier to policeman with all the upheaval of family life that this involves and was settling down to a much more stable lifestyle than had been possible before. Luckily this meant more time for fishing and it is during this period that what ever skills I have started to develop.

In those days there was a total closed season for coarse fish on both lakes and rivers, so if you wanted to go fishing between the 15th March and the 15th June trout fishing was your only option. Some clubs stocked their waters with a few token rainbow trout and everyone carried on as normal using coarse fishing methods and tackle but saying they were fishing for trout, if challenged. I chose to learn to fly fish for the trout on more heavilly stocked fisheries that specialised in providing trout fishing.

It was during one closed season that I met Roy Meincken. He worked in an office on my beat at Heathrow and we started fly fishing for trout together. One day, some months later, I called in to his office for my usual cup of tea and he showed me a reel that his mother-in-law had bought him, thinking it was a fly reel.

It was, as you can see a very fine and expensive centrepin reel made by a firm called Adcock and Stanton, but I soon discovered it was not the sort of centrepin I had known as a boy, this one ran on ball bearing races and was as smooth as a pint of Dublin Guinness.

I had to explain to him what it was for and a week or so later found us on the banks of the river Colne at West Drayton where I showed him how to trot a float with it.

I don’t remember what effect the demonstration had on him but I do remember the effect it had on me - I was captivated and I wanted one of these for myself. Also on this day I think I became a confirmed river angler!

Shortly afterwards I bought a replica Match Aerial, a traditional centrepin (but I now know, not a particularly good example) and whilst this was fine for legering and trotting a big float on fast water for barbel, it would not perform as well as the Adcock and Stanton with a lighter float on a more gentle stream. I just did not have the spare cash for a better reel and of course, there were not so many being made then, they had yet to become fashionable, John Wilson was unknown and most people would ask if it was a sea reel or a fly reel when you used one in public.

A year or so later, after the breakdown of both our marriages, Roy and I fished together a lot more ( I caught two hundred barbel, including my first double, in the season after my divorce) and became much firmer friends. Roy had found a new partner and I was filling my spare time, between work and fishing, by rebuilding a boat. Roy offered to help financially as well as all the hard work and advice he had put in but I refused because he had done enough. It was on this boat on the river Thames that I really needed a free running centrepin but had to make do with the aerial.

At that time we were doing a lot of barbel fishing and Roy was looking for a second hand Graham Philips barbel rod and I managed to find one for sale in the Anglers Mail. He made the arrangements by phone to collect the rod the following week and told me that the chap selling it also had a second hand Adcock and Stanton for sale. I immediately expressed and interest but Roy said he wanted another one.

A few weeks later he invited me and my youngest son to Silverstone for the Touring Car Championship and when we arrived at his house he produced the newly aquired Adcock and Stanton to show me. I was a bit miffed to say the least until he told me to turn it over and look at the back.

I now have more centrepins than I am prepared to admit to but this reel was my first good quality reel and was the start of my enthusiasm for trotting a float on a river.

Shortly afterwards his health began a gradual decline, starting with a double hip replacement at the young age of thirty eight and the time we spent fishing together became less and less as the years passed. We remained very close friends but the physical demands of our sport just became to great for him. Yet you will see from his comments on this blog that he still loved fishing.

He was a really gifted chef and Jan and I spent many New Years Eves at his dining table and he would often pop in for a coffee on his way home from work when we lived in Shepperton.

We said goodbye to him last month at the age of fifty three after a series of strokes and he will be missed by many more people than just me. He was a big man, both physically and in his effect on those who called him friend, he will leave a big gap.

Last weekend his wife Jane asked me to sort out and dispose of his fishing tackle. Much of it has not been used for over ten years and as I loaded it into my car the memories tore at my emotions with each new discovery. But there was one piece of equipment that I found that will help me remember him to the end of my days. The original Adcock and Stanton centrepin reel that started it all.

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It is a well established fact, handed down from generation to generation, that a man cannot have too many centrepins! But I must be coming close.

Yesterday I went to the Farnborough tackle sale just for a look round and to renew some aquaintences when on a stand manned by Angling and Outdoors I saw a centrepin reel called Ikonix.

This reel, as far I can tell, is the same as the Marco Cortesi Signature Centrepin reel which I had gone to the Dragon Carp Direct stand to see but was told they had sold out.

The Ikonix is a well made reel compared to some of the cheaper reels I have seen and when subjected to the pointless spin test (when does a reel need to be able to spin for such a long time in normal angling use?), it spun until I got bored with watching it. There was a little growling sound from the bearings but that did not seem to detract from the operation of the reel and I will certainly lose no sleep over it.

The reels is 4.25 inches in diameter and the spool is 3/4 in wide, it is certainly comparable with any of the Okuma centrepins I have handled but the price asked was £35.

Yes, I bought it. It will be ideal for my up and coming young river anglers and less of a worry for me than allowing them access to my children …er, I mean other reels.

I took it home and compared it with my favourite Bob James Lightweight and it was not ten times worse as the prices would suggest. I noticed that it was stated on the Ikonix box that the reel weighed 219 gms. I was horrified - the BJ reel weighs 218 gms and its main selling point is its lightness and this justifies it’s £350 RRP. However when I weighed the Ikonix it was actually 257 gms, naughty! But it is still lighter than the new Adcock and Stanton which I was told by the manufactures was 305 gms. and retails at nearly £400.

The weight of a reel is important, particulary for trotting, as the heavier the spool the more force it requires to start it turning and keep it in motion. This means that the less force needed the slower the current you can fish with a lighter float and the less inertia it has whilst in motion which can cause over runs.

All in all, well worth the £35 I paid for it, I can recommend it to any one considering taking up centrepin fishing. The guys on the stand tell me that they have lots more in the shop back in Watford.

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I mentioned Nicky in my last post and told how I had been forced to disappoint him by not taking him pike fishing, well, I decided to give him a taste of river fishing too.

On our next outing I took him to Twynersh Fishing Complex to fish the little river Bourne that flows through the complex. It is only twelve or thirteen feet wide at it’s widest and no more than three feet deep unless in full flood but it holds a good head of roach, dace and chub and has been known to produce the odd barbel. On the day it was quite low but still carrying a tinge of colour after the previous week’s rain but to my pleasant surprise the management of the fishery had done a lot of very sympathic bank clearnce and had opened up a lot more swims. Well done, Paul!

I set up a twelve foot through action rod and a centrepin loaded with three pound line (not a big fish venue when it’s not coloured), the float was a small wire stemmed stick and the hook a size eighteen. Whilst showing him how to set the tackle up I started feeding a few red maggots and a little hemp every couple of minutes or so. I then showed him how the float was set up and without bait on the hook demonstrated how to trot the float through the swim, increasing the depth each time until it just started to drag under with the current.

After a few practice runs we put on two red maggots and he started learning about float control and the vagaries of a centrepin with the line wound on backwards.

He got in a few tangles but was soon catching fish, his first dace and his first gudgeon. We then moved downstream after our first swim died and he caught several good roach and this fine chub.

I think I have another confirmed river angler on my hands!

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Last week I picked up Nicky from his home to go fishing but there had been a hard frost the night before which had been thawed by a cold North Eastery wind carring a lot of drizzle. He wasn’t dressed for the cold or the rain as the outing had been arranged at very short notice. We decided that this was a good opportunity to do a much needed “reccy” to see what damage had been done to to the fisheries I use after the cold spell and to try and find him some pike fishing.

We spent the day driving around Berkshire, Surrey and parts of Buckinghamshire looking at various venues. If it was raining Nicky stayed in the car, if not we walked the waters together. We ended up on a fishery that used to be rented by the Metropolitan Police Angling Club which I hadn’t fished for twenty five years. It is now in private hands but day tickets are available. I hoped it still contained a few of the pike I used to fish for even though it was now stocked with carp. Enquiries with the bailiffs proved this might be the case so I promised Nicky I would take him there in two days time on our next scheduled outing.

The next day I took another student, Khurum, to the same venue as I had been promising him some pike fishing too. We legered sea fish deadbaits as they were the only type allowed. I selected a swim where I knew there was a deeper chanel caused by barges when it was still a working gravel pit many years ago and we put out two rods, one with half a mackerel and the other with a sardine. Both rods were only two and a quarter pounds test curve as I had picked the swim the day before and I knew long casting would not be necessary. Pike do not fight all that hard and the light rods meant that even small pike would give some sport. We sat and chatted while I explained the rigs and the basic principles of pike fishing.

At about mid morning the left hand bite alarm sounded, the half makerel had become something’s lunch. Khurum struck quickly on my instructions, I did not want a deep hooked fish. The light rod bent well and after a short fight a large pike rolled into the net, both Khurum and his key worker Theo were amazed. She was a short stocky fish who had been feeding well despite the bailiff’s assertion there were no silver fish left in the lake.

I later found out that this was the last day of the pike fishing season on this fishery so unfortunately I was unable to keep my pike fishing promise to Nicky. I will make it up to him later.

Khurum’s photo has since featured on Sky TV’s Tight Lines.

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The winter term started quietly enough if a little uneventfully except for a fine carp caught by this young lad on his first lesson. He caught it on a four meter whip without elastic and a two and a half pound hook length. He was just big enough to catch it but not quite big enough to lift it!

Of course I look surprised, it should have broken his hook length with ease, it would have done if I’d hooked it in the last minutes of a match!

This time of year is my favourite for lure fishing for pike and a new student Nicky caught his first pike on a Shakespeare Big S plug from pit seven at Twynersh, shortly after the pike fishing season there opened. He is now a confirmed lure fisherman. Unfortunately the fishery then had a hammering and our next few sessions were blanks.

In November I started taking him to Royal Berkshire Fishery in Windsor where he has caught a lot of fish on a waggler, including this fine one pound nine ounce roach.

If I could catch roach like this from the river Kennet on a regular basis I would be a happy man.

Then it happened, the new ice age. The lakes were frozen for six weeks and it was too cold for the youngsters to sit by a river so I took them to the London Aquarium, Brooklands Museum and the Imperial War Museum.

At last it thawed and I was able to get Josh back on a river, this time the Thames at Windsor. This means repeated long feeder casts and then a wait watching a quivertip, not as stimulating as trotting a stick float on the Hampshire Avon but rewarding nevertheless.

This chub weighed five pounds three ounces and I sent the picture to Tight Lines on Sky Sports where it featured as a runner up in the Young Angler of the Month competition. I understand that Josh will nevertheless get a small prize but my reward turned out to be greater. I had a telephone call from Mick Brais from Tight Lines asking me to do a piece to camera on fishing with a centrepin and Wallis casting on the kind recomendation of Keith Arthur, so on 24th February I met Andy Ford and a cameraman on the Lower Itchen Fishery for the filming. I was quite nervous as my last attempt at making a film with Weller of the Yard was a disaster. This time I was made to feel at ease and soon picked up the technique of talking to the camera.

The result was shown on Tight Lines on Friday 5th March and can be viewed here (you might get a short advert at the start).

If any one is interested in the reel I was using, I reviewed it here.

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In early Autumn I returned to Britford for another coaching session, this time with Colin and his son Joe.. Their second lesson is featured here and their third here.
I knew this session would prove a very steep learning curve for both of them but at Colin’s suggestion I concentrated on coaching Joe, leaving Colin to take a back seat.

Joe took to fishing with a centrepin like a duck to water and was soon catching dace almost every cast, I even allowed him to use my latest aquisition, a Shakespeare Aerial Centenary centrepin nearly as old as him and in mint condition, which I had yet to use myself.

He quickly learned to feed the swim from a bait apron, a little every cast, whilst standing in the water in waders. Eventually a pike moved into the swim and the dace stopped feeding, so we moved to another spot.

Here after a quick lesson on the use of a bait dropper he caught some more dace and his first Avon grayling which he found, as many of us already know, very difficult to hold being like a bar of soap with muscles.

He also caught a fine roach that this stretch is famous for, not the biggest specimen but one that young Joe will remember. A truly beautiful fish which made me secretly quite jealous.

When the swim went quiet I took the opportunity to show him how to fish with bread flake and to use liquidised bread as loose feed. A longer trot further down the swim produced a couple of chub which gave him a good fight on fairly light tackle.

You can see from this picture how proud his Dad was of him, so was I. A wonderful day on a wonderful river.

Later that month we tried to duplicate the session on the river Kennet but it proved quite uneventful with Joe losing a big fish which turned out to be a double figure salmon that didn’t know it was hooked. When he turned it upstream and put as much pressure on it with his five pound hook length as he dared it rose in the water column which proved to me that it wasn’t the barbel I had hoped for. As we saw it, it saw us and bolted in the direction of Newbury, smashing Joe’s hook length with unbelievable power.

Joe was heartbroken and asked what he had done wrong and I told him nothing, he had no chance on such light tackle, it was out of season anyway and Joe had no salmon licence. He has the makings of a good river angler and I am looking foward to our next outing.

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Some of my students have expressed an interest in river fishing, I can’t imagine where that idea came from… (if you keep on about something for long enough they will eventually come to believe it was their idea). This obviously shows a great deal of wisdom, often beyond their years and a mature understanding of the finer points of angling!

So I gave in under immense pressure and took some of them river fishing over the summer.

I have worked with one lad, Josh, off and on for a couple of years. He is becoming quite a good angler and is developing a real love for the sport. So this summer I decided to give him a real treat. Up until then the only river he had fished was the tiny river Bourne near Chertsey and then only when it was carrying a little colour as its size dictates the fish will be too shy to feed in clear water. He had also seen the Thames but in summer - these days it is often little more than a long lake with no flow at all.

I cannot describe the expression on his face when we arrived on the banks of the Hampshire Avon at Britford near Salisbury. Here was a fast flowing, crystal clear river in which you could see the weed and the fish amongst it (with a little practice). He was totally captivated as so many of us have been in the past.

I had already shown him the basics of trotting with a centrepin and he was soon catching fish, mostly minnows but with some small chub and dace. His first bigger fish was this perch which he almost failed to recognise as it’s colours were so much brighter than the pale washed out perch he was used to in still water.

He fished on and the harder he practiced, the better he got. Josh even caught his first grayling and this chub.

He was becomming proficient enough to be able to cope without me hovering over him so to develop his own problem solving skills I moved a couple of swims downstream but still within earshot. I could still hear him if he shouted, in case he got into trouble or caught a big fish and I was downstream in case he fell in, in which case he would drift past me if he was unable to regain his feet…

This meant that I could do a bit of trotting on my own and equipped with my favourite rod and centrpin reel I started to fish a channel between the streamer weed about two rod lengths out. To reach this channel I used the Wallis cast, a method of casting with a centrepin reel that has achieved almost mythical status over the past few years (unjustly so, I believe.) I was soon catching roach, dace, grayling and small chub and was in a world of my own when I was joined quietly by Josh ( he must have listened to the lesson I gave about the need for stealth - frightened me half to death).

He had been watching me Wallis casting and asked how to do it, I explained that it was very difficult and required practice to develop the necessary coordination and timing. I mentioned how I had tried to teach more experienced and skilful anglers than he without much success. He asked if he could have a go but I didn’t want what had been a great day for him to end on a note of failure (besides the rod and reel I was using cost the price of a cheap second hand car!)

He persisted with his request and with a quiet prayer to my own patron saint (Jack Hargreaves, if you must know and if you don’t know who he is then that’s what google is for!). I explained what was required and handed over the rod.

As I expected, his first effort was a disaster and his second little better but no dreadful tangle resulted so I reached for the rod as a damage limitation measure but instead of admitting defeat or at worst throwing the rod down in frustration as he may well have done six months before, he said “I can do this!”.

I then switched into full coaching mode to minimise any damage to my tackle, still not believing he would be able to master it but within half an hour he was casting a medium sized stick float out to the channel I had been fishing previously. To say I was amazed at what he had achieved in such a short time would be an undestatement but it was explained that evening when I held a very low level debrief of the day with him and we decided that his success was explained by his expertise on the Xbox. Both require the ability to do two seperate actions with each hand simultaneously and Josh’s brain had already been trained to do just that.

It has made me re-think my attitude towards computer games.

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It has been eight months since I have updated this blog and I have spent the last three of them trying to think up a plausible excuse.

Yes, I have been busy coaching four or five days most weeks and the occasional weekend too but I have now got another coach working with me and he has taken some of the pressure off. His name is Alwyn Royans (yes he is a little bit Welsh but only in his ancestry). Like me he is an ex copper - we worked together at Heathrow and Paddington many years ago. Take a look at his website. I am sure he will prove a real asset.

In the summer term I continued working with school groups of all ages, as can be seen from the school uniforms - could you put a price on those smiles?

I also spent some time with older lads who had been with me before and were ready to learn more advanced methods, pole fishing in this case. I seem to remember that an element of heathy competition had crept in here!

Everyone always catches fish, mostly tench and carp but sometimes students benefit from a change of quarry and whilst I don’t really like stillwater bream, they are easy to catch, make a good trophy shot and respond to different methods.

I have also been working with father and son team Colin and Joe and they too have been bream fishing but they are more experienced and their quarry was larger.

Joe caught most fish at first with his Dad Colin fulfilling the role of spectator (but us Dads don’t mind that… MUCH!). He also caught this fine roach, all on banded pellet and a method feeder.

Colin came good at the finishing line with the best fish of the day.

Mostly my students want to catch carp and big ones too but it can be difficult to explain that to land a big carp they must improve their skills. The loss of their first big fish can be devastating for some youngsters so we work our way up the scale, gradually.

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Tench have always been my favourite stillwater fish, I think I caught my first one in about 1962. In those days tench were for grown up, proper anglers and us kids were happy with little perch and roach. So when I caught my first tench on a legered lobworm, it really was a turning point in my angling life and a milestone had been passed but my real ambition was to catch one on a float. Later that season I achieved that ambition too and catching them with float tackle has remained my favourite method.

Most of my stillwater fishing has been done in gravel pits and I soon learned that the tench in those young and sometimes vast expanses of water behaved differently from the estate lake fish that I read about in my youth. They would feed all day if you were lucky, they tended to be very mobile and difficult to hold in the swim but they often fed in the margins and could easily be caught with float tackle.

Since then I have caught many tench that way (I won’t use the old cliché of an orange tipped quill sitting amongst a patch of bubbles next to a lilly pad, oops! I just did!) but it has become more difficult with the changes to our stillwaters due to the introduction of carp. Over the years more and more waters were stocked with them to the detriment of the tench fishing, tench can’t compete with the larger carp. Tench fishing went into a decline so that it has become more difficult to find a lake where it is possible to float fish for tench without being smashed by unwanted carp.

I was discussing this with a young coach I met recently and he told me about a local lake he had heard of that still held a good head of tench and offered to fish it with me on my first visit. Will Barnard is a very capable angler with a vast knowledge of local waters and his description of the lake proved right. We met at about eight in the morning and both fished with feeder tactics in adjacent swims.

We both had one tench each but Will’s was slightly larger than mine.

He caught his fish very close in whilst mine came from a deep trench about three rod lengths out, so the next time I visited the lake I fished the margins with a centrepin and float tackle. The swims we had been fishing were both those horrible platforms extending out into the lake from between dense bankside vegetation. Still I suppose the platforms are preferable to removing the vegetation to make the fishing easier. This meant there was a good depth of water, about six feet within a rod length of the bank and I was able to fish under the rod tip from the bankside end of the platform so as not to scare the fish.

I chose to fish balls of paste under a pole float on a five pound hook length over a bed of ground bait, pellet and hemp. The day produced three tench, the last one weighing seven pound and seven ounces, the best tench I have had for a couple of years.

Five pound twelve ounce tench

Four pound eight ounce male tench

Seven pound seven ounce tench

All these fish fought like tigers and I thoroughly enjoyed the day but late in the afternoon I tried a piece of prawn, having fed a few chopped free samples during the day, in the hope of hooking an even bigger tench. My bait was taken by something that stripped thirty yards of line from my centrepin before turning back and kiting into the roots ten yards to my right. Not a tench but a carp I suspect but I will never know because it transfered my hook into the roots and I straightened it trying to pull it out…

I have been looking for such a fishery since I moved here and it turns up fifteen minutes drive from my home, well done Will!

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At last a fishing programme by the same maker as A Passion For Angling has made it on to mainstream television. This morning at 7 am. Channel 4 broadcast Catching The Impossible.

This series of films is made by angler and wild life photographer Hugh Miles who fimed and directed A Passion For Angling, featuring Chris Yates and Bob James. It features well known actor and one time recording artist Bernard Cribbins, who did the narration for Passion For Angling and Martin Bowler, noted specimen angler. It took five years and nearly half a million pounds to produce and was turned down by the BBC because it showed “fish under stress” and therefore did not fit in with the Beatrix Potter image their management like to promote.

I have seen the entire series - I bought the boxed DVD set at the Carp Society Show at Sandown earlier this year and had a chance to have a short chat with Hugh who has long been one of my heros for his wild life documentary photography. He is also a fanatical angler with a great enthusiasm for roach fishing on rivers.

This series is even better than the classic Passion For Angling and will appeal to anglers and non anglers alike. It is a quality series not having been “dumbed down” for the mass audience like so many angling programmes and I will watch my copy again and again. I encourage you all to give up your Sunday morning lay in, go fishing a bit later or set your recorder to tape it. The series is being shown until the 1st August and if it gets enough viewers then perhaps it will encourage more stations to show it and more programmes to be made.

Let’s face it, there are one and a half million anglers in this country and most of them have a TV licence but the BBC turned it down and the best slot the other TV companies can manage is 7 am. on a Sunday morning when most anglers are out of the house…

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I have been promising Jordan some serious carp fishing since the start of the last ice age that masqueraded as our winter and today I took him to Royal Berkshire Fishery to try for carp using conventional carp tackle. I had set up two carp rods with baitrunner reels, one with a helicopter rig and the other with an ordinary lead clip, both had leadcore leaders and flourocarbon hook lengths. The hooks were attached with knotless knots (love the music). On one hair I fitted a 10mm pellet surrounded with paste and on the other I mounted a small tiger nut popped up with two pieces of bouyant plastic sweetcorn. Both rigs were sealed into PVA bags filled with pellets before being cast out to the margins of an island.

While we waited for our first bite I explained the differences of the two rigs and how they were constructed, then I showed him how to tie the knotless knot and let him practice tying one for himself. He found the most difficult part was tying a small enough loop to form the hair (as I do myself.) The carp gave us just enough time for me to complete my lesson and for Jordan to get sufficient knot tying practice before the first run occurred.

It was the rod with the popped up tiger nut and after a brief fight this fish came to the net.

A fine common carp.

Then it was the turn of the other rod.

A second common carp.

He caught five carp in all including this last fish, a personal best for him. All but one came on the small paste covered pellets.

This fish weighed 9lbs 15oz

His expression might suggest that he was disappointed that the fish was one ounce short of being a “double” but Jordan has been taught, as have all my students, that the value of a fish is not measured in numbers but by your enjoyment in catching it. He enjoyed catching all five.

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On Monday I took Josh to a fishery I had never fished before - Lizard Fishery at West Drayton is closer to Josh’s home than most of the venues I normally use. On our arrival we met the baillif and he briefed us on the myriad of rules and after catching a small carp on a waggler I opted for a method feeder with a small piece of luncheon meat on the hook, sweetcorn and boilies not being allowed.

Josh caught four decent carp in the next couple of hours and polished his fish playing skills.

Josh’s biggest ever carp.

Then the baillif returned and said he had forgotten to tell us that both method feeders and groundbait were also forbidden and that this was not mentioned on the exhaustive list of banned baits and methods on the sign post in the car park…

WHOOPS!

As the old News of the World reporters used to do, “we made our excuses and left”. Josh had a great day and finally caught the carp that I had been promising him since we started fishing together. Job done!

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At last we are beginning to catch some fish now that the water is warming up and I am starting to get some better results on my coaching courses. The small carp at Longmoor are feeding freely and while they may not be very big, there are plenty of them. A great place for beginners or those who want to get their “string pulled” again after a cold winter.

Last year I had the privilege of giving a father and son team their first lesson and after one cancelled lesson during the winter, we met again at Twynersh where I took them bream fishing on the match lake. Both had a quick refresher lesson on the waggler and I set up a method feeder for each of them as well.

Joe caught fifty or so roach, perch and rudd including this one on the waggler, all on his new rod but the method feeder produced the best fish especially this 1lb 4oz roach.

He also caught about a dozen bream, topped by this 6lb 4oz fish.

His dad Colin also caught small fish on the waggler and some bream on the “method” including this one at 5lb 7oz.

A long and very tiring day but very satisfying. I am so lucky to be able to do this for a living, at least now the warmer weather is here.

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Much has being written over the last few years about the decline of fish stocks, in both quality and quantity, caused by the influx of non indiginous species to the freshwater environment of the UK and also by some species that have been re introduced where they had died out.

Discussion became hysteria a few short years ago with the spread of cormorants to most of our British inland water ways. Contrary to common belief, it seems that these birds were not driven inland by hunger caused by over fishing of the seas around our coast but came from an inland colony of birds in Denmark, according to Dr. Stuart Piertney in his article Big greedy British cormorants : where do they come from?

They have devastated many fisheries and have changed the face of freshwater fishing forever. I do not believe there is any need to go into details here about how many fish a cormorant can eat or how large a specimen it can swallow but as long as they are a protected species there is little hope of reversing the damage.

Signal crayfish were the next problem to come to light. Introduced to the UK as a food species in the 1970’s, these crustaceans escaped from their landlocked ponds into Britain’s rivers and rapidly spread. They are carriers of “crayfish plague” which has attacked the UK’s native crayfish and depleted their numbers greatly. In addition, they threaten fish stocks through predating on their eggs, damage banks and make fishing a bait on the bottom almost impossible in some areas. There are so many in some of our waters that they are in danger of wiping out fish stocks by eating their eggs but trapping seems to have little effect.

Otters, although originally widely spread in this country, died out in many areas by the first part of the last century. Not, as some would have us believe, by hunting - otter hunting with dogs was mostly ineffective - but by pollution and water abstraction damaging the environment in which the fish they fed on lived. Not enough fish, no otters!

The disciples of Beatrix Potter (or the bunny huggers) then took a hand and decided it would be wonderful if we had some otters back in our rivers. A restocking program was born but no one thought to ask why the otters had died out in the first place or what these new otters would eat in their new homes. In many places much had changed in the passing of time - the freshwater eel, once a major part of the otter’s diet, was in terminal decline and the area had blossomed with the growth of still water commercial fisheries caused by the same decline in river quality that had seen off the otters.

These fisheries represented a major monetary investment in fish stock by the owners and were often situated in river valleys. Where do you think the otters reintroduced into those rivers went for lunch when they found the rivers still had no fish in them? As you know, these commercials as they are known, are heavily stocked with large, slow moving fish that had no experience of such predators. The result was very expensive carnage and a lot of very upset anglers.

The result is that the bird watchers are happy, lots more birds to watch or count or whatever they do. The bunny huggers are happy with more cute furry animals about but I can’t think of anyone who is happy about the signal crayfish except those whose supply the restaurant trade and probably imported them in the first place.

Anglers, of course, all have their feathers ruffled up in indignation and are complaining to anyone who will listen (mostly each other!) but before you shout too loudly from your righteous high horse, think about the damage that we as anglers have done to the environment in the name of our sport!

Now I’m going to get controversial because I don’t just mean litter on the banks. We have imbalanced the environment we are so keen to preach to others about by introducing species of fish that weren’t there to begin with. Barbel being probably the least of our offences as they were at least indigenous to some parts of the country since the last ice age but just before the turn of the last century (1896) barbel were stocked into the Dorset Stour and the Hampshire Avon for the first time and since then they have been introduced to many other rivers such as the Severn, the Warwickshire and Bristol Avons, the Wye and their tributaries. I love my barbel fishing as much as the next man but barbel have a dramatic effect on the stock of any river they colonise, they out-compete the smaller species and the bigger fish are quite predatory.

Zander and catfish are other non indigious species that have been introduced for the benefit of our sport and in many places these apex predators have had disasterous effects. Did we really need two more predatory species when water quality was already beginning to suffer?

Yes, you knew I was going to go after the “sacred cow” next. Carp have been here a long time but they are not an indigenous species. Some people say the Romans introduced them and others say they did not arrive until the Middle Ages but before 1900 there were so few of them about that one angling writer said it was not worth fishing for them because life was too short. They can now be found in almost every bit of fresh water, rivers, canals and lakes as well as, seemingly every puddle that doesn’t dry up over the summer and the number of fisheries that are poorer for their presence, such as good tench lakes, are beyond count. They are not even proper natural carp as were originally found around the Black Sea in Eastern Europe but cultivated, ornamental, table varieties, selectively bred to grow big and fast and prone to every disease that fish farms encourage. Their introduction, legal or otherwise, has changed coarse fishing beyond all recognition since my childhood - the sport has come to depend on these frail mutants and perhaps carp fishing has changed anglers too.

The trouble is that it is quite easy to introduce a species to an environment, their survival instincts do a lot of the hard work but it is very difficult to remove them again after you have realised your mistake.

Remember what we anglers have done when you complain about others messing with the environment.

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What an awful winter, it seemed to go on for ages and I don’t know if it’s my age but this one really seemed to get me down. The lakes I use for coaching were frozen for six weeks and all the rivers were full of snow melt. It was difficult to tempt the young ones away from their nice warm play stations and out into the fresh air and the few days I had to myself were disasters.

It at least gave me time to look back over the previous year, through all the politics that have bedevilled our sport and I will share some of my thoughts with you.
The highlight of my fishing year was not, in fact, the big Avon roach I caught in the January but this fish I caught at Sparsholt College during a coaches day out.

I have read about these beautiful fish for years and this was the first golden tench I had ever caught and you don’t get many “firsts” at my age. Death might be the next one!

The Angling Trust, which I anticipated would be the savior of our sport, has taken a long time to get going and I believe this was down to an appalling business plan at the start and some people in the beginning thinking they knew more than the very experienced people who were offering good advice on the setting up of such an important organisation. They thought they knew what anglers needed but didn’t bother to consult them. It almost failed in its first year and yet they still ignored the offers of help and advice given by those who rallied around to support it. It remains to be seen what happens at the AGM, when some people will have to answer for their decisions.

My contribution was to help run the AT stands at the Carp Society show at Sandown Park in November and at the “Big One” tackle sale at Farnborough in February, working alongside Keith Arthur and Ruth Lockwood. Between the two shows we gained over 100 new members for the AT. The big benefit came at the Carp Society show where I was able to meet fanatical roach fisherman and wildlife photographer Hugh Miles. He filmed the famous angling series Passion For Angling which many of you will have seen on the television and was publicising his new series Catching the Impossible. I have bought the full series on DVD, it is the best angling series I have ever seen and is responsible for me not troubling Ebay with all my fishing tackle this winter. Well worth £75, the kids will really enjoy it.

The Professional Anglers Association, whose course got me started in coaching all those years ago, finally imploded with its own internal political problems. These had been coming to a head for a couple of years and I resigned from the association last spring before it got messy. It would seem a minority of members had seized control of the association and were running it for their own dubious ends. The existing members now seem to have regained control of the direction of the association and hopefuly it will become the coaches support organisation it was originally intended to be.

I will continue to support the AT and hope soon to see the way clear to rejoin the PAA, both organisations require members to concentrate on their positive points and work on their negative ones. Why do so many organisations seem to work on the basis that they know what’s best for their members but never consult them?

As I said at the start, spring is finally here and I have already started courses that are producing results for the young people. They are catching from Royal Berkshire Fishery and Longmoor is producing Rudd, Tench and small Carp including these two.

A small common carp

A beautifully marked mirror carp.

Due to the demands on my time last autumn I have engaged the services of another coach, Alwyn Royans who I know from my days in the police is in possession of much more empathy than his CID background would suggest and I am sure he will be a great asset to myself and our students. I am looking forward to working with him.

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Image credit: Broken-Arts

Are you looking for the ideal Chistmas gift for a friend or relative who fishes? Tackle is a difficult choice as it can be very much a personal preference and buying an item of tackle that the angler already has can be embarassing (let’s be frank, I don’t even know what I’ve already got…).

So why not buy a year’s membership to the Angling Trust! This is the new, single organisation to represent all game, coarse and sea anglers in England. They will lobby government, campaign on environmental and angling issues and run national and international competitions. They will increase participation in angling by people of all ages and backgrounds. They will fight pollution, commercial over-fishing at sea, over-abstraction, poaching, unlawful navigation, local bans and a host of other threats to angling. You will not only show that you are thinking about them at the festive season but you will be helping them to make a real contribution to the sport that they love and helping the Angling trust at the same time. Any angler worth his salt should be a member.An excellent gift for the new angler as it will get them involved in their first angling community and give them a feeling of belonging.

Members get the following benefits all for just twenty pounds a year, the ideal present for any angler and if you pay by direct debit then the gift will be renewed each year. One less present to worry about each Christmas!

Menbership applications are here.

The trust says

The Angling Trust is here to represent you and to ensure the future of our sport. Help us to help you, stand up and be counted, join today. You can support the Angling Trust for less than 39p a week and get several great member benefits. Your subscription is important, it will make your voice heard. The more anglers who join, the louder our voice and the more we will achieve - for you the angler.

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At the end of August I wrote a post about how our chance to get all anglers speaking with one voice was likely to fail with disastrous effects to the future of our sport. It made depressing reading and I apologise for that, but the one glimmer of hope in the whole post was a letter from a group that has now become known as the Magnificent Seven and I make no apologies for republishing it here.

The following letter was recently sent to the Trust and gives us a glimmer of hope:

OPEN LETTER DATED AUGUST 10th 2009
ADDRESSED TO BOARD OF THE ANGLING TRUST

Dear Sirs

It is with deepest concern that we contact you regarding the development of the Angling Trust.

For far too long, anglers have needed a professionally run, representative body, and the launch of the Angling Trust in January 2009 was a major step forward towards greater unity in angling.

We believe the Angling Trust has provided an initial framework to the path of true representation and the merging board has created a valuable structure, but news of overspending combined with a failing business plan is extremely worrying although not that surprising.

Our concerns at this stage arise primarily from the continuing lack of engagement with AT members, and the angling community as a whole, particularly on sensitive issues. There is a wealth of first hand angling, industry and media experience that appears to have been largely ignored by the current board. Therefore, it is with this in mind, that we all offer our support services, without charge, to the Angling Trust as a “collective” advisory board. The absence of individuals that anglers recognise, trust and respect is clearly apparent at all levels of the Angling Trust.

In addition, there is obviously and immediate need to review the failing business plan currently in place. Once again, where applicable, we would like to offer our experience in business development, marketing and finance at no cost, to help secure the immediate continuation and sustainable development of the Angling Trust in the future.

We trust that the current AT board will be addressing these concerns and await your earliest response.

Signed by:

John Wilson, Keith Arthur, Danny Fairbrass, Martin Bowler, Ruth Lockwood, John Everard, Tim Norman

This group - who I will in future refer to as the M7 - are all very busy people and it was decided that an advisory panel of fifteen anglers from all disciplines, under the chairmanship of John Wilson, was needed to spread the workload. I needed to be on that panel so I started to make representations to everyone I could think of. I made a list of ideas collected from many sources and I understand this was referred to on the first meeting of the M7.
(more…)

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I am a great fan of the internet, it gives me instant access to a great deal of information and enables me to share my views on various matters with other people all over the world, it is probably the best thing that has happened to communication since the discovery of the electro magnetic wave.

But the great freedom of expression that enables me to publish this post is also available to fraudsters and extremists and allows the spreading of lies and propaganda without any accountability. You can read here about my catches but you have no way of authenticating what I write. I could be anyone in the world and although I do publish my telephone number, I could be practicing a great deception for my own purposes.

The dangers of this were brought home to me this week when I received a circular email from a friend for whom I have a great deal of respect.

Do you agree ?

Hit the nail on the head!

An incident occurred in a supermarket recently, when the following was witnessed:

A Muslim woman dressed in a Burkha (A black gown & face mask) was standing with her shopping in a queue at the checkout.

When it was her turn to be served, and as she reached the cashier, she made a loud remark about the English Flag lapel pin, which the female cashier was wearing on her blouse.

The cashier reached up and touched the pin and said, ‘Yes, I always wear it proudly. My son serves abroad with the forces and I wear it for him’.

The Muslim woman then asked the cashier when she was going to stop bombing and killing her countrymen, explaining that she was Iraqi.

At that point, a Gentleman standing in the queue stepped forward, and interrupted with a calm and gentle voice, and said to the Iraqi woman:

‘Excuse me, but hundreds of thousands of men and women, just like this ladies son have fought and sacrificed their lives so that people just like YOU can stand here, in England , which is MY country and allow you to blatantly accuse an innocent check-out cashier of bombing YOUR countrymen’.

‘It is my belief that if you were allowed to be as outspoken as that in Iraq , which you claim to be YOUR country, then we wouldn’t need to be fighting there today’.

‘However - now that you have learned how to speak out and criticise the English people who have afforded you the protection of MY country, I will gladly pay the cost of a ticket to help you pay your way back to Iraq ‘.

‘When you get there, and if you manage to survive for being as outspoken as what you are here in England , then you should be able to help straighten out the mess which YOUR Iraqi countrymen have got you into in the first place, which appears to be the reason that you have come to MY country to avoid.’

Apparently the queue cheered and applauded.

IF YOU AGREE… Pass this on to all of your proud English friends..
I just did……………!!!

Support Our Troops.

It took me a two or three days to take in all the inferences of this story and I read it a couple of times before I truly realised what a nasty piece of fiction it most definitely was. The cynical old copper in me recognised the elements of a made up story, it was too perfect and totally unattributable [1].

No mention was made of where or when it happened, no witnesses were named, it read like the old style “voluntary statements” attributed to suspects in the bad old days of the sixties by inexperienced young coppers. Weller of the yard will know what I mean!

I took a great deal of care in composing the following email in reply and I hope the people that read it will think more carefuly about the things they read, receive and forward on the web.

I have read this with some dismay, not expecting to receive such racist drivel from someone I respect as much as I do you.

The dialogue is too perfect to be true, no names or locations are mentioned and when, in this sort of discussion, was one speaker able to deliver such a precise monologue without interuption or abuse?

This has obviously been contrived, either wholly or in part just to encourage the racial distrust that is genetically programmed into each and every one of us but which, as civilised adults, we should strive to suppress. Even if it were true and the poor woman was misguided enough to believe her statement, what purpose is to be gained by broadcasting it on the internet, other than to foster racial hatred, thereby playing into the hands of the extremists on both sides?

This wonderful country of ours has always been a haven for migrants of one form or another, be they, as in our distant past, invaders or more recently as refugees. Over time they have been absorbed into this great nation of ours and have often been a great benefit, we have always been a nation of mongerels, absorbing the ideas and cultures of our guests and we have become stronger because of it.

Of course it is tragic that our forces are being killed in Afganistan and Iraq and as an ex regular soldier I feel the loss more than most but this is something to be taken up with the politicians and not held against those who have sought sanctuary in our country to escape from this violence.

I also served as a police officer in some of the most racially diverse areas of London, I am aware of the problems these people face and the vulnerability they suffer as strangers in a strange country having lost so much. This sort of story only fosters that feeling of isolation and may encourage beliefs such as those attributed to the Iraqi woman in this piece.

This sort of propaganda was one of the ways that hatred of the Jews was encouraged in pre war Germany and that resulted in the Holocaust.

I will always support our soldiers abroad but fostering racial distrust can only make their job more difficult and I will not be passing this on to anyone.

Martin

Someone once said that all that is needed for evil to prevail is for good men to do nothing.

Remember before you pass any of these stories on to your friends that credibility is like virginity - it can only be lost once.

[1] This story has been seen in various forms on the internet for many a year, try searching for any part of the text, excluding the home nation since it is “reported” variously as stemming from the wearing of English, Scottish and British, Australian and undoubtedly other country flags.

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We anglers are famous for our stories. Non anglers would call some of them lies, but this would be to ignore the mythical element of our sport and I will try to explain what I mean.

Fishing is about much more than just catching a few fish. The angler, whether he realises it or not, is going back to his deepest roots when he ventures on to the river bank, seashore or lake side, he is dabbling with a world that in his not too distant past was full of mysteries. Many civilisations even worshiped water spirits and made votive offerings to their Gods by throwing valuable items into water. Only recently has science been able to explain what goes on beneath the surface of the water that covers seven tenths of our planet.

We rely even in these modern times on the water that is our rivers, lakes and seas, even now it is still a mater of life and death but in times gone by, without our knowledge of science you can see how water and the aquatic environment gained its air of mystery - and let us not forget that our most remote ancestors came from that same water. Myths and legends have grown up around almost every expanse of water from springs, to small streams, rivers, lakes and of course the sea. As fishing evolved from a means of feeding your familly to a sport it has encompassed this atmosphere of mythology and myths have become part of angling .Think how stories have grown around many fisheries about the huge fish that are purported to live in them - in my youth it was always pike but now huge carp or catfish have replaced them and how they devoured small dogs, even children, smashed tackle after fights lasting many hours and they seemed to live for ever. These stories often featured grandfathers who had seen these monsters as young boys and yet they were still said to inhabit the same waters fifty or sixty years later. Angling has never let science get in the way of a good story and even those of us who publicly laugh at these legends are intrigued by them and part of us wish they could be true.

Don’t we all hope to catch a fish much bigger than anything else the venue has produced, even if it is a recently dug and stocked commercial fishery? And for me, rivers have even more mystery as none one can say for sure what fish may be in front of me.

Can you blame the angler, immersed in this mythical world, who exaggerates the size of the fish he lost or adds a few ounces to the weight of one that he caught?

Now before my regular readers begin to wonder if I have lost the plot or gone all mystical I will tell you why I have written the above. Something strange happened to me in the wilds of Essex a couple of weeks ago when I was doing some coaching for Nick Watkins on one of the taster days he organised, that may well have been considered a myth had there not been a couple of professional coaches and a number of members of the public as witnesses.

I was demonstating to a student how to hit bites on eight metres of pole and for once I was holding the pole. I was fishing with an eight millimetre soft pellet on a size fourteen hook when the float dipped and I struck into what I thought was one small fish.

As my quarry came to the surface I saw not one but two fish so I carefully netted them and called to Nick who was nearby.

You can see on this picture that the hook length goes through the lip of the small mirror carp and the hook is securely lodged in the lip of the bigger brown goldfish. Two fish on the same hook at the same time, first time in forty eight years of angling.

My explanation is as follows. The mirror carp took the pellet and while it was between in its lips the brown goldfish used its size to snatch the bait. The small fish must have been already hooked at this time, with the hook point outside its mouth and the larger fish pulled the hook through the lip of the smaller one only to have it lodged in his own lip.

Perhaps in twenty or thirty years time my grandson Oliver or his brother William will tell the story of how their grandad once caught two fish on the same hook at the same time. A myth… but we know better, don’t we?

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I am an old man, 60 seasons have come and gone since I was stocked into the fishery that is this world of ours and I like to think that I may have picked up a little wisdom during all that time. Very little of this was free, indeed I paid quite heavily for a lot of it but I will pass one particular gem on to you for nothing.

All you anglers (and many non anglers) are worriers and are always ready to complain about what ever it is that worries you. Get a couple of anglers together and the complaints will start - the immigrants/cormorants/crayfish are eating all our fish, there are too many/not enough silver fish or carp, or the carp in such and such place are dying from some disease or other. The list is endless.

I was once told by a man I respected greatly, in an organisation whose initials are AA and has nothing to do with motoring, that worries should be dealt with in the following way. He said,“There are two categories of things that people worry about: things that they can do nothing about, in which case, why worry about them and things they can do something about, in which case, stop worrying about them and do something to solve the problem.” I have tried to follow this axim over the last few years and whilst it has not stopped me worrying it has given me a measure of “peace of mind”.

It is a difficult way to live, it is so much easier to complain about the way things are and how someone should do something rather than get your bum off your seatbox and actually do something or empower someone who has the required skills to force some change or other.

I pointed out to my readers their chance to take such action in my post on the 18th January about the formation of the new Angling Trust and I said all anglers needed to join this organisation to give us a combined voice to protect the future of our sport.

Well, the majority of the apathetic anglers in this country didn’t bother to put their hands in their pockets and join because someone else would do it and everything would be alright! Now we are in danger of losing our last chance, we have burned our boats by combining all the failing angling groups into one and that is about to fail too. Not because of political pressure or the difficulty of the task but purely because Joe Angling Public could not be bothered and didn’t care enough about the future of his/her sport. Neither did the tackle trade or the clubs or the Angling Press, every one just thought they didn’t need to get involved someone else would do it for them.

Perhaps I am being unfair, maybe the launch of the Angling Trust and its purpose and value to the sport was not well publicised but in a number of my tirades in tackle shops and on the river bank (yes I am a bit of an Angling Trust evangelist) I have been told, after my argument in favour of joining proved too strong, “I’ll wait and see how it goes before I join”. The fact that I haven’t slapped anyone is only because of my advancing years and the fact that most of them are bigger than me!

As you may have seen in the angling press the Angling Trust is in trouble due to the shortage of members.

Angling Trust announces restructuring

The Angling Trust has announced a number of cuts to its central operations in Nottingham and Leominster. Despite widespread publicity and the distribution of half a million membership leaflets, the level of recruitment has to date, fallen below expectations. This shortfall, along with higher than expected costs, is threatening the viability of the Trust.

Membership shortfall
Of 4 million anglers less than 1% have joined the Trust – many more were expected to have signed up and, despite thousands of further members of former organisations due to renew in the remaining months of the year, the Board was not confident the organisation could continue to provide sufficient service to members without making savings.

This shortfall, added to difficulties created by the merger, presented a difficult situation which could only be rectified by reducing the overheads of the organisation. Consequently deep cuts have been made and a number of staff have been made redundant.

“Angling needs the Angling Trust” - Chairman

“These measures are necessary to balance the Angling Trust’s books. It is difficult to conceal the board’s disappointment in the response we have had from anglers. However, we expect to be able to continue at a satisfactory level of service.” said Dr Stephen Marsh-Smith, the Trust’s chairman.

“More than ever before, angling needs representation at national level to continue the fight against pollution, inadequate legislation, illegal canoeing, poaching, predation and all the other threats facing angling today.

Angling needs to have a strong body to promote our unique sport, increase participation and ensure that the whole business flourishes. For only £20 per angler, this can easily be done, but we need every individual angler to join as a member themselves, as well as their clubs and sponsorship from all those who benefit from the £3billion angling business.

Anyone can join the Trust today and ensure the sport is represented at a national and international level by completing an application form, visiting www.anglingtrust.net or calling 0844 7700616.” he continued.

Chief Executive Mark Lloyd stated:
“Anglers need to imagine what the future might look like without a national body to represent their needs, and join the Angling Trust now. We have worked very hard before and after the merger to develop the national body but it seems that too many anglers think that others will support the cause for them. Anglers have to realise that having a central body representing their interests, protecting their angling and campaigning to ensure we can all go fishing tomorrow does require a commitment from everyone today.”

Latest development

The following letter has just been sent to the Trust and gives us a glimmer of hope:

OPEN LETTER DATED AUGUST 10th 2009
ADDRESSED TO BOARD OF THE ANGLING TRUST

Dear Sirs

It is with deepest concern that we contact you regarding the development of the Angling Trust.
For far too long, anglers have needed a professionally run, representative body, and the launch of the Angling Trust in January 2009 was a major step forward towards greater unity in angling.

We believe the Angling Trust has provided an initial framework to the path of true representation and the merging board has created a valuable structure, but news of overspending combined with a failing business plan is extremely worrying although not that surprising.

Our concerns at this stage arise primarily from the continuing lack of engagement with AT members, and the angling community as a whole, particularly on sensitive issues. There is a wealth of first hand angling, industry and media experience that appears to have been largely ignored by the current board. Therefore, it is with this in mind, that we all offer our support services, without charge, to the Angling Trust as a “collective” advisory board. The absence of individuals that anglers recognise, trust and respect is clearly apparent at all levels of the Angling Trust.

In addition, there is obviously and immediate need to review the failing business plan currently in place. Once again, where applicable, we would like to offer our experience in business development, marketing and finance at no cost, to help secure the immediate continuation and sustainable development of the Angling Trust in the future.

We trust that the current AT board will be addressing these concerns and await your earliest response.

Signed by:
John Wilson, Keith Arthur, Danny Fairbrass, Martin Bowler, Ruth Lockwood, John Everard, Tim Norman

Well there you have it, a challenge. If you have bothered to read this far then you care about our sport and presumably already belong to the Trust but there is more you can do. Convince other anglers to join too, ask your local tackle shop, club and fishery if they are members and if not, ask them why, if they depend on the sport for their income, they have not joined.

The reason I have not posted here since the middle of July is that, along with a number of other Angling Trust registered coaches all over the country, I have been working hard to introduce more people to our sport on various functions. These efforts and those of years gone by, along with all the other hard work done by the Angling Trust board members and their predecessors, will all be wasted if our sport goes into decline, as it will, without our voices being heard in the corridors of power.

Anglers out there happily pay £10 for a day on their chosen commercial fishery, two days would buy them an Angling Trust membership and safeguard the future of their sport.

If our sport is to decline all anglers need to do is NOTHING!

Let’s show we care about our sport.

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