Last Thursday I was back at Twynersh Fisheries for a full day of coaching. I had a normal beginners’ course at 10 a.m. and a special two hour course at 4 p.m. The morning course was with Dad Terry, his son Charlie and his friend Daniel. All were virtual beginners and were started off with whips after the casting exercise.

As usual everyone caught lots of fish, including a bream caught by Charlie who had a natural ability but Daniel worked very hard to keep up with him and both boys learned very quickly.

Charlie with first fish

Daniel and small bream

Charlie with bigger bream

Terry was reluctant to have his fish photographed after Charlie’s bream but he caught his share, although his main interest was the boys’ sport. If I had been that selfless years ago then maybe my two sons would be fishing today.

I had arrived at the fishery at 7.30 a.m. to get my favourite swim and to get the tackle set up well before the first course. By mid afternoon I was already quite tired, coaching three beginners involves a lot of running about, baiting hooks, unhooking fish and untangling tackle. At the end of the lesson I had an hour and a half to make running repairs to the rigs before Julia was due to arrive with her family.

The second session was of a type I have never attempted before as two of the boys were five years old and the third was only seven. This is below my usual eight years old lower limit but Julia had communicated their enthusiasm so well in her telephone call I deided to make an exception. Due to their age we had decided to limit the course to two hours as children this young tend to have shorter attention spans.

Many of the techniques I have used in the past with older students failed to work with these youngsters and I had to develop new ones “on the hoof” as we went along. The boys were not the only ones on a steep learning curve. Nevertheless it went well and once again everyone caught fish.

Youngster with first fish1

Youngster with first fish2

Youngster with first fish3

Lots of fish were caught and I was run ragged between the three youngsters, anglers so young have more problems than their older counterparts and much more for the coach to deal with. I enjoyed the new experience immensely but was not all that sorry when the end of the lesson came.

I will have to think some more about running shorter lessons for younger students, this one was so much fun.

If you'd like to leave a comment on this post, here's how.