The Fishing Coach

The summer is on its way and it really makes a change to be able to leave my fleece and waterproofs at home when I’m coaching. I’ve also had a couple more days at Marsh Farm and my season’s best crucian is now three pounds nine ounces.

I had forgotten my camera but Nathan Walter, a fellow Wasing member, took this picture for me. He told me that an article I wrote some years ago for the magazine Coarse Angling Today had been reproduced in a book called Barbel; A handbook of techniques published in HARDBACK (a proper book like you get in libraries!)

I am so chuffed about this that, as those of you on my mailing list already know, I have emailed everyone I can think of using the same title as this post. Some off you have not realised I was making a joke at my own expense and have replied asking the date of the signing, I hope I am not going to have to organise one. The downside is that because I was paid for the original article I get no royalties when this book sweeps the best seller list…

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Once again my tackle store come workshop has become a victim to my untidy nature and I have been having trouble just moving about in there, let alone looking for things. It was time to call in my tidy up expert Tayler Clark who happened to be on Easter holidy from college. He came to stay for four days and expressed an interest in learning to fly fish.

We could not fish the rivers due to the close season, so I took him to Moorhen Trout Fishery which is set in the beautiful Meon valley in Hampshire. This is not the type of fly fishing that I usually do, being a still water but is the ideal place to take a beginner. The banks are kept well cut, there are not too many trees to catch the beginner’s back cast and these places are usually well stocked.

On Thursday morning we arrived at the fishery to find the staff very helpful and I began Tayler’s first casting lesson on a large lawned area beside the lodge. I have been coaching Tayler for nearly eight years and he is already an accomplished caster with a fixed spool reel and coarse tackle but he found fly casting a very steep learning curve. However, within thirty minutes or so he had grasped the basics and was ready for a fly with a hook instead of the piece of wool he had been practicing with.

On the lake he struggled with his timing as all beginners do but was soon casting a long enough line to fish with and we worked on the finer points of his technique and his timing throughout the day. Unfortuately the fish did not cooperate, probably due to my inexperience in fly choice but he did get two takes and a couple of follows which were enough to generate enthusiasm for this branch of our sport. His casting improved by leaps and bounds through out the session and as we packed up at the end of the day we were discussing what to do the next day, the owner told Tayler that as he had not caught he now had a £10 credit towards his next ticket. This made his mind up and he wanted to come back in the following morning.

I telephoned Keith Dipper a friend of mine who is a fly fishing coach and asked him if he would come the next day to polish Tayler’s casting and try and make sure he caught a fish.

On Friday morning we picked Keith up at his home beside the river Itchen in Winchester and drove to Moorhen once more. I paid for all the tickets since we were partially using Keiths coaching skills and I decided to fish as well. Tayler must have been practicing in his sleep or at least thinking hard about what he had learnt the day before because his casting was much improved apart from the occasional lapse of concentration. Keith was very surprised that he had only touched a fly rod for the first time the day before.

Small black buzzers were the going fly and Tayler caught his first trout under Keith’s guidance, it weighed two and a quarter pounds and my warnings about the speed of these rainbow trout had not prepared him for the vigorous fight.

His second trout was four ounces bigger.

I was fishing with a lighter five weight outfit as I do not own the same range of fly fishing tackle as I do coarse tackle and this four pound rainbow took quite a while to bank.

When I add these two days to another good day at Marsh Farm it was a pretty good week.

A three pound six ounce Crucian carp caught at Marsh Farm it was one of two caught both over three pounds on a size twenty hook to two pound line.

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I have just got home from a long, difficult coaching session and I found the following email waiting amongst the usual load of spam.

Hi Martin,

You probably don’t remember me and my son Charlie. You tutored Charlie on two fishing trips, the first at Thorpe where I brought a friend’s son with us. The second trip was to a lake in the Wokingham/Arborfield area, where you spent all day making sure charlie caught fish and enjoyed himself (I had fun that day too!).

Well to cut a long story short, I finally gave up with the golf clubs and decided to take up fishing again properly. Initially this was because I now live 50 yards from the beach in Rustington West Sussex and I was gifted some sea fishing tackle. However I recently purchased a job lot of coarse tackle from ebay and I now do both types of angling.
The great tution that you gave Charlie in those two sessions meant that he was keen to come coarse fishing with me and we had our first expedition together on Wednesday at a local day ticket water (Passies Ponds). I have always been sport mad but Charlie never really enjoyed any of the sports and so it has always been difficult to find something that him and I can both do together. It was therefore a very special day for me. It couldn’t have started any better, Charlie caught an 8lbs Mirror first cast! This was followed by 5 Bream up to 5lbs. The highlight of the day came toward the end of our session when Charlie caught an 18lb 2oz Common! He did everything himself, playing the fish beautifully on 10lbs line, a size 10 hook and using a 1.5lb test curve quiver rod. All through the 10 minute fight he kept saying “Martin told me to keep the rod up, Martin told me not to panic, Martin told me………..etc etc. I have attached a picture (he wasn’t confident enough to pick the fish up and didn’t want to hurt it!)

Thanks to the introduction to the sport that you gave him, we now have a hobby that we can share together for a long time.

Many thanks

Terry Clark

It’s great to hear from you Terry - I found this picture of you taken on my course - Charlie’s carp is it a bit bigger, isn’t it?!

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It’s been a busy Spring of coaching for me and I haven’t had a day’s fishing for myself since before the end of the river fishing season. On Monday night last week I had a last minute phone call cancelling the next day’s coaching, so I reorganised my tackle and set off early next morning for Marsh Farm, hoping for some more crucian carp and perhaps some tench.

I knew that caution was the order of the day as far as feeding was concerned because the weather had not been wonderful and the water would not have warmed up enough for the fish to be feeding in earnest. A few tiny betaine pellets, a little hemp and a few casters were the initial feed and I thought the chilly wind would let me get away with a 2gm pole float fished on my 15ft spliced tip Harrison GTi. The centrepin (of course) was loaded with 2.6lb line with a 2lb hook length and an 18 hook. Tiny baits were most likely to get the bites so I started off with a single caster which was shelled on the first cast with no indication on the float. The same happened to the second bait and I stepped up to double caster- no bites at all!

I suspected little rudd taking the bait on the drop so I switched to a 4mm soft tuna flavoured jelly hooker pellet - still no bites. I cut the next pellet in half and missed the next bite as the wind had picked up and I misssed the float tip not reappearing between waves. I hit the second bite about twenty minutes later and was soon involved in a very recognisable fight, my first crucian of the year.

The fish weighed three pounds four ounces and was in perfect condition.

The swim went quiet and fearing that the tench were moving in I switched to a heavier rig with a small lob worm. The float slid away and I was grateful for the six pound main line as the culprit was a five and a half pound tench.

By this time the wind was blowing a mild gale and the pole float was invisible in the choppy waves so I changed to a more robust waggler but the bites were still very hard to see. I switched back to the heavy rig and caught two more tench about four pounds on whole shelled prawns. Had it not been for the wind I am sure I could have caught some more crucians, but you have to play with the hand the weather deals you.

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I have always been a champion of the BBC and the whole TV licensing system and have argued their case on a number of occasions. My argument has always been that the output of the Natural History Unit in Bristol is worth the license fee alone and that their other programmes are way ahead in quality compared to anything broadcast by the other channels.

This argument has been reinforced by the latest programme about angling, Extreme Fishing with Robson Green, shown on channel 5. This is obviously aimed at the lager lout element in our sport and the few episodes I have seen say little about the sport that I recognise. The presenter shows few angling skills and does most of his communicating screaming at the top of his voice. There is little to learn from this programme as it does not seem to wish to educate, merely to shock.

However Mr Green, being a minor TV celebrity, has been chosen to front this series over someone with real angling knowledge and talent and neither he nor the content do our sport any favours.

We have seen how our sport can be favourably portrayed in “A Passion For Angling” made by Hugh Miles, but the television companies are seeming to ignore his new series, “Catching the Impossible”.

Now insult has been added to injury by the BBC of all people. They invited Mr Green onto their Breakfast programme and during the interview he stated that that he saw no point in “pulling a fish out beyond recovery” and he said that that in such an instance, the fish would die 9 times out of 10. This as any coarse angler knows is absolute rubbish - commercial fisheries would close overnight due to lack of stock, the record fish list would be made up of much smaller specimens and the carp guys would not be able to give their quarry pet names. It is often used as an excuse by those elements amongst both game and sea anglers who choose to slaughter everything they catch.

Once again Mr Green has damaged our sport, this time by allowing his arrogance as a “celebrity” to take the place of any knowledge of the subject about which he spoke. The public who think that his ability to play Robson Green in a number of different roles makes him special will believe his statement.

Weller of the Yard drew my attention to this as I was coaching on the day it was broadcast but he wrote a letter of complaint to the BBC, here is the trite reply he recieved:

Thanks for your email about Robson Green’s appearance on ‘Breakfast’.

He was invited onto the programme as an actor and television presenter, to talk about his enthusiasm for fishing and the programme he’d made about it.

Most of the interview was chatty and anecdotal - but he was asked one question about the issue of throwing fish back after catching them. He was never invited to give anything other than a personal opinion: our presenters put to him “People have differing views… What’s yours?”

He prefaced his statement with “I don’t want to impose my view” and then explained that he saw no point in “pulling a fish out beyond recovery”, implying that it would be out of the water for an extended time. Then rather confusingly he added that in such an instance, the fish would die in 9 times out of 10. We think he must have been using “9 times out of 10″ in a casual sense, because if the fish were literally “beyond recovery” it would presumably die 10 times out of 10!

Later in the same answer he emphasised there were “different views, different practices” and again emphasised his personal objection to “pulling a fish in beyond recovery”. In the TV clips he was shown twice catching fish, and - quite happily - throwing them back. We’re sure there is a complex debate about the optimum time to keep a fish out of water but it seems that Robson Green was trying to sidestep this in repeatedly stressing “beyond recovery”.

We’ve reviewed his contribution and it seems he held absolutely to his intention not to impose his view, though we agree that, if taken in isolation,
the phrase “9 times out of 10″ could have been misleading. But whatever interpretation might be put on one phrase, the overall impact of the
item was very pro-angling: it seems perverse to suggest it was damaging to the interests of the sport. Both in the TV clips, and in his interview with us, Robson Green was passionate about fishing and lyrical in his description of the experience, and what he called the “primeval feeling”. It was an extremely positive view of the sport and very likely to encourage interest.

Nevertheless, we’re sorry if you were concerned and appreciate the time you’ve taken to get in touch.

Regards

BBC Complaints
____________________________
www.bbc.co.uk/complaints

The BBC should have broadcast a retraction of this misinformed statement and they have gone down in my estimation for failing to do so.

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