The Fishing Coach

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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