The Fishing Coach

I have and have always had a healthy distrust of salesmen and my recent dealings with a double glazing company of some repute who shall remain nameless, has done nothing to change that.

Shortly after the move to paradise I traded in my diesel-guzzling Toyota Hi Lux 4x4 for a three year old Volvo CV70 diesel, four wheel drive estate car, which I purchased from Fawcetts of Newbury, a local Volvo dealership.

This seems to be the ideal fishing/coaching car as there is room for four passengers and all the tackle I always take (those who have fished with me are now imagining something the size of an articulated lorry). The great plus is that in three months motoring it is averaging about forty miles to the gallon.

However last week it started losing lots of brake fluid and wary of the warranty I took it back to the dealer for investigation, only to be told that the clutch slave cylinder was leaking and because it is situated inside the bell housing and therefore part of the gearbox it was not covered by the warranty. As the leaking fluid was likely to have damaged the clutch mechanism the bill could be as high as £2500, this caused me a great deal of concern .

The Service Manager said he would see what he could do and finally arranged for Volvo to pay 40% of the bill and the warranty company and Fawcetts themselves each to pay 20%. I got a new clutch, flywheel and slave cylinder fitted for a little over £500 and during the work they discovered that the four wheel drive system was not supplying power to the rear wheels. Happily this was covered by the warranty and was fixed at the same time. The lack of four wheel drive would explain my problem in the previous post.

I am therefore extremely pleased with the service I have had from Fawcetts of Newbury and pass on my recommendation to you.

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Last week I was sent a request to renew my membership of the coaching governing body fishcoach.org and I noticed that my First Aid qualification had just expired. I spent a couple of hours in a series of panicked Google searches but managed to book a course with Surrey First Aid. Many thanks to Sam Cannon for her assistance, I have attended the course today and now I am “legitimate” again.

The course was held at the Charterhouse Club in the grounds of the famous Charterhouse School. It was an excellent, very well-run course and I wouldn’t hesitate to recommend it.

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It looks like Spring has finally arrived and the sun is beginning to warm my back, the days are getting longer and there is more daylight for fishing. This time of year means one thing to me, tench fishing. This fish has always had a certain magic to me. Back in the sixties when coarse angling was very different than it is now, us kids who used to fish the many gravel pits in the Thames valley caught perch and roach but the “experts” caught tench. The tench had a certain mystery, it fed at night and was much bigger than the roach and perch we caught. Sometimes we would hook one but it usually broke even the heavy tackle we used. Looking back on this tackle I now realise that we used the wrong rods with line that was too heavy for them and it was usually the knots we used that let us down.

The tench has retained this mystery for me and I hope will always have a special place in my memories, even when for a few years I was totally captivated by barbel, I still found time for a couple of tench fishing sessions in the spring.

I think big tench are more difficult to catch than big carp on a regular basis, partly because they have been displaced by carp on so many waters as they do not compete so well for food. I much prefer to catch them on a float in what I consider to be the traditional way, but on some waters angling pressure has driven them out of the margins and I have to resort to a feeder. This was true of my biggest ever tench which I caught last season.

In the last week or so I have been running some courses for young people and I saw my first tench of the season caught, are your local lakes producing tench yet?

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Les Weller called this morning to ask where everyone was last night - it seems that he didn’t receive the email I sent everyone cancelling last night’s meal and to make things worse he brought a couple of friends. I had to apologise, just because I check my emails every couple of hours not everyone else does, but in this case his got lost in the system. Not so clever these computers are they? I saw a documentry on Sky tv a couple of weeks ago that said in a few years all the weapons systems in the world would be controlled by computers, does this mean we can expect an outbreak of world peace when the damn things all crash?

I told Chris Clark about my success at Twynersh yesterday and he decided to have a day on the next lake to try and get some roach from there. I gave him advice on where to fish it and what method to use but didn’t go with him as rain was forecast and I had some errands to run. He phoned me at lunch time to tell me he had just caught a two pound roach. I could learn to hate that bloke!

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I am still trying to get over the last hectic week - how I ever managed a full time job I don’t know, must be getting old.

Talking about getting old, what a strange process we are subjected to in our later years. Why can I still remember the telephone number of a girl I only went out with once in 1968 yet I can’t remember where I put my car keys ten minutes ago? Why does the hair stop growing on top of my head and start growing so profusely out of my ears and nose?

Best answer will win my last year’s rod licence…

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So it looks like fox hunting as a sport is finished. I believe the countryside as a whole will eventually regret this particular piece of legislation and I say this assuming the police or whoever is supposed to enforce it is able to do so. It is also against the law to mistreat badgers and other animals, to abuse children, to misuse drugs and to drive whist drunk. This is just a short list of offences in no particular order that seem to go unpunished in so many cases.

Let me state equivocably here and now that I do not have, nor have I ever had, any desire to chase foxes on horseback, or on foot for that matter. There are, we are all aware, many influential people who do and are prepared to spend a lot of money in that persuit, what will happen to the counrtyside when that money goes elsewhere. Fox hunting supports many small countryside businesses.

Foxes are part of the British environment and have benefited from being hunted because some farmers have treated them in a special way because either they, their landlords or good friends wish to hunt them. They have left part of their land wooded to provide shelter and they have refrained from shooting,trapping or poisoning what is after all a livestock eating pest. Foxes have prospered from this protection and the countryside is more picturesque.

I don’t like the idea of running some poor creature to ground with dogs and tearing it to pieces, it is unpleasant but so is nature in many more brutal ways. The fox lived by the sword and died by it also, I will not use the word cruel in conection with an animal as I only apply that word to human suffering and believe me, in my twenty odd years as a policeman I have seen my share of human cruelty. There are much more barbaric acts committed in the everyday production of our food and in our treatment of other human beings that require the anger and disgust squandered on fox hunting.

I feel that the underlying dislike for fox hunting in some quarters is not just about the cruelty to foxes but also to perhaps to a larger extent about the perceived privileged classes who indulge in it. I am a socialist at heart, a diffcult thing to be in the police force of the eighties, but I am not critical of the toffs who hunt - all that inbreeding, being sent to boarding school at the age of seven and on to public school with the bullying in an all male preserve is bound to generate some aberrant behaviour. At least while they’re chasing foxes they are not mucking about with us peasants.

The prohunting lobby seemed to use the wrong argument in their defence, they claimed to be controlling the poulation of foxes which are of course a pest (perhaps the occupants of Tower Hamlet council estates have failed to consider this). Anyone who drives on the roads in the countryside knows that far more foxes are killed on the roads each week than are killed by all the hunts in the country in a year. All with no apparent effect on the population of foxes. The foxes run down on the roads suffer and a percentage must crawl off injured and die a miserable slow death, is anybody demonstrating to ban the motor car?

If there was unneccessary cruelty in hunting then surely monitoring and licensing is the answer and if that would have been too difficult to enforce then so will the ban be.

I have already mentioned that I am a retired police officer but I am also a recovering alcoholic and have seen much suffering caused by the misuse of alcohol, I no longer use this drug but I know that it plays a large part in many crimes and has a major influence on those who commit crimes such as murder, rape, serious assaults and child abuse. A ban on alcohol is of course out of the question but in my eyes is more justified than one on fox hunting.

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