Succeeding
against all the odds
How much easier it is to catch fish now than it was years ago.
Commercial fisheries have a lot more good-sized fish than was once the
case, and in several waters fish are growing much larger than they used
to do, especially carp, tench, bream and barbel.
At one time fisheries capable of yielding fish that were considered big
in those days were few and far between.
Often – apart from the time spent travelling to those waters –
you needed to fish at dawn or dusk, or both, and in the night too, to
have much chance of landing a few whoppers.
For several years when I was a middle-aged angler I and some other anglers,
notably the late Ray Webb and Tag Barnes and a few others, relied on covering
some of our fishing expenses on the fees that we got paid for filling
every edition of a certain fishing magazine with lots of pictures of sizeable
fish that we had landed the week before.
The need to succeed put a lot of pressure on us but, surprisingly, we
hardly ever failed.
Few working class men (and we worked too) could afford a car in those
days. To get about we used a bizarre assortment of second-hand vans which
were free of purchase tax providing that they did not boast side windows.
You could buy a basic van cheaply if you did not have luxuries like a
heater or passenger seat!
We fished often at places like Hornsea Mere for pike, and in Ireland for
tench, and the Yorkshire rivers for barbel, plus Scottish trips too.
I remember finishing a night shift at work and setting off straight afterwards
to fish a water on the Scottish border and return just in time to start
another night shift of 14 hours!
I’m glad (and surprised) that I survived this baptism of fire, but
I wonder whether the modern angling writers who succeeded us and who catch
much bigger fish than we did really understand the effort that went into
preparing the groundwork for today’s so-called specimen-hunting
brigade.
And when we got home from a trip we had to stay up developing and printing
and enlarging our black and white photographs and delivering them to our
editor.
We made do with primitive darkroom equipment and somehow met our deadlines.
We must have been tough.