This is a step too far
For quite a lot of years I did more night fishing than fishing in the
daylight.
This enabled me to enjoy both of the productive times for fishing: an
hour or so either side of dusk and the same around dawn.
I found that in summer this was easier than tackling up in the pre-dawn
darkness and sitting it out throughout the less productive daytime to
expect sport when you were tired at dusk and pack up in the darkness.
I enjoyed sitting quietly in the darkness without shining lights and I
mainly fished places where few if any other people were present.
This fishing, especially for carp in the few waters that held that type
of fish, meant staying wide awake all the time and using a sensitive tackle
that would perhaps let us strike at and hook a carp that took our bait
before it had become scared and spat out the hook.
Since carp were few and far between, most nights one didn’t get
a bite at all.
Then it became the norm for fisheries to be heavily stocked with carp,
and on some venues you could almost guarantee that you would land a carp
on most outings.
The next thing that happened was the invention of battery-operated bite
alarms that over the years became super efficient. So far so good.
But then we discovered that if we used tackle that had the baited hook
firmly anchored, quite often a carp that tried to eat your bait would
dash off in alarm - often hooking itself without any need for the angler
to act quickly and strike the hook home. I fished that way myself on many
occasions, though my conscience troubled me a bit.
Then anglers in search of big carp started spending long hours (weeks
sometimes) bivvied up at the waterside.
They kept the baited lines (two or three of them) out all the time while
they, the so called anglers, went to sleep in the tent relying on the
“buzzers” to wake them up and tell them that a carp had hooked
itself on one of the rods.
This is one stage too far for my conscience to allow me to do it. After
all it is illegal to fish an unnattended rod and surely no rod is more
unattended than one whose owner is asleep?
If I was carp fishing I would wind in the lines if I intended to sleep
for a while. Yes, I know that what I have written here will infuriate
many readers. They are not doing anything for which they can be prosecuted,
but it saddens me all the same.