Female anglers: a rare breed
Angling is often seen
as a sport for men and boys, and female anglers are far outnumbered by the male
anglers.
It sometimes seems strange to us male anglers that girls and women should have
a keenly developed hunting instinct but I have met several really keen and competent
lady anglers and sometimes they outscore the men.
I’m not thinking here of the women who accompany their boyfriends or husbands
on trips to the waterside without having much interest in the sport themselves.
No, I am thinking of the ladies who really do take the sport so seriously that
they go fishing on their own, or are known for their success in the world of competitive
angling.
I have also known several husband and wife angling partnerships and more often
than not in my experience the female of the do was by far the keenest of them.
At one trout fly fishing venue that I frequented often in years gone by I regularly
met a husband and wife fishing pair and it was quite predictable that when the
dusk was falling and the husband had packed his tackle away and was impatiently
waiting for his wife to join him for the drive home he called “Are you ready
to pack up yet?” would be answered by the reply, “Not just yet darling!”
One such female angling fanatic who was very pregnant at the time was fishing
from a boat for pike accompanied by her husband who was himself a famous angler
when she went into labour just after she had hooked a very big pike.
Undeterred she insisted on playing and landing the big pike, then weighing and
photographing it before agreeing to row for the shore and call a halt to the fishing.
However, just to put another aspect of all this into the picture I often used
to fish at a popular venue where a female angler fished, most days in fact, and
she would annoy me and other anglers by loudly shouting to anyone who would listen
using a non stop string of vile obscenities. It takes all sorts to make the world.