Confessions of an Olde School Specimen Hunter. Act 2, Scene III.

I have never been much of a linguist, my Franglais remains fragile, my Latin lounges somewhere between comatose and lethargic.  And after 25 years of marriage, I still understand just one word of my wife's native language.   "Tanga", or in more extreme circumstances  "Tanga tanga".   I have strong suspicions that the word means "stupid", or when repeated, "Very stupid".  I hear the word(s) quite often, and it  invariably seems to be when she is speaking to me.  But maybe I have completely misinterpreted the word, and it is actually quite complimentary?   Take today for instance: 

I have never been much of a gardener either, but have been lucky, in that my garden is full of shrubs, and so apart from digging the pond, I can honestly say, that in twenty eight years, I have never threatened it with a spade, nor have I thought about forking it.   But now bring ALDI into the equation.  They have been selling bulbs this week:  crocus, daffodils, tulips and so on.   You have to plant them in holes, because leaving them on the surface, in or out of the packaging, just does not work...especially in the kitchen.  Onions are different.  It is hard going  using a "dibber" to dig holes, and I often used to hear my father complain about the task.   But today, seeing brownie points on the horizon, I extracted the centre pole from my angling umbrella, and tackled the back lawn.  I dibbed and I dobbed ( Not sure, but I think, maybe, that might have been wolf cubs points rather than brownies) and after a good 10 minutes had planted just..... five crocus bulbs.  And ALDI, sadists that they are, have been putting no less than fifty bulbs in a packet, and selling them for just £1.39.   So the wife bought FOUR packets.  Only 195 left to plant.  A couple of days work in old money.  Another type of bulb flashed in my head: an idea!  I direct this brainwave at all the gardeners out there, a tip from one obviously destined to be greater than Percy Thrower: namely myself.

The tip:   Throw away that dibber, get rid of your trowel, and dig out your Black and Decker.  Fit a one and a quarter inch wood borer, and point it at the lawn.   That's me, being green.

In next to no time I had 195 holes in the lawn, each fitted with its own crocus bulb, and I had nearly filled in all those holes by dribbling in compost, when I heard the words: "Tanga tanga!", quite loudly.  Quite obviously therefore, the word actually means "Genius".   I admit that the lawn has gained something of a look similar to Wayne Rooney's head.  The moss is now dotted with little round dark pits of soil, but unlike Wayne's head of hair, surely it will all grow back properly by Spring, and look very healthy?   I mean,  think about it, if Wayne suddenly, next April, were to sprout a host of golden crocuses, or daffodils if you really must, then surely even he would look quite good? Almost decorative. And I believe he frequently gets well watered.  I will leave you with that image and move on to the confession.

Although now an expert gardener, I sometimes can do some pretty damn stupid things when fishing. In the days when all stillwaters had a close season, the soonest anyone could tackle tench was June the 16th, midnight.   The 16th was glorious to angling, in the same way that August the 12th is glorious to grouse shooting. For days before, preparations would be made, and prayers offered to the Gods for a good bit of cloudy, rainy weather. On the 15th, people would queue up outside the tackle shops.  Removal of the close season has destroyed all that tradition, tradition which was often in vain, for mostly the middle of June would be hot and sunny, and quite useless for tench fishing.  The water that I and Chris used to fish for tench was boat fishing only, but because we were friendly with the game keeper, he allowed us so set up the boats on the lake, the previous day.  They were staked and tied down solidly, so as to provide a stable platform from which to fish, some fifteen yards out from the bank, the other side of a thick reedbed, in about two feet of water. The punts were to be home for a week.   The weather, at 3pm on the 15th was awful, brilliant sunshine, beating down on us, my hay fever starting to make my nose itch and my eyes water. We spent much of the afternoon and evening bemoaning the sun, prebaiting and waiting, but as 11pm and darkness approached, so did a bank of cloud.   Thick cloud.   Very thick cloud.    Our hopes of great catches were raised rapidly as the rain started to fall.  Prospects looked so good for the next day.

"Bloody Hell Chris" I said, "I have never seen such dark clouds. Looks perfect. I can see nothing at all."

Chris replied, nonchalently "Well, if you were to take off your sunglasses...."

Now I am short-sighted, and have been, probably, since I first left the womb. I quite definitely do not remember seeing that midwife in sharp focus.  But in the close season, before the trip, I had invested in a pair of ultra cool, very dark, prescription polaroid sunglasses.  And I was wearing them. Without the glasses it was pretty damn dark, but with them....blackout!  The trouble with wearing glasses from necessity daily, is that, with sunglasses on, you forget that you are not wearing your normal daylight pair.  But those clouds were getting darker still, and so I donned my waders, hopped over the side of the boat and waded ashore, intending to take a short cut through the wood and back to the car, in which I had stupidly left my normal spectacles.  Short cut? Bad idea!   The rain got heavier, much, much heavier. Torrential became an inadequate description, as the clouds thickened yet more.  The wood was not only full of boggy ground, soaking wet ferns, but there were trees as well.   I had the choice of a) wearing the dark glasses, and being able to see nothing at all, but all of that nothing would have been in perfect sharp focus.    Or b) taking the glasses off, and being able to see exactly how completely dark it really was, but with very blurred vision.  This dilemma had a severe effect on my orienteering skills. My promise to return to the punt, Cinderella style, by midnight, was badly broken, and my clothes were also in danger of being reduced to rags by the rain, mud and random attacks by vegetation. So I spent nearly three hours crashing about in the woods, bumping into trees, falling into bogs, tripping over brambles, fighting through invisible but very aggressive nettles, whilst trying to find my car.  But the pollen count was falling and my sneezing diminished as the rain proliferated. The rain that became so heavy, my waders actually started to fill up as the water ran down my neck, back, front and just about everywhere else.  Getting part filled waders out of deep bog in a midnight monsoon is not easy.   It was very nearly daybreak when I eventually got back to the punt, bruised, saturated, annoyed, and swearing like any modern Liverpudlian teenage girl, but without the accent.  

As luck would have it, Chris had no bites during darkness, and it wasn't until I was back in the boat, dripping wet, that the floats first started to move. The day's fishing did go quite well, and we had a fair few tench, maybe as many as twenty.   I would have to go back through my logs to check exactly what we caught, but it is not relevant to the post in any case.  Doubtful if many were much above five pounds, as, in those days very few people ever had a fiver.

Confessions of an Olde School Specimen Hunter: The Prologue and Rant.

This post is part zero of "Confessions...", and will serve as a prologue to an occasional series of such articles.  Their ultimate aim is to tell, and preserve, if only for myself, a number of amusing incidents  that occurred.  But first, an introduction, and some history.  (This post should have appeared last year, but I forgot all about it, and it has remained in the draft folder, gathering dust.)
So: "The Prologue and Rant".   Hmmm....that would make a pretty good pub name. Along with "The Frog and Bucket", "Elephant and Castle" and other odd names. So, if any publican currently residing in a boring old "Red Bull" or "White Horse" would like to rename their public house with a rather more memorable name, then please make contact, and for a small(-ish) fee I shall, on  a franchise basis, license you the name.

My early fishing, from age eleven into my teens was largely split into three parts:  a small club pond, match fishing and lastly the Macclesfield Canal.

The club pond held delightful crucians, the odd tench, and a few carp, supposedly growing to 20 pounds.  It was where I fished for pleasure, and I did quite well there, poking a rod out just past the rushes, with bread fished lift method. The pond has disappeared now, run over by the Manchester M60 ring road motorway. Match fishing was usually the weekend coach trip, to the Trent, the Witham, or to many other distant waters. Occasionally the local clubs held  Club Federation matches mid week on a nearby canal.  I did well in all these matches, very well, enough such that some seniors actually objected to juniors being allowed to enter the sweepstakes, and even to compete for the overall club championships.   They were outvoted. They lost in two ways. ;-)   It was not difficult in those days to win: most seniors, and practically all juniors, had absolutely no idea how to fish, and certainly were clueless as to how to fish to win.  And there is a huge difference between fishing, and fishing to win. There were none of the myriad of modern aids to learning that exist today. So on those matches, 90% of anglers were just cannon fodder, and they were all standing immediately in front of the muzzle with their eyes closed. One that was not was Ian Heaps, who went on to become a world champion.  On the Federation matches, I used to beat him about as often as he beat me. But I quickly grew bored of match angling whereas he did not. 

It was fishing the Macclesfield Canal that gave me the skills to win.  I taught myself how to fish there from about 12 years old. In those days the canal was usually gin clear, and the fish very difficult to tempt.  In three feet of water you could watch your free offerings all be snaffled on the drop by roach and perch, whilst your baited hook was repeatedly ignored. It was a training ground of great excellence, bar none.  At the time it was bailiffed by one Albert Oldfield, who, sometimes assisted by the ancient Mr. Grindley, riding an even more ancient bike, used to sell day tickets on the bank.  Albert was famous in the angling press for catching numerous 2 and 3 pound roach from the canal.  But none of the canal regulars seemed to have ever seen him fishing, we saw no photographs, either in the press or elsewhere, and despite years of fishing the canal, with all sorts of baits and methods, including copying those techniques supposedly used by Albert, none of us ever had a roach bigger than a very nice fish of  1-6 that I managed to  hook into one day.  A fish of a pound would have been a season's best...and I probably only caught two or three fish over that magical one pound weight. We were all certain that the Albert fish reports were merely a method of increasing Albert's ticket sales. Had two and three pound roach existed in the numbers Albert claimed, we would have had at least the occasional big fish ourselves. We may have been mistaken about Mr Oldfield, but it seems unlikely. I would welcome any genuine photos of him with big fish from the canal, at which point I will publish my apology.

A 2 pound plus Macclesfield Canal Perch that I caught recently.

One day, high excitement: a guy I spoke to said that he had a two pound roach in his net.  He showed it to me....a beautiful fish, yet 12 oz was my highest guess for its true weight, however I said nothing to dampen his joy.  A number of us had formed the "Macclesfield Canal Roach Specialists (MCRS)", who were determined to get that good fish out, despite none of us really believing they ever existed. We never succeeded, and the fish of 1-6 remained the best any of us ever saw.  It was to be some years later that my first 2 pound roach came to the net, and that was not a canal fish.   The canal is very different now, the boat traffic has multiplied by a factor of at least twenty, with moorings occupying most of the deep water stretch that I loved, and the water is therefore constantly coloured, even in Winter.  Most of the edging of rushes and reeds has gone, replaced by awful metal shuttering to prevent erosion, consequently the water voles have all gone, and it is no longer such a pleasure to fish from the towpath.  Oddly it does now produce some good fish, and two pound plus perch have become quite common.

Specimen groups were beginning to appear in the mid 60's, and I leapt at the chance to join the Manchester Specimen Group when it was first formed.   There were probably still no more than 500 anglers in the UK who called themselves Specimen Hunters, and most of those were so only in their own heads.  I felt I did not deserve the title myself at that time, although  I was soon to become ridiculously dedicated to the task, always aiming at that even bigger, better, higher, faster fish. I even became records officer for the NASG, whilst Eric Hodson was in the secretarial chair.

Richard Walker and friends were probably the first group of anglers who might have been referred to as "specimen hunters". Walker's book "Stillwater Angling" was certainly responsible for an upsurge in the "big fish" interest that followed.  The MCRS slowly evaporated and was no more, and the MSG was to fold sometime later, although I am still in occasional contact with three of its members, who have remained anglers ever since.   I had formed a partnership, with Chris, who founded the MCRS, and we were to fish together very intensely over a number of years.  In those days, the late 60's and 70's, being successful as a big fish angler meant finding waters where few others fished, which were not heavily stocked with fish (and therefore were seen as difficult to fish), putting in the hard work, and most of all, being confident that you could catch those big fish. ( Nowadays, catching big fish seems to be mainly dependent upon visiting waters that are fished very often, and therefore those which have masses of bait fed to the fish...in short go fishing in fish farms, for obese overweight unhealthy fish). I gained that big fish confidence quite early, Chris taking much much longer before he got his fair share of the fish.  I can only put my successes then down to that confidence: nothing else could explain it, illogical though it may seem.  In due course we both became very successful, big bream, tench, carp, roach, rudd etc etc.  Chris and I were largely responsible for showing Alan Wilson how to catch big fish. John Watson occasionally joined the party, and much later became a well known pike specialist.  Alan later also became very famous, breaking the tench record. Shared a lot of superb breakfasts with Alan, cooked in his old grey Austin van. He was a great guy, and could occupy a swim more completely than any other angler I knew. Not an innovator, but so incredibly patient.

But my own dedication was not to last,  and after about 12 very successful years, I had convinced myself that big fish were not so hard to catch after all ( and I had annoyed a fair few other people by saying they were actually quite easy. The reality was that some "specimen hunters" regarded themselves as being very special, and here was I saying "Bo.......ks! ). For me, the challenge had gone, and I also realised that fishing some 60+ hours a week, whilst working, was leaving me shattered, and with no social life at all.  So one June 16th, first day of the coarse season, after landing a personal best tench, I consigned the rods to the attic, where they were to remain for over 30 years.

So, 32 years later, following a combination of starting to hate the work I had loved, and my wife getting cancer  ( she is looking good now, 6 years later, following tumour removal and chemotherapy, cross fingers), I decided to dig the rods out of the dust, having seen some small chub in the River Mersey.  Last time I had held a rod, all those years ago, even the shopping trolleys could not survive in the Mersey.  No plant life, no insects, no fish, just a bottom covered with dead bricks.   So the chub both shocked and pleased  me.  However I promised myself that, when I restarted my fishing,  I would fish for pure enjoyment. If a big fish came along, fine, but they would not be my be-all and end-all targets.   As luck would have it, over those 30 years fishing has changed, Oh my God! How it has changed.  Big fish have become even easier to catch!       ;-(  or maybe  ;-)

The fish of today are far bigger, thanks to modern bait technology, and there are so many more of them, catching a big fish is so very much easier that everyone does it now, almost routinely, not just those few isolated specimen hunters as in the 60's.  Tackle is so much better, no need to build your own alarms and specialist rods.  Tuition comes in so many forms: DVDs, the internet, the TV, paid professional guides, facebook, websites, forums. Books and magazines have proliferated. I used to be the only person I knew who had caught a double figure barbel, nowadays it is hard to find an experienced anger who has not done so.  Bream record up from 13-12 to about 22 pounds.  Everyone knows what size fish a water holds, how many there are, and even their names!   People fish for a specific fish, and all the speculation, all the watercraft needed to work out if a lake was worth the time of day (or night) has gone. What happened to the wonderment, the mystery?   Fishing now works straight out of the box.  New, young anglers, who don't know one end of a hook from the other, target big carp on their first angling trip. And many succeed there and then... because carp have become so very commonplace. Would they be able to recognise a gudgeon? Even the match anglers go after carp these days.  Unheard of in the past. I heard a rumour that F1s were introduced so that match anglers could land them, without risking getting their poles and tackle smashed up by real carp. I have no idea why we needed to introduce ide, F1 hybrids, golden orfe and tench, koi carp, blue trout, sturgeon and various other exotics  into UK angling.   And it is no surprise to me that they have all propagated into areas where they should not be.   Even the Wels, which used to be confined to about two waters, Claydon lakes and somewhere else "dahn Sarth", ( Woburn Abbey I think),  is now such a widespread species that anyone can target them fairly locally.  Don't anyone dare mention goldfish!  Poncing around with their fancy fins and having unprotected sex with all our beautiful crucians! Grrrrr!  Commercial fisheries have appeared and proliferated, and together with irresistible baits, these vastly overstocked waters guarantee a good catch.   The fish have to feed on anglers' baits, there is far too little natural food for the total fish biomass present in these waters. And I suspect that, to a large extent, fish that would normally NOT feed during the winter now do so because they have to, they are unable to build up enough fat reserves over the Summer, due to heavy competition for food, and to their frequent exercise workouts when they are hooked again and again.

It would not be incorrect to say I rue most of these changes.  Angling has changed from being an art to being a science.  Mechanistic.  Of course, all this comes at a price: an expensive price. Angling has become so commercialised.  Tackle shops are brim full to overflowing with all sorts of gizmos and gadgets, whose purposes frequently elude me.  But is there any subject, other than angling about which so much utter rubbish is talked and believed?  I doubt it.  Not even football. Reading about modern angling these days gives me many a secret grin. So much science and so much nonscience...perhaps that word should be spelled n.o.n.s.e.n.s.e?   Unfortunately we will never go back to basics.    Too many anglers accept the dumbed down approach, and the big fish it nevertheless can give them.  And then they tout their catches around as being evidence of their great skill.

So there you have it, some history, some introductory stuff, and tired fingers.  Some moans and the odd rant or ten.  Taken me so long to write and publish this that I almost feel the epilogue coming on.

Confessions of an Olde School Specimen Hunter. Act 1, Scene I.

A number of the posts in here will not be fishing related, others, such as this, have some link with fishing but are not devoted to fish capture as such.   There will also be some posts purely to remind me of events in the past, for the future, when my memory of them may have faded, or to allow my lad to read about certain events in my life. 

This tale is true and is fishing related, but no fish will be mentioned, as I completely forget what we caught on the trip in question. This is a report of part of a trip in those bygone days when I was a stupidly mad keen specimen hunter.  I was very successful too back then, but these days I fish for the pure enjoyment of being outside, and to get away from the wife and Eastenders. I still catch more than my fair share of big fish, simply because it is far, far easier to do so these days, than it was back in the sixties and seventies. But size no longer is paramount, I no longer have the same ridiculous level of dedication, and as a result, I enjoy it far more.  But even in those days of olde, events occurred that were at times far more entertaining than the fishing.  Many such events involved disasters, major or minor, either at my expense or to the embarrassment of others.   This was one such event.

I used to have a regular fishing partner for weekend trips.  Let's call him Chris, as I do not have his permission to publish what happened.   His name may or may not be Chris, and only those of you that know me well will be able to confirm that his name was indeed Chris.  The rest of you will just have to remain in the dark, I am afraid.

It was one of those periods when I had a sensible fishing vehicle, a Bedford Viva Van, based on the old Mk 1 Vauxhall Viva.  ( I was later to change the van for various, increasingly impractical, two seater sports cars.)   Chris had a Hillman Minx, and these two cars will enable you to date these events to about 40 years ago, without the need to resort to carbon dating.    Although my van was perpetually steeped in the smell of bream and tench slime, and being oft infested with escaped maggots, and worse, I remained quite house proud about it.   I have always been a non-smoker, and so Chris was never allowed to smoke inside the van.   But Chris smoked about forty Capstan Full Strength a day, and also sported a pipe which he filled with something called Highland Sliced.   Capstan Full Strength is a watered down description of these cigarettes, they being so strong that all of his mates would refuse the offer of one.   Highland sliced had, to my nostrils, much of the smell of burning road tar, mixed with mustard gas.   Both tobaccos are probably now banned by the Geneva convention. 

But a forty a day man would never get all the way to the Cheshire Meres without at least one smoke, and so my van always stopped a couple of time on each journey, at some convenient lay-by or other, whilst Chris reached for his tobacco.   I waited in the van, suffering at times the pounding of torrential rain on the roof of my van whilst  Chris stood outside in the fresh air, trying not to get his tobacco wet.

The tables were turned on alternate weeks, when we would use his car, rather than my van.  It was easier than sharing petrol costs, and seemed the fairest and easiest way to divide expenses.   Of course, it being his car, I could not insist on a smoke free environment.   I could have stood in the rain as he puffed away, but being then, blissfully unaware of the joys of passive smoking, I chose not to.   The inside of the Hillman's windows had become stained, over the years by his heavy smoking, which had left a dark brown deposit , one that threatened within weeks to totally obscure sight of the outside world.  At times I swear I can still smell that car now.   The windows inside had never been cleaned, and it showed. We drove permanently through a 1950's smog.  Anyone else remember those?  The acrid swirling yellow smoke, not being able to see the pavement across a narrow street?  Following the fence all the way to school?  Shadows of other kids only appearing when they were five yards away?  

Returning from fishing, in the Minx one day, late Sunday evening, I noticed the smell of something burning.   It was not a tobacco-like smell and I assumed that something was sadly astray with the car's wiring.  I told Chris that I could smell something burning.   Chris sniffed and replied "Rubbish!".   I repeated my claim, which he again dismissed, saying that the car was driving perfectly well, and in any case, it had been serviced just a couple of weeks before, so nothing could go wrong with it for another six months.  He had said much the same a few days before, when I had insisted he stop so I could investigate a very loud rattling noise. Chris would have happily driven on, in his freshly serviced car, ignoring the noise for the next six months.  We continued only after I had removed a hubcap, to find two wheel nuts rattling around inside it.  The wheel only being held on by the two remaining nuts, both of which I was able to remove with just my fingers. Chris was not mechanically inclined.
But back to the journey:  A few minutes later I again wrinkled my nose, and sure enough, I could still smell burning....but the car continued to work perfectly well, and so I kept quiet...apart from continually sniffing the air, as a reminder to him, or perhaps, more likely, to annoy him a bit.

A mile of so later, I nearly went through the windscreen as Chris unexpected jammed on the brakes, in an emergency stop that would have impressed the most critical driving test examiner.   Chris leapt out of the car, beating away at his clothing, screaming and swearing.    Over the years of heavy smoking, Chris's sense of smell had deteriorated substantially due to its mistreatment with the powerful tobaccos, to such an extent that the function of his nose had reduced to being little more than a shelf, whose only function was to stop his glasses from falling off.    But he WAS still, eventually, able to detect the presence of burning corduroy, when that burning was caused by a plug of glowing tobacco embers that had fallen from his pipe.   A large lump of  Highland Sliced  had slowly been burning its way through the trouser fly area until, having fully penetrated the cloth, it had reached a very delicate part of the anatomy, still glowing merrily, and started to burn its way through the flesh.  The ultra-sensitive flesh of a very vital organ! 

Chris eventually got back into the car.

"Are you absolutely sure there is nothing burning Chris?" I said, innocently.  Had I heard the reply I am sure I would not have been able to print it here.

It was still some twenty miles back home, and I don't think I stopped chuckling for a single minute of that journey.