Sometimes it's just nice to sit back, close your eyes and listen . . .
The last time Jon and I went fishing, two very unusual things happened: the first was that we caught something that wasn’t a roach; the second was that we met a female angler. She occupied a pitch at the very far end of the lake and was moodily lobbing sausages at passing carp, although it is possible that she was ground baiting - always hard to tell with these specimen hunters.
Sooner or later, all anglers get the urge to catch big fish – for much the same reasons that deer stalkers eventually get to hanker after a stag with a really good head. The challenge is one that hunters have faced for millennia; the chance to test oneself against a creature which has beaten the odds and through luck, strength and cunning, fought its way to the top of its tree.
By the time you read this, nine more species of shark will have been added to the endangered list, adding to the one hundred and twenty six that already find themselves there. Top of the shortlist is the scalloped hammerhead, down to 1% of its 1970s level, but shark populations in the north-west Atlantic have fallen overall by an average of 50% in the past thirty years and that is the good news, because other areas are far worse affected. The worldwide population collapse has been caused by over-fishing, largely driven by the appetite of a newly-affluent China.
Back in the late eighties, Hardys marketed a series of carbon fly rods under the family name ‘De-Luxe’; they had a burgundy blank, with gold anodised reel fittings and two tone scarlet whippings. We have the seven and a half foot four weight, the nine foot 6/7, a thirteen foot three piece nine weight salmon rod and two fifteen footers, one of which makes the most lovely Spey cast; they are all extremely pleasing things to fish.
Christmas comes but once a year and with it the delicious uncertainty of what one should buy the angler in one’s life. The problem for most partners, significant others,WAGs and (in the case of female anglers) HABs, is that it is rare to find two fishermen in a long-term relationship, largely because angling is, as our very own Fred Buller so eloquently puts it, a solitary vice.
In late August, the Guardian ran a story about a court case brought by Defra against six trawler crews operating out of Newlyn in Cornwall. An appeal is awaited; the seventeen involved making an unlikely bunch, ranging from a former policeman to an eighty-four-year-old woman - the crime they are said to have committed is to have landed fish such as cod, hake and monkfish in excess of their quotas and to record their sale as ‘non-quota’ fish, such as ling, turbot and bass.
Once upon a time, long, long ago, in a far off land where nobody ever shot before leaving, three desperate men gathered.They were desperate because they were to fight; a battle that was to be fought over unimaginable distances, a war of words which would span an ocean and the breadth of North America; a duel between the Old World and the New.
“Now that we’re ten, we can really do some stuff - we can go up to Monkey Wood and build a tree house - and we can stay in it all weekend, and we can get Davy to come and use his .22 to shoot rabbits, and we can cook ’em and we can do spuds in the ashes afterwards - and we can go fishing on the pond and see if we can catch a monster and we can catch one of the ponies and ride it and we can play chicken with the boar and bet on flying hens off the barn roof and all sorts of stuff! . . ”
I don’t know why, but things which sound perfectly OK when uttered at 3am before an empty whisky bottle seldom make the same sense once the sun has risen. So as we toyed with our breakfast after the last editorial meeting, trying to avoid Rosie’s eye and hoping that the children wouldn’t make any more loud noises, it occurred to me that I must ask a question. “Do we really mean to produce a tenth anniversary issue that is all lies?” I whispered, praying that the paracetamol would start working soon. . .
This sensational discovery of some early recordings of the famous Crabtree has got collectors very excited . . .
Unique recording of the very last Angler's Question Time, recorded by the BBC in nineteen, er nineteen fifty, er, ages ago.