Home Features Diaries A Tall Tale… Isn’t It?

A Tall Tale… Isn’t It?

April 29, 2004

Golden Age
Many years ago, when I was about twelve, I used to go fishing regularly with two mates, Baz and Wiggy. We were fortunate because in the late 1960’s we didn’t really have to consider our safety like you would today and would often disappear for a day’s fishing, just taking our tackle, a brown paper bag of jam butties and a bottle of water. We would wander off through the Cheshire fields in search of new waters to fish. Our idea of waters was little more than big puddles in fields – but boy, did we enjoy ourselves!

These little ponds contained the usual fish; roach, rudd, perch, tench and our favourites, Crucian carp. None of them would have pushed the needle of a set of scales past the pound mark but the magic was in the catching.

We would start a competition between us, who could catch the most fish; not the biggest, but the most. Weights were pure guesswork as scales were way beyond our budget, which was generally nil!

I have often thought since that any fish we caught must have been suicidal, as silence was an unknown to us three boys of twelve years old.

Our tackle was restricted to what we had cobbled together from friendly anglers we met on our travels and what we could beg, borrow, or permanently borrow. Rods were split cane of an indeterminate age and reels varied from tiny fixed spool reels to ancient centre pins.

Maggot Boy
Bait was bread or worms. We’d never heard of sweetcorn, boilies were far in the future and even maggots were only available to the brave…or Wiggy.

Wiggy was so called because he had an amazing thick mop of wiry red hair, which had a mind of its own. He was also known as Maggots, which I’d better explain.

Now and then we would breed our own maggots by putting a piece of offal, a few fish heads or a chicken carcass in a bucket, cover it with newspaper and leave it in a shady spot well away from houses. If we were really lucky the bluebottles would lay their eggs and give us some decent sized maggots. The problem came with harvesting them. Only the bravest, or Wiggy usually, got the bait, and did it stink! Wiggys advantage, (in our eyes at least, if not in his) was that he had a genetic defect which left him with no sense of smell! We definitely did not keep maggots warm in our mouths!

Treasure
One day I thought that Christmas had come early. My mum had been to a local jumble sale, (remember those?), and had come across a job lot of fishing odds and ends. I was chuffed to bits when I saw what was in an old toffee tin. Inside the rusted tin was a whole jumble of floats, hooks, lead weights and various spools of line. Some of the line was so old it was just rotten but one spool had survived, probably because it was about 30lb breaking strain. I’ve moored boats since with thinner ropes! There was also an old landing net with a wooden handle and mesh that would have let most of the fish we caught straight through it. I didn’t care, I was like an alcoholic in a brewery, and I didn’t know where to start.

There was one small item of tackle that really caught my eye and my imagination. It was a very battered silver metal imitation of a rudd with a treble hook attached. We had never tried pike fishing and I couldn’t wait to get started.I legged it out of the house to round up my fishing partners so they could admire my assortment of “new” tackle. After much oohing and aahing we finally got our tackle and ourselves together and headed off for the Millpond.

The Venue
We didn’t often venture as far as the Millpond because it was at the very edge of our travels. The other reason was that we didn’t often go there was that the effort was rarely worth it. This was probably due to our behaviour and inexperience rather than lack of fish in the pond!

The Millpond was about