Barrie Rickards’ Angling – July 06

Professor Barrie Rickards is President of the Specialist Anglers Association (SAA) and President of the Lure Angling Society (LAS), as well as a very experienced and successful specialist angler with a considerable tally of big fish to his credit.

He is author of several fishing books, including the classic work ‘Fishing For Big Pike’, co-authored with the late Ray Webb and only recently his first novel, ‘Fishers On The Green Roads’ was published. He has been an angling writer in newspapers and magazines for nigh on four decades. Barrie takes a keen interest in angling politics.

Away from angling Barrie is a Professor in Palaeontology at the University of Cambridge, a Fellow of Emmanuel College and a curator of the Sedgwick Museum of Geology.

Carp in the Telegraph, but not enough Homework

ANGLING RARELY GETS a good press in the national newspapers. Usually it’s a story about something seen as quirky by non-anglers; or something to do with the anti-angling movement.

Occasionally, we do have something rather good from the likes of David Profumo or Tom Fort, but these are not as frequent as they could be. Some writers do columns in the nationals, for example, John Wilson, and those do keep the flag flying – rather like the flags of the foreign Legion on some desert oasis or fort! So when I saw the Saturday Telegraph Weekend issue for 10 June, with more than half the front page taken up by a carp, another picture lower down of a 40 lb fish and an article on coarse fishing running over into the next page my immediate reaction was that it makes a nice change.

Someone called Jonathan Young wrote the piece. I hadn’t heard of him (The Editor of ‘The Field’) but there are many modern carp anglers I haven’t heard of, and vice versa! Lets read on then:

“Britain has three species of carp, the common, the mirror and the crucian.” Well, no, Jonathan that’s only two species of carp you’ve mentioned, mirrors and commons being the same species (and what has the poor old leather carp done to deserve exclusion?). The crucian carp is not only a different species to commons, etc, but belongs to a quite different genus. Is JY then a journalist who hasn’t done his homework? Let’s read on.

The article is written and published when it is because 16 June, the opening day of river fishing follows shortly. And near the beginning of the piece JY makes quite a play on the fact that carp anglers will be getting ready for the off. I dare say a few of them will be, but most of them will have been carp fishing for weeks and they have little or no interest in 16 June or any other date as a marker, for that matter, because many of them fish on through the winter quite successfully.

In the ‘Where to go carping’ section, which may be nothing to do with JY, it refers only to rivers and canals. In fact, these are not usually good carp fisheries and the vast majority of carp fishers fish in lakes. There are books listing many of these lakes. I should have thought it might be a good place to start. The remainder of the article is on safer ground because he simply quotes other people: Chris Yates at length, Mark Cunnington, Chris Ball, Zenia Gregorek, Ruth Lockwood. Since all these anglers talk good sense the rest of the article does look better than that very dodgy start. And the article isn’t anti-angling at all. But why didn’t the Telegraph get Chris Ball to do it in the first place then you’d get it correct all through?

More Herons than Ever

I saw another item in the same Telegraph that irritated me greatly. It was a small article by Daniel Butler on herons. Very interesting until you got to “there are now more herons than ever, with at least 13000 pairs recorded. This has upset anglers…” What planet are you living on Mr. Butler? In all my years I have never met an anti-heron angler. We accept them as part of the natural ecosystem and they often give pleasure to our day. And I’ll tell you this for nothing Daniel Butler: were it not for anglers preserving our aquatic ecosystem as we have done, and providing waters full of fish, then there wouldn’t be 13000 pairs of herons today. Where were you Mr. Butler when herons were dying in numbers after the 1963 freeze up? Some anglers were feeding them.

But not Enough Water Voles

I’ve been reading a little about water voles recently. Wouldn’t it be lovely to have them all back again on our waters? I’m sure that bad drainage practices and the dreaded mink haven’t helped the cause of the water vole. Have you noticed, though, how easy it has been to instigate a get-mink campaign of extermination because it is targeting birds’ eggs and a bunny-hugging mammal? There are damned hypocrites abroad in this country of ours. Another problem for the vole, though, may be these made-up, pile-driven margins which on many canals (e.g. in Shropshire) have replaced the gradually sloping earth bank of the old days (the days of ‘Wind in the Willows’ in fact). I’ve seen this in Shropshire myself: all the water voles I saw on one trip were on the natural banks, not on the artificial ones.

And now to livebaiting

The Scottish Executive seem set to ban livebaiting in Scotland on, in my view, purely spurious grounds. In fact, the decision has to be political/expedient/pandering to so-called greens, call it what you will.

However, some of you may have seen something more worrying in their reply (numbered 96):

“The Bill will contain an enabling power enabling the Scottish Ministers to prohibit such baits AND LURES as they may specify by statutory instrument.” The capitals are mine.

This is a dreadful turn of events where Ministers can ban what the devil they like without debate or bill revision: the enabling powers, so worrying to many in the legal profession, are, in fact, the blunt instruments of dictatorship.

Anglers’ Mail, in their infinite wisdom, chose to headline the Scottish Executive’s decision with the banner “Livebaits set to be banned. Full story.” No mention of Scotland until you turn to the inside pages where there is a small story. They quote the same paragraph as I have just done but seem completely to have missed the significance of the word ‘lures’. Let us all ask the Scottish Executive: what is it doing there? Is it pressure from salmon anglers who wish further to restrict pike anglers? How much support have pike and sea anglers had from other angling sections in Scotland? It would be nice to have answers to the last question in particular. Maybe someone like Mike Heylin knows. Because if bait fishing is ever lost then pike and other predator anglers may well need to examine who they support when other angling sections come under fire. That is the consequence of a failure of anglers to stand together. Someone gets on his high-and-mighty because he doesn’t agree with or understand livebaiting; then someone else takes umbrage because he doesn’t agree with keepnets, or matchfishing, or whatever it happens to be.

When will anglers realise that the only way forward is to stick together and unify against all external criticism. Listen to criticism, yes, but fight the corner as one voice.

Those who Fought our Battles are Leaving us

Some of those who have fought anglings’ battles are gradually leaving us, often in the saddest of circumstances. Who will forget the efforts of Vic Bellars, for whom a memorial service was recently held, in presenting the case, for pike and pike angling, in a variety of forums?

I well remember when Vic and I journeyed to the annual meeting of the Birmingham AA to persuade them that livebaiting, with certain safeguards, was a perfectly legitimate and reasonable way of piking. We were successful too.

The return journey to Norfolk, very late at night, was quite eventful, as the police stopped us. Vic was driving his wife’s car so the vehicle check didn’t bring up his name. His repartee, which the female police officer didn’t seem to understand at all, nearly got us arrested. We felt that the minority of anti-pikers on the BAA had put the fuzz onto us, hence the otherwise inexplicable road block. He was a very tidy man in his tackle room, and highly untidy, disorganised, and noisy too, on the river bank. Vic was a lively man who made a great contribution to angling over many decades.

The same cannot be said of David Overy who died recently at the depressingly early age of 42. David made magnificent contributions to pike angling and Irish piking in particular, but only over the couple of decades allowed him. We could have done with him around a lot longer. He was a good companion and a brilliant speaker at angling conferences, as well as being a very successful pike angler. He did not have an easy life, and in the end a very difficult one, but his spirit never seemed dimmed and his searching for piking truths were unwavering. Both David and Vic feature in our book ‘The Great Modern Pike Anglers’, to be published by Crowood in the autumn. I must say that I’m pleased that in the last year of their lives they were able to make a contribution to the book.

I was also sad to learn of the death of Chris Dawn, angling journalist, photographer and game angler. I didn’t know him as well as I knew Vic and David, but all my dealings with him over the years were excellent and I could always count on him for help and advice. Chris was 62, I believe, which is no age to go.

A Little More on Barbless Hooks

Just to harp back to something I’ve mentioned in the past let me quote big fish maestro Ian Welch to you: “But I firmly believe in the interests of fish welfare, no experienced angler should ever use a barbless hook by choice on a big fish water.” That’s what I believe too – In fact, I’d go further: I don’t think beginners should use them either. It’s easy to take out a barbless hook, of course, but it’s hardly rocket science to take out one with a small barb, is it?