They say you learn more on the bank in a couple of hours than you do in a lifetime of reading about fishing and to a large extent that is true as there really is no substitute for actually being there. Being tucked up in your favourite armchair with a glass of red to hand is all very well for enjoying a book but to actually ‘learn’ and to improve your game you surely need to be out on a venue, rod in hand, learning by experience – or do you?
It was my fishing partner at the time – the late, great Vic Gillings – who suggested I invest in a copy of Tony Miles’ book My Way With Chub and after parting with my £14.95 at (I think…) Andy Barker’s tackle shop in Coventry I duly settled down in said armchair and opened the pages which would change my fishing forever.
It was 1988, I was in my early 20’s and up to my neck in a Masters Degree at university with my fishing restricted to holidays which, thankfully, were of a decent duration. At the time I would say I was a fairly competent angler without being anything special (many would say the same of me now…). I was heavily into catfish and enjoying a golden spell on Claydon Lake but had a solid multi species background behind me with some big tench, decent carp, reasonable crucians and some terrific pike. On the rivers I had caught plenty of chub but never one over 4lb, a few clonking roach but never a ‘2’ and a fair few barbel to about 8lb in days when doubles were none too common.
My river fishing was very much a ‘chuck it and chance it’ affair, my knowledge of watercraft was poor and my techniques were limited to say the least but within a couple of hours of opening those pages that was all to change and I became a ‘proper’ river angler with a wealth of watercraft without ever leaving the chair.
Writing a technical angling book is a very difficult thing to do and although Tony’s offering contains a wealth of anectdotes and reminiscences these are mostly involved with problem solving and it is essentially a technical manual from start to finish.
It is split into two sections: ‘Summer Chubbing’ and ‘Winter Chubbing’ and both look at the baits and techniques required to master the conditions: trotting, floating crust, naturals, touch legering, induced takes etc but it is when Tony gets to grips with watercraft that it suddenly goes from good to sublime and the chapters ‘Reading The Winter River’ and the following ‘Fishing Techniques for Swims Identified’ are, for my money, the best words ever written on river watercraft.
For me they opened a whole new world of fishing as I suddenly realised that there was far more to a river than I had previously imagined and what is more it looked as if it didn’t take too much to be able to identify those different areas – and next time out on the river (I was concentrating mostly on St. Patrick’s Stream and the Thame at the time) that is exactly what I did! I needed to get out – it couldn’t all be done from the armchair but my goodness Tony had given me one hell of a headstart!
Suddenly I could pick creases and junctions, find areas of uneven bottom, spot possible depressions and by watching the various currents with Tony’s words in my mind it all suddenly ‘clicked’; I could see where food would be channeled, where it would start to settle out of the current, where the chub would be holding. I could see where the fish would move if the current picked up, where they would retreat to if the river flooded, what they would do if temperatures suddenly crashed. It was a revelation which brought me fish from the off – and has ever since.
One section of the book above all others stood out at the time – and still does – ‘Fishing Flood Rafts’.
Illustrated with a series of simple diagrams Tony describes how he and Trefor West developed a technique to get the best from one of the all time classic chub swims. If there is a better practical, technical chapter in all of angling literature I’ve yet to come across it! Suddenly instead of catching one or two chub from under a raft I was picking up five or six and I was connecting with the bigger fish in the swims too. Marvellous!
Times change, tackle changes, rivers evolve, fish sizes change – dramatically as it transpired – but fish themselves don’t – a chub is still a chub and a chub will still move along or across a crease in response to a changing current exactly the same now as it did in 1988. Tony’s original tome looks dated in terms of tackle, bait, fish sizes and some of the photographs were poor at the time…what doesn’t change is the information which is timeless – and priceless.
The title of the book is, in fact, a bit of a misnomer; although it specifies ‘chub’ in the title the watercraft is relevant to all river species and as well as hundreds of chub the book has caught me hundreds of barbel, roach and perch too – in fact over 23 years on it’s probably thousands, not hundreds!
Tony remains one of the few modern big fish anglers I have never met. I hope I do so I can thank him in person but if I don’t, and he somehow gets to read this, then Tony, thank you!
