If you haven’t yet read, and indeed watched, my day out on the Kennet then you had better take a look HERE before you read on…
It was a careful-what-you-wish-for day when I went to the Kennet with Sir Ian Welch, Lord of the Stream that very first time as his apprentice. I was all keen and eager yet ignorant. I’d read so much stuff about the bronzed river beauties we pursued and yet there’s a huge difference between reading about a thing and achieving it yourself.
I really thought I had the right kit and I would definitely have gone shopping for the bits I didn’t have, had I but known, yet Sir Ian was confident that any competent angler could have caught with the set up I used. And of course, at interview, I had given it my all to land that coveted job as Sir Ian’s tackle polisher…I didn’t want to let Lord Welchy down…
Except there was a competence gap – the power and mass behind a good barbel bite was something I hadn’t actually experienced and when my phone went off, I had been paying less than rapt attention and thought I would be able to thank my match angler chum for phoning me up,by letting him know he had brought me luck and that I was into a fish…
But it wasn’t a carp, all lumpen force and a bit slow witted when hooked. It was a barbel that accelerated off like a Nitro-Methanol-fuelled Yankee V8 dragster and to this day, although he won’t confirm his thoughts, I am sure Sir Ian thought it was a double. For a moment I was in a world of startled-beyond-comprehension hooped carbon before my rod sprang back and my heart plummeted down into my worn out camo boots – where it stayed.
Come the morning of the FishingMagicTV approach to this apprentice-fettling test and I had slept badly dreaming of dragsters that looked barbel shaped feverishly blended with that hooped rod springing back,over and over and over again in my head.
It was a fair yomp over cow-poached and punched fields with long grass to the swim and when we got there I was the incredible melting man. I carried a lot less kit than previously but still had the equivalent of another Ian Welch around my middle. And for a fat lad…
Anyway, enough of the nasty pictures in your head, the rest is like Lord Welch wrote it. My PB going up to a fish I landed in a somewhat Robson Green fashion was odd. I hand-pulled slowly for the break and a lump of tree branch came up off the bottom and began to be dragged in. Or so I thought. Then it jagged a couple of times and Ian was trying to disentangle my rod tip where I had dumped it on the bank but not before the fish was at the bank too.
The experience of fishing under pressure in a match never appealed but fishing for results for a noted journalist is truly double-edged and it feels different. For who wants to read about a blank? I came away from our long day out with a renewed respect for the most genuinely down to earth bloke and this weird euphoria that transcended the whole experience.
Exactly like a young bloke losing his virginity, there’s that difference between wanting to terribly badly and actually finding out what your rod is really for. At last I got it, I finally ‘get’ barbel angling and understand why it arouses more passion and enthusiasm amongst its followers than almost any other fish.
So a huge thank you to Sir Ian for opening my eyes to the business of barbel. I still dream about them but now at least I can see their bellies and feel those soft, expansive rubbery lips in my hand as in my dreams as I capture that fish over and over again.
The bastard still fired me though…
