| Matt Brown | |
Matt started fishing at the age of 11 and for years fished for bites, match style, and would often catch more than the adults on the same venues. Influenced by the England squad fishing the world champs he bought his first pole. The resurrection of the River Don was a dream come true and from 1986 he fished regularly for the roach using the stick float. In 1988 Matt moved to Basingstoke and for a couple of years fished the Kennet and Thames. Although he caught decent barbel and good chub, his light line approach would often result in lost fish. Back in Doncaster in 1991 he continued to fish for the River Don’s roach and when the EA stocked barbel in ’92 they became a regular feature in his catches. In 1995 he targeted the carp in Cusworth Lake and caught the biggest two in the lake on the same day. Although Matt enjoys travelling and fishing venues that offer a better chance of big fish, such as the Trent, he still craves that elusive River Don double figure barbel. |
There have been many letters in magazines and internet forums about skill in angling. There are anglers who think that catching fish on the pole requires little skill, or that the effort required to sit behind a pair of carp rods and bite alarms is minimal. There are people that look down on anglers who choose feeder fishing over float fishing and there are those that feel if you spend enough time on a low stocked gravel pit you can’t fail to catch eventually.
Much of this attitude stems from a lack of knowledge of these methods as other people have said before. I think some anglers have things completely out of perspective. Let’s look at some of the examples above. Actually handling a pole is something that beginners almost always struggle with. Shipping in and out without tangling a rig takes time to learn. It’s not just a case of dropping a rig in as some non-pole anglers think. It just looks that way when you’re watching someone who knows what they’re doing. Choosing the right float, the right elastic, feeding accurately and so on all require skill that takes time to learn.
Sitting behind a pair of rods on alarms is another tactic that can look incredibly easy to the untrained eye. After all, all they have to do is cast out, wait for a self-hooked fish to set off the alarm and then it’s just a case of reeling in. Well there’s much more to it than that. The skill here is in making sure the rig, the bait, the rig’s location and so on is all spot on. If the rig is wrong then, when a bite does finally come, the fish might not hook up or come off during the fight. If the baiting tactics, or rig location are wrong then the bite might not come at all. The preparation that needs to go into this style of fishing is phenomenal and in a way this is why it’s fun. It can be very satisfying to plan something in such detail and have everything come to fruition in the form of your target fish.
Feeder fishing used to be seen as a ‘chuck it and chance it’ method and there are still a few who feel this way. Choosing the right shape and size feeder, the right hooklength, knowing when to strike and when to leave things to develop requires just about as much skill as most forms of float fishing. A good feeder angler will be just as active as a good float angler. This thing is, whether it be Wallis casting with a centrepin, holding back a stick float to induce bites from wary roach, tying the ultimate pop up rig, casting a lead and PVA bag 150 yards and so on, are all relatively minor skills in what we need to be good anglers.
All of the above can be learned in a relatively short time. If we were to practice six hours a day, some of these physical skills may well take us weeks before we were competent, but however long this might take, it’s nothing in comparison with the real skills in angling. We need to put things in perspective.
Knowing how much to feed, whether to fish at 11m or 9m, up in the water or down in the deck, pellets or boilies, stick float or waggler are the sorts of big decisions we make every time we fish. No matter how good an angler is there’s no way on Earth that they’ll get these decisions right all the time or that they’ll know all the answers before the end of their lifetime.
These skills require years of experience before an angler even starts to make the right choices most of the time. So let’s not be negative about other angling methods that differ from our favourites and celebrate the fact that no matter how many fish we catch, we still have much to learn. It would be boring otherwise! |
