| KEVIN PERKINS | |
Never mind smelling the flowers, don’t forget to take time out to see the satirical side of fishing life and grab a laugh along the way as well. So here’s a regular column from Kevin Perkins to remind us that life is for laughing at, or taking the p*** out of, whenever we can. |
| DRAW BAG FODDER? When I was (a lot) younger, match fishing was held to be the pinnacle of our sport. As a junior, my local club would always ensure that there was a place on the coach for kids like me. Should I be jammy enough to win any prize money I would be allowed to keep it rather than buy drinks for everyone at the obligatory pub stop on the way home. Just as well because these drinks always had strange names such as Double Diamond, Black and Tan, Dark Mild, Light and Bitter, all of which could have been exotic cocktails for all I knew at the time. These matches were fished on and around the Thames, so they were all ‘to size’ with bleak and pike barred. Various aerobic stretching exercises were performed on the fish to make sure they were ‘goers’, and mysterious pebbles would often appear in keepnets as fish were being emptied into the weighing pan. Of course, there were the obligatory ‘characters’, such as a gentleman known as Lucas, who would often entertain us with his version of darts in the pub. This involved throwing the darts in rapid succession, and running up to the board to pull them out just as quick. In the meantime he would shout out the score, but that was fractionally after he had removed the darts! Whilst all this was going on he would be monitoring activity around the fruit machine. When the time was right, usually when the person playing on it had gone for a pee, he would rush over and claim the jackpot, normally for the modest outlay of no more than two bob! As well as their finely honed skills at pub games, whether it be cribbage, bar billiards, dominoes or the aforementioned darts, these blokes were genuine all round anglers. Didn’t matter where they went, they were able to fish it – river, stream, canal, lake, it mattered not a jot. There were basically two methods, float or leger. Roach Poles did get an occasional outing, but these were only eighteen feet long and made from bamboo, and weighed around a hundredweight, or so it felt after about twenty minutes use. Raising them up and down to lets boats past felt like you were operating Tower Bridge! Given that almost every situation we encountered dictated you could use a running line to much greater advantage meant that the ‘poles’ didn’t seem to get much of an airing. Float fishing would encompass everything from tiny crow quills on canals, long trotting Avon floats, launching huge loaded antennas on lakes, and that most deadly of river tactics, laying-on. Legering would involve coffin leads, rolling bullets, paternostering et al. Always, when arriving at an unknown venue, the very first tactic was to fish for bites, and progress from there. Giving that it was fishing to ‘size’, on rivers the first move was to introduce a slice of floating crust into your swim to take the obligatory ravenous bleak shoal down stream to your neighbour. You would, of course, know it was just a matter of time before someone above you did the self same thing! As I said at the start, becoming a successful match angler was the stuff of dreams. There were no ‘specimen anglers’, no ‘single species’ specialists. We had coarse anglers and match fishermen, who didn’t have the benefit of team or individual sponsorship, no inducement of huge cash payouts, just a sense of achievement, in knowing that you were a real ‘all rounder’. Moving forward to match fishing today, where would you start? Do you really need hundreds, maybe thousands of pounds worth of equipment before you can put your hand in the draw bag?
It is all too easy to refer back to the halcyon days of old, but hasn’t match fishing become a little too focused on technical equipment over natural ability? If there were more anglers with all-round capability fishing in matches, wouldn’t more methods (no pun intended!) be tried, and maybe even found to be successful? Indeed, when fishing for a team, aren’t the individuals even told exactly which tactics to use? What if they don’t work in your swim? Are you allowed to go off and ‘do your own thing’ against team orders? Or are the individuals pre-programmed to follow instructions to the letter, whatever the outcome? Are they even permitted to carry tackle that doesn’t conform to the team plan? Would they even know how to go about fishing another method if the team plan wasn’t working? Sounds like a case of all the gear but no idea to me! Read ‘THE ALTERNATIVE ANGLER’ every Friday! |
