| Where did all the years go? One minute you’re considering an Intrepid Elite and the next minute buying a Shimano Stradic. Decades flash by, seasons pass – what happened? Quickly – for those past the first flush of youth. What year did Dick Walker die? Peter Stone? Bernard Venables? Ron will know the answers, but isn’t it incredible that Walker died back in 1985, Stone in 2000 and Venables in 2001. Two whole decades since Walker’s death! Where did twenty years go? An old proverb says that time spent fishing does not count towards our allotted span. It is certainly time far less grudgingly spared than the all too common daily grind that passes for work. Why is it that when you’re looking forward to going fishing at the weekend that the week seems to take forever, yet blink and it’s Monday again.
Time is supposedly linear, and passing at a constant rate, but there is a theory that as we get older time passing is perceived as ever shorter due to it being a smaller and smaller proportion of our lives. Perhaps the busier you become the quicker it passes. Look back forty years and the pundits were predicting an age of leisure by the year 2000. Instead, we seem to cram far more into our lives than ever. How often do you try to arrange fishing trips with mates only to be told, “can’t make it at the moment, too busy”? It seems to take months, years even, to arrange a trip whereas a few years ago you’d have fixed it for the following weekend.
I’m sure this is a partial reason, if nothing else, for the significant decline of match fishing. It always was time consuming but when there was little else to do, and far fewer demands on our time, it could be fitted in. Local matches were not so bad but travelling away meant a whole day, and how many want to (or more importantly are able to) commit to that every weekend? The structure of matches has changed over the years as well. I have access to club records that describe the arrangements over the decades. These are describing matches in a small club with next to no travelling, ie, the matches were held on the river next to the town where the club is based. In the 1930s and 40s many of the matches were short three hour events, often on Saturday afternoons, and probably most of those taking part worked on the Saturday mornings. Very little time was allotted for preparation before the match, perhaps fifteen minutes but then no-one had more than one rod, or if they did they were only allowed one rod. By the sixties, the matches had moved to Sundays and become all day affairs; six or even seven hours, but still with perhaps half an hour to prepare. A decade or two later and the matches had got shorter, mostly five hours and with an hour to prepare. The concept of setting up more than one rod was widely practiced. In the last decade the preparation time has crept upwards, even reaching two hours at times, just so that one or two pole perfectionists can faff about plumbing up and so on. (You’d think it was a world championship). So the structure of the match has changed over the years. Less fishing time proportionally and more time hanging around, and overall the time needed for the match is now approaching nine hours despite virtually no travelling time. Makes you wonder doesn’t it? I’ve noticed another thing. Nostalgia isn’t what it used to be. How do we blot out all the crap times we’ve had and only remember the good bits, and then progressively embroider our memories of the good bits? Some of the fishing we’re experiencing nowadays is so far superior to anything ever experienced in the past that it’s beyond sublime. Yet periods like the sixties are held up to be some sort of golden age of angling never to be repeated. Is it because for some that was the time when you were experiencing all sorts of angling experiences that were exciting and new, and that it’s far more difficult to regain that buzz of being at the cutting edge (and youth)? Check out Bob Buteaux’s memoir “Fishing With The Famous” to understand my drift. I know that in the sixties there were older anglers harking back to the good old days before the war, and before them, anglers harking back to the days….ad nauseum. Complaints of the death of watercraft, and that modern angling lacks soul are far from new. Moans about new technology in angling being a step in the wrong direction, and wasn’t it better when horse hair was used rather than new fangled gut?
But take the sixties. The weather played some hard tricks on us then; the winter of 62/63 devastated waters up and down the country, including rivers. If we had a winter like that again I wonder how many of our commercial fisheries would survive with any fish stocks. Break the ice? It was a foot thick, and with temperatures that low, impossible to keep open water. Other destructive factors of the time were the almost incessant dredging of our rivers in the name of ‘improvement’, ever increasing abstraction and pollution on a scale that is hard to imagine today. That our rivers are very different today is certainly true, and the problems facing them as insurmountable as ever. Much pollution has been conquered though the pollution seems to be harder to spot nowadays. Did you see the recent report about the concentration of cocaine flowing down the Thames? Some abstraction licences have been revoked on minor chalk streams though the pressures on the water supplies rise inexorably. But pollutions from sheep dip and oestrogen type chemicals have difficult to assess impacts. And forty years on, the number of individual members of the ACA remains the same – far too bloody few – www.a-c-a.org – Just do it! (If I keep enough subliminal messages going it’s bound to eventually have an effect). I’ve written before about time machines, and there is a theory that if time machines had been invented some time in the future that we would know about it by now as people travelled back in time, or is it only possible to travel into the future? Some go as far to suggest that that incredible genius Leonardo di Vinci was the first time traveller, so far ahead of his time were his ideas, but I’m digressing again. If we did have a time machine for anglers when and where would you want to fish, and with whom?
Would you go roach fishing on the River Hiz with Walker in the fifties? Or watch Billy Lane’s floatfishing mastery? The Royalty in the 20s? The Wensum in the 50s? With Wilf Cutting on Hornsea Mere in 1917? Or somewhere, some time much earlier? (The Monk’s request to travel back in time to engage in jus primae noctis has been turned down). And finally some time travel events for Fishingmagic regulars:- -Andy Nellist’s fishing clothes go in the wash – March 2009 (Public Health Act 2008) |
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