Wintle’s World of Angling – A Good Idea?

Mark Wintle, an angler for thirty-five years, is on a quest to discover and bring to you the magic of fishing. Previously heavily involved with match fishing he now fishes for the sheer fun of it. With an open and enquiring mind, each week Mark will bring to you articles on fishing different rivers, different methods and what makes rivers, and occasionally stillwaters, tick. Add to this a mixed bag of articles on catching big fish, tackle design, angling politics and a few surprises.

Are you stuck in a rut fishing the same swim every week? Do you dare to try something different and see a whole new world of angling open up? Yes? Then read Mark Wintle’s regular column.

The bizarre Newark Needle Float

Whilst Jeff Woodhouse and I try to put the angling world to rights now and again regarding fishing tackle design, there have been some absolute stinkers unleashed on the angling public in the past.

Who dreamt them up? And why? Just what were they thinking? And to think that some mug actually paid money for these inventions. The world of floats probably has the most failed attempts; you try and imagine it and somebody, some time, has probably got there first, no matter how bizarre the idea. There have been floats that cleverly swam across the current, floats like paper darts, floats with hinges in the middle, and yet Dick Walker’s assertion that a simple bird quill would do for 90% of angling situations still holds true.

But back in the seventies, when flared trousers were the height of fashion (no chance something that hideous would ever come back into fashion, oops, too late!), a couple of ideas surfaced that did little to advance the art of float fishing.

The first one grew out of a crisis. The increasing popularity of waggler fishing from the early seventies onwards meant that the demand for good quality peacock quill rocketed. Peacock quill is difficult stuff to work with at the best of times, and from a commercial point of view, it’s expensive in that consistency in diameter, straightness and quality are hard to achieve. Before too long, good quality quill was in short supply.

Then someone had a bright idea. Using Norfolk reed as a float-making material was old hat but the reed simply isn’t durable enough for commercial float making. But out in India there was a reed that was similar but tougher, available in different diameters, and cheap as well. It was known as Indian reed or Sarkandas reed. Before long there were ranges of wagglers and antenna floats made of this stuff. Now Sarkandas reed isn’t as buoyant as peacock, and therefore floats made from it don’t fish the same. Those in the know sourced peacock quill and made their own floats.

What the commercial float makers hadn’t reckoned on was that Sarkandas had one particularly lousy quality. It was the devil’s own job to get paint to stick to it for long. Despite all sorts of preparation work of sanding and primers, within a few sessions the paint would flake off, and the float would start to get waterlogged. As supplies of peacock quill gradually improved, the popularity of Sarkandas reed waned.

If you thought making floats out of a waxy reed was bad enough then the great Newark Needle float fiasco took the prize for bad float design. Newark inventor Walter Bowers must have somehow got hold of a massive job lot of pencil wood (cedar) and wondered what to do with it. As cedar wood is denser than balsa, he hit upon the idea of creating a sort of giant wire stemmed stick float, with a steel stem. For reasons I could never fathom, he compounded an already clumsy float with a strange plastic contraption that sat on the top of the float to hold the line plus a plastic cleat at the bottom. Quite what was wrong with painting the tip and using a float cap, we’ll never know. It got worse. To eradicate the use of shot, more lengths of steel rod were available to use, attached with yet more plastic cleats.

Back in 1977, he persuaded Gladding to stage their annual Masters Match on his stretch of the Trent at North Muskham. Battered by gales, the huge crowd had an opportunity to see demonstrations of the sensitivity of the floats. This consisted of one of the needle floats and a light stick float in a tank being struck by a hinged piece of wood. Knowledge of inertia (easily overcome by the lump of wood) and momentum (far more in the heavy needle float) explained why the needle float stayed under far longer than the delicate stick float. It was a far from convincing demonstration of the needle float. What you now have to remember is that just yards away the finest match anglers in the land, including Kevin Ashurst, Ivan Marks and Billy Lane, were performing float fishing miracles using anything but needle floats. A discerning crowd could see the evidence of their own eyes.

Initially, plenty were taken in by the sales hype, but not long after even a huge giveaway (possibly by Angler’s Mail) could not prevent its rapid demise. Better news for float anglers came a couple of years later when John Dean launched his superlative range of stick floats, and the Newark Needle Float remained sunk without trace. The best use for the Needle float was said to be stirring paint.

Wintle’s Folly – The Square Bread Punch

Today, some carp anglers find radio controlled bait boats useful for positioning bait and hookbait in awkward spots. Thirty years ago, someone got there first with the idea of a model boat to feed a river swim. This one wasn’t powered or radio controlled, and cost a great deal less than the typical £ 600 cost of a modern bait boat. It was called the “Mabby”, and consisted of a small plastic boat about a foot long that held about a pint of maggots in a tray in the bow. The idea was that the maggots would gradually crawl out of the open back of the boat to feed the swim. To get the boat into position, one threw a weight out on a cord, then threaded the cord through a ring on the boat, and so manoeuvred the boat into position at the head of the swim. Experienced river anglers will quickly spot the restrictions of this method of feeding. The boat will need to be retrieved each time it is empty, and worst of all it is difficult to alter the rate of feed during the session, apart from the hazard of a small toy boat anchored in the middle of your swim. I hate to think what sales were like but they certainly never caught on. Why bother when a decent catapult was far better?

As an angler that likes to make floats and other bits and bobs, I have to admit to the odd design disaster myself. Many floats never even got wet but the most surprising failure was a square bread punch. I made it from square brass tube, and it cut a neat square of bread but the fish simply won’t touch it, and switching to a normally round punch brings back the bites straight away.

If you are interested in the arcane yet fascinating world of floats and their design and history, you could do far worse than obtain a copy of Keith Harwood’s excellent book ‘The Float’ (Medlar Press). Here you will find all manner of astonishing designs, mainly developed to catch the angler rather than the fish, but wasn’t that always the purpose of floats?

Next: ‘Is Match fishing in Decline?’