Anotherangler's reasons

I set this site up in response to my own disquiet with the type of fishing I'd almost slipped into and also as a response to the direction that much of the UK's coarse fishing has been heading.

After a spell of prolonged work orientated lifestyle, when I only fished a few times a year, and blindly took my pole along to whatever water was on the radar, I broke my pole (on a tree, helped by a carp), but it made me stop and think. I got out my carp rod, my Black Spider braid and went back to a simpler method, derived from wild carp fishing and early fishing life - and in part due to 'Stillwater Angling' which I read in 1980, and every year since I think.

I started to catch tench and occasional carp in this way, and while I flirted with hair rigs for a while (three months or so), I then abandoned them and the bite alarm after only a few tries. Despite catching fish that way, it didn't seem as rewarding.

The commercialisation of fishing has long since overtaken what I believe to be the core values of the sport. Angling ought to be its own reward, with catching fish and solving the problems associated with that process also part of the deal. If you do not love nature and appreciate her many facets, then you ought to, if you are going to spend time by the waters edge. Like all borders and boundaries it has elements of both sides as well as being a world of its own.

It saddens me to see many 'commercial' fisheries that are so full of fish it is well nigh impossible not to catch. What is the point? No problem to solve, no fish to find. Stock treated as a cash commodity, rather than animals. On many waters the patter of maggots or corn on the water will bring the fish scurrying, with even the smaller cyprinids hungry all the time as the natural food supply simply doesn't keep them all in fettle. And that's if the omnipresent head of carp haven't hoovered up all the available food leaving the rest scrabbling for a living.

Match fishing on these waters has been reduced completely to the mechanics - how fast can you get them out, but that is all. Use a net, save time. Or try winter river match fishing - you need your brain for that (too hard for me!).

I know first hand of three waters that once were great mixed fisheries, for all the seasonal and day-to-day variation, with many roach, rudd and perch, which after a few years of 'common carp' are reduced to shadows of their former eco-system selves. One near my house was an excellent perch and roach fishery of an ¾ acre at the most, a delight on light tackle or a slim pole, but now (5 years later) has a number of carp in the thirty and upper twenty bracket (must have been introduced, one wonders about the legality), which are caught several times a year each. To what end, in a pond of that size? Ducks and barrels. I could fish there for £100 a year, but do not care to any more. Catching those would not make me a good carp angler, but many think differently.

There are venues (one near me) where the new ponds have selected stock of the venue's larger fish and stap me if the venue's 'special flavour boilies' don't catch these bigger fish many times a year. A cynical view would be that they feed the fish on them and then sell the 'special bait' to the angler who's odds of a 'twenty' of 'thirty'' have just climbed. But there's no fish to find, no bait or tactics to figure out. Fish so accustomed to human traffic that probably even the clumping set-up of bivvies and bite alarms loud enough to scare a smack head burglar, wouldn't put them off. Add your 3-3.5lb test curve tip action and 15-20lb mono, what's really in it for either party?

Even now, the attitude and reaction to pike is backward in many instances. There is a least one club near me who still exterminate pike on catching (quietly) as they are a 'pest' and 'ruin the fishing'. The same organisation pumps hundreds of small stockfish into the water and then blames the pike for eating some. That's a bit like showing a dog a steak and then kicking it for having a bite. Even one of my local (not so commercial) waters, has had folk complaining to the owner as pike 'ruined' their fishing.

Why not just catch the pike and put it carefully back further up the bank. It'll take you 20 minutes, you might have some fun and the pike will skulk off for 24 hours leaving you free to 'enjoy' your fishing. It's only making a living after all.

The same folk that complain about losing a small roach to a pike, will then cheerfully brag about being broken up by a carp on the same light tackle in the same spot. Oddly, that's not a nuisance…

What concerns me most is that some of the practices many of us have unwittingly adopted (it's perhaps all too easy to get sucked into thinking loads of fish all the time is good and what a great angler it makes you) leave the sport wide open to those who would ban us all from our tackle.

Who would tend the waters then?

It's not as unlikely as you might think.

Ah well. Enjoy the site. If you disagree feel free to rant back. If you like it let me know…

There are a few of us left out here.

P.S.(Dec 2006) Since setting this all up for my own edification, I've discovered there are more of us, which is heartening. Be Lucky.