just read Keith's post back on page 8, great read and if it had been played back to me on a tape i could have closed my eyes and been on the bank watching your exploits while feeling a little sad that my own father, although starting my interest in fishing by giving me a 6' Woolworths starter kit and later the tackle he had as a boy, an Intrepid black prince and a 9' three piece tank aerial witch had no lined eyes, a plastic pipe handle and crude screw down reel seat that needed adjusting constantly, never really taught me a thing about fishing apart from 'if you want to do something right, you need to use the right tools, the right way and in the right place'. this holds true for most things in life where i am concerned, whether plumbing, engineering, repairing the car or fishing. He taught me how to learn for myself, and that has held me in good stead all my life in all aspects.
angling times had a large part to play, usually the previous weeks edition passed down to me from a guy up the road that only got it for the tide tables and to find out when the cod were in
and the cartoon strip with 'Bob Mussett' was taught by the Crabtree'esque guy the art of watercraft and tackle choice. think it went down hill for me when he started match fishing though
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cycling miles to waters that were free, or the odd poaching session here and there
lead to joining a local club with river stretches and many gravel pits where roach and bream were abundant to add to the minnows, roach and perch normally caught near my home water. a few sessions with my cousin and his grandfather for roach were a great learning opportunity as the grandfather was the most old school of old school anglers and where we, cousin and me, had been given shiny new shakespear strike rods that Christmas past, he had mitchell 300a and a darkbrown fibertube avon type rod that looked so drab that many a bird thought it to be a branch and disturbed his concentration on the float by landing on it. he too dressed in drab cloths and sat much further back from the water, keeping low and off the horizon and where we plucked 2oz roach every third or fourth cast, which involved sending the float to as far away as we could cast then frantically winding back with the tip almost embedded in the lake silt to sink the line until it bobbed back up usually less than five feet past our rod tips, he sat motionless for the most part, just feeding a few grains of hemp or some casters now and then, until the float would slide lazily away until the line almost pulled on the rod tip. the first sight of a tench, clinched it for me, learn from old methods and the people that use them. i learned to, crudely, trot a river for roach and later chub, to use swing tips, spring and quiver tips and later new style feeder rods. A sundridge ledger and my first shimano reel made landing bigger fish less hit and miss and then the decline...the river had no power over me now i could cast to vast shoals of bream, tench over distant gravel bars and so the ever present but as yet unattainable barbel stayed a thing to fish for another day, that day took over twenty years to get to and the equipment that the old guys used from the 60's and 70's bore little resemblance to the stuff available with four easy check payments via mail order in the late 80's. carp gear
has barbel fishing and the tackle used changed, from a point of view of someone relatively new to barbus but always interested in the stealth and watercraft used in their pursuit, yes, but mainly due to technology. we are the same and the fish, though bigger are still barbel, the rivers are still rivers and the developments in other branches of fishing have filtered through to many other branches. the newest development that has come in to not only barbel fishing is the use of the very same methods that the old guys used back in the 60's and even the old tackle or new versions made with the technology at our disposal now. the avon/barbel rod with it's through action and the centrepin have never been so popular as now. passion for angling must have been the catalyst for many people as i know there are only a few that have managed to keep all the old ways alive throughout the technological advances, unchanged and unaffected, and, there's now a budding 'Chris Yates' under many a floppy hat seen wandering the banks nearly out of sight from the fishes point of view and a constant source of amusement to many a carper sat by his array of baitrunners, buzzers and bivvies, I know, i now wear that floppy hat
