I first fell in love with angling through a book. Mr Crabtree goes fishing which I got as a present when I was around 6. I loved the illustration of Mr Crabtree with his pipe and young Peter as they fished for every species that swims in a river. The watercolours of fish were especially good. I remember a phrase used that Chub had a catholic appetite. As a Sunday school attending CofE six year old, I wondered why Chub had decided to join the ‘other lot’.
With that mystery still unresolved, I first went fishing with a cousin on the canal near Ulverston and he managed to catch a perch on a bubble float and worm. Then we were on holiday in Sedgwick? Just outside Kendal, there was a swing bridge over the river from which you could see the salmon and trout holding in the current below. I managed to catch the only eel in the river which frightened the life out of me when it climbed up the line and halfway down the rod. A fellow angler took charge and said the only way to deal with eels was to cut their heads off, which he duly did with a very large Rambo type knife. The rest of the eel was placed in the bucket that I used for making sand castles and I was horrified/fascinated to see the headless body still moving hours later. These things stick in your mind!
When I was 10 we moved to Richmond in Yorkshire and the beautiful River Swale and I was finally free to fish as often as I wanted. Just to reiterate what has been said, the local tackle shop is a mine of info, if you have a friend that already fishes, brilliant. Mine had a penchant for storing maggots in his mouth and falling off the top of the falls at Richmond. He was a pretty good angler though. We used to learn loads just by talking to other anglers as well. I remember a guy asking to fish next to us one day. He had a lovely West Country accent and told us his home river was the Kennet. He proceeded to ground bait his/our swim and didn’t fish for the first couple of hours. We had never seen the like, nobody used ground bait where we fished. We thought him to be a bit excentric, a posh southerner using his fancy dan methods oop North. By the end of th3 day, we had revised our opinion, he had caught just about every fish in the river and completed a Swale slam. Not quite the same as a grand slam of permit, bonefish and tarpon but impressive to our young minds nonetheless. A Swale slam for the uninitiated was every species to be found in the river at Richmond; Trout, Grayling, Dace, Chub, Barbel.
I thank god that I got into angling, it has provided a lifetime of memorable experiences, an appreciation of the great outdoors and nature and a bunch of great friends. If everyone fished the world would be a better place.
