It is, apparantly, a Wednesday, but what difference that makes escapes me at the moment. About 2 weeks into the lockdown I was rather belatedly informed by my RA Consultant that my Immune System modifying drugs rendered me very high risk, and I was advised to shield myself totally for 12 weeks. Fortunately life hadn’t been a social whirl anyway. The only issue with the concept of shielding is that, although Tescos were good enough to make contact to assure me that I had access to priority delivery slots, they failed to mention which year in this decade those slots are for. Something I can deal with via friends and family, but I hate to think where this situation leaves other shielded individuals who aren’t able to access such help. I’m not sure I would want to rely on food parcels supplied by the Council and delivered by volunteers. How on earth could they know my favourite choices of wine for starters?
I have tiled the Kitchen floor plus the bit of the Hall inside the cupboard, tiled the splashback, decorated the Kitchen and Hall ceiling to floor, fitted three new light fittings (pain in the arse job!) and totally reorganised my kitchen and hall cupboard storage. So yes, I was pretty bored. I am now busy organising the garden and painting the garden fences, which is a plus and a job that needed doing but kept getting pushed back. And, if I’m brutally honest, I had intended to do most of these jobs anyway and needed to crack on with the extras, because I’m only now reaching the point in the Close Season where the improving weather and extended daylight hours are tempting me to start up a bit of fishing again and enter into some serious prep for the coming Season. But, of course, we can’t, and on a personal level I will need to think long and hard about how I approach any future return to angling if the restrictions ease within my 12 week shielding period.
Fellow anglers have adopted a number of different approaches during this lockdown period. There have been any number of 10 day postings of catch shots. Some have dug through their magazine arhives and posted match reports and articles from way back, whilst others have reminisced about times gone by. The latter two approaches have been my favourites, I’d rather read about fishing than just look at pictures of fish. One recent post was by Tim Ford (aka Cluckers Peg), where he beautifully invoked how magical and mysterious angling seemed when we were so much younger. It certainly stirred some memories with me, sessions and matches which were in many ways very unlike the more precise technical and tactical approaches we develop as we get older and gain experience.
Most of my fishing and matchfishing in my former life, i.e. up to the mid’80s, is a hazy melange of odd events and results, but for some reason there are bits which have stuck more firmly in my memory. One memory which nicely demonstrates how it all seemed a bit more abstract ‘way back then’, was a Wednesday evening Mini-League match on the Tennant Canal. The annual Mini League was a fairly friendly affair involving 5 or 6 local teams of 6 anglers fishing 6 rounds on a range of local venues. The Tennant Canal was (and is) a fairly shallow narrow canal which oriniginates at Aberdulais where it branches off the Neath Canal and terminated in the east of Swansea in Port Tennant (hence the name). Probably about 10 miles total. In its heyday it would have carried boat traffic servicing various industries along the way, but the boats were long gone, and it’s continued raison d’etre was to provide cooling water for the BP Llandarcy Refinery. . So weed-cutting operations only dealt with the canal upstream of the BP pumphouse, and in the absence of boat traffic the Canal had become very weedy and silted up in places.
When I first became aware of the canal its reputation was mainly about Tench, decent fish up to maybe 5Lbs. It also held Rudd, which were endemic to most West Wales waters, Perch and Eels. As we explored the various stretches over the following years we became aware that it also held Roach, Bream and Skimmers. And on one memorable occasion I caught it with a fair amount of colour and flow on, and caught five decent Chub! On the stickfloat!! My angling companion Alan Godrich also caught a Chub that day, and then as far as I am aware neither of us ever caught or even saw a Chub there again. But we made the local paper!!!
Anyway, I digress. The Mini League was pegged out on a stretch above the BP pumphouse, so weed was less of an issue and the canal, at this point, was typically 10m wide at most, 3′ deep and flowing quite steadily. Methods had evolved somewhat, and the go-to approach at the time involved fishing a pole at about 6m to hand, using a Billy Making grey pole float (which I would now classify as a pole stick). This was still very much in the infancy of pole fishing, and the problem of curse, especially on this sort of venue, was how to deal with a bonus fish. We were somewhere in the transition between pole crooks with elastic to today’s elastic through sections. We’d gone past the pole crook with integral elastic phase (6″ of elastic doesn’t stretch very far!!), and we were whipping very small (quiver tip) eyes onto a flick tip, threading strong mono through these then attaching the mono to a longer length of elastic on the next section down. Before you all rush off to try this, let me just point out that the pole felt like shit with all that paraphanelia on the end, and although we could use longer lengths of elastic there were still limitations. But there I was with my cutting edge approach, either on the very last generation of Shakespeare fiberglass poles or just possibly on the very first generation of Shakespeare carbon fibre poles which were, even at 6 or 7m lengths, a revelation.
I drew a peg midway up which at least had the advantage of a nice tree opposite which provided some much needed shade on such a shallow and clear venue. I kicked off with my pole to hand rig, which was of course my only rig, as I didn’t set anything else up, and started running my pole stick through 2/3rds across under the tree. Any form of groundbait was a big no-no in those days, so I’m guessing that I would have been loose feeding caster and possibly pinkie, and I got the usual early response from some small Roach and Perch. Settled on the caster and continued to pick up odd fish, although, as usual the canal faded quickly in the face of such unusual angling pressure and disturbance. About halfway though the 3 hour match something possessed me to try double pinkie on the hook. Turned out to be a good choice as I immediately hooked a Bream around the 2Lb mark. After a few heart-stopping moments, during which my hyrbrid elstic system was probably more of a hinderance than a help, I netted it. This was good news on a canal which could throw up 30Lbs if you were pleasure fishing but where 3Lbs was a good match weight. A bit further into the match I went off on even more of a tangent and fished punched bread on the hook, and lo and behold a 1.5Lb Tench grabbed it and I had an even better demonstration of how totally ineffectual my elastic set-up was. And why did I switch to punched bread? I haven’t got a clue, totally random approach. But, I must have dropped 5 or 6 Lbs on the scales and won the match comfortably, beautiful early summer’s evening and a couple of bonus fish. Lovely! But I do often wonder how I would have tackled up and fed the same peg using today’s gear? What would I have caught? I know for sure that I wouldn’t have suddenly switched to punch as a change bait. And I will never find out either, which is part of the magic of fishing.
Given that we are still facing at least another 3 weeks of lockdown, I may try to recollect a few more of these successful cock-ups. But apologies for the lack of any precise data, one of my big regrets now is that I didn’t think to keep a diary or record of my fishing adventures. They’d make an interesting read through this difficult time. ,
26 Year ITCH 