I'd been looking forward to getting my copy with a great deal of anticipation.
I've had it now for about two weeks and have dipped into it a few times.
The last good Roach book i bought was John Bailey's Roach the Gentle Giants which I really enjoyed. Unfortuantely I leant it to someone and can't remember who; it never came back !
This is much bigger book but has less photo's of fish is harder to read, contains a lot of ancillary information that was of little interest to me and is at times poorly researched.
I love fishing for Roach. I've had them over 2lbs on float and ledger from stillwaters lakes and from rivers. My best fish were a 3 lb 1 oz 8 dr stillwater fish and a 2 lb 14 oz river fish.
I'm interested in how methods, populations and records have changed over time and why they have done so and these are covered in the book.
However, the stuff on the history of records was in many cases wrong and when it got to the present day the author whilst agreeing with the acceptance of the NI fish and the rejection of the Basingstoke fish failed to say why.
The writer suggested that the Trent fish couldn't be a Roach because it had a lateral line count of 40. He then went on to suggest that it was a Roach x Chub hybrid but has clearly not considered the obvious - a lateral line count of 40 would mean that it couldn't be a Roach x Chub hybrid either. Roach x Chub hybrids have HIGHER lateral line counts than roach (Wheeler 75, Pitts 94)
I actually agree with his conclusion that the fish was probably a Roach x Chub but the point that he missed and it is a fundamental one is that you cannot rely on lateral line counts.
Like MW I would have liked to see more on the Brown fish and Walkers involvement. I would also have liked to have seen the wrtiter look properly at Roach x Rudd hybrids and refer to the academic papers from Wheeler '75 to the present day. In that study Wheeler was actually looking at fish from Estwaite obtained by Fred Buller and Wheeler, Buller and Walker discussed the issue at length as is mentioned in the acknowledgements at the end of the paper.
Interestingly the Wheeler paper took measurements of the relative position of the dorsal of Rudd, Roach and hybrids and plotted them on a graph. Its an absolute must read when you are making your mind up about the NI fish.