From another website:
I think I visited a form of angling hell last week.
I went to visit a well known group of pits just off a major road in the Midlands, with a view to possibly fishing there. It is next door to my Mother-In-Laws and could provide a worthy excuse to slip away in pursuit of a plump carp.
I can only describe what I saw as the antithesis of everything I love about fishing.
It was the warning signs which alerted me to the fact that this place was different. Badly written, hastily constructed, obviously ignored. "You will be evikted if you yuse a kepnet". "You must dip youre nets. This meens you!" They were everywhere.
There must have been over 100 people fishing on these pits. Every peg had a bivvy. And every peg had a car parked right next to it. And quite a lot had caravans. So as you looked around these featureless pits you were faced with a skyline of vehicles. All vegetation had clearly been removed from the lakes to enable more anglers to squeeze in. Friends stood around in the afternoon gale on each others pegs, grimly drinking warm lager from discounted cases. Outside the caravans people had set up tables to eat from, their radios blared as they played football with their skinheaded sons. Their rod pods sat, motionless, like unused gun batteries. The wind made them squawk occasionally, audible at 400 yards. People wandered from peg to peg, in full camoflage, talking loudly, laughing, drinking.
The roar of the dual carraigeway filled the air wherever you went. The bridges the road sat on were right next to the pegs on the Eastern Bank. They were covered in graffiti, littered to capacity with booze bottles, condoms, syringes, burnt out cars. The legions of carp squaddies seemed oblivious to this as they stared at the grey lake, spitting and swearing into their mobiles as their afternoon lager kicked in.
I had entered fishing hell.
