So, you are a dedicated specimen hunter; you have chosen your water well and learnt as much as you can. You are happy with your rigs, your bait and your presentation; you are in the zone and fishing well. Then, amazingly, what you have been waiting for happens: your rod tip flies around, you strike and, hey presto, ten minutes later the fish of your dreams is lying on your unhooking mat ready for the photo.
The buzz is fantastic. You shake hands with your mates; you shout “Get in!” at the top of your voice. You excitedly tell a bemused lady at home and hug and kiss her in celebration. You re-tell the story time and again, to increasingly bored work colleagues. You buy the comics and gaze proudly at your smiling face within their pages. You glean every last bit of enjoyment out of it; happy to have finally achieved what you set out to do.
Two weeks later and the buzz has started to wear off. You are thinking about getting out on the bank again – but something is missing. Suddenly the ultra keen any weather fisherman is looking out the office window and saying “Not tonight” or waking up on a Sunday and thinking more about staying in a warm bed and watching telly for a day.
What has happened? Could fishing finally be losing its appeal? How can it get any better when you have already caught your dream?
This is my story of when it happened to me.
I have wanted to write an article on this subject for a while, not because I want to show off about a big fish. On the contrary, this is a precautionary tale of what happens after you let the fish go.
In 2008 I was lucky enough to make acquaintance with a barbel bigger then even my wildest childhood fantasies, but weirdly it nearly ended my love affair with not only the species but with fishing itself.
As kid I used to read a lot about fishing, often from old books my dad had stashed about the house. I read the old stories about huge barbel from the Hampshire Avon, how one guy had caught “several over 10lb in one season” or about a 16lb monster that had been foul hooked by a salmon angler. I read about massive chub in Throop and how a fish over 5lb is possible even to the novice angler. How the record roach had been caught by a guy around the Wimborne area. Names of the towns, Ringwood, Christchurch, Ibsley, seemed to ring in my mind and it was always a pipe dream to one day fish in the area. Little did I realise then fate would mean I ended up living there.
Growing up in Slough meant that most of the fishing I did in my early years was on the Grand Union Canal – Slough Arm. It is as lovely a place as it sounds; truly Crabtree country…
I remember beating my Dad, four gudgeon to one, and being pleased about it! I also recall in horrid and vivid detail how I once had to unhook something made of cotton wool with a string attached – I shudder still.
A dream to fish rivers where fish grew big and where you needed to be a serious angler to catch one started in the festering waters of an urban canal.
Once I moved to Bournemouth in 1999 I quickly discovered the free fishing on the Stour.
There was one fish, and one fish alone, that occupied the vast majority of my thinking – the barbel – and my goodness did I think about them! Within my first year I caught my first double, a fish of 12lb 6oz from a stretch of the Stour at Longham. After that, well, things started getting a bit obsessive.
Some five years later and barbel were still pretty much all I fished for. Yes, I caught chub and never did I complain but Saturday, Sunday and three nights a week after work I went fishing and come rain or shine, floods or drought I fished for barbel. And in particular I fished for just one fish – The Giant at Longham.
Let me explain a little about Longham Free Stretch. Longham is possibly one of the best big fish waters in the country, and it’s for FREE. It is truly an amazing fishery and the fish it has produced even in recent years make some of the more exclusive bits of river look decidedly bland.
However, and this is a very BIG however, it is no secret how good the fishing can be and as a result gets haunted by the worst, most weird, social reject anglers you could ever imagine – me being a prime example! Not only that but you have to cope with the general dog walking public, drug users, criminals, aggression, drunkenness, human pooh, homeless people living there, rabbit lamping with air rifles, illegal fixed lines, inflatable boats, gypsy horses and piles of litter…
You may think I am being hyperbolic but I assure you if you are tempted to fish Longham you had better be prepared for a colourful experience.
The evening in question was 16 August 2008. I had left work in a hurry, got to the fishery and, to my dismay, found it busy. Why I even considered it wouldn’t be in school holidays I don’t know but none the less I decided to fish anyway.
Actually the evening progressed very nicely. I already had two 6lb chub and was settling down to a bit of relaxation before heading home for dinner and it was just as I was telling two youngsters about the chub when I had a bite.
Now I’d like to say the fight was amazing but it frankly wasn’t; I kind of bundled it in the net and it was only when I lifted it out of the water that I realised what fish it actually was. The scales read 17lb 11oz and with a bit of maths for the net I settled on 16lb 10oz. It was not at its top weight but it was more than big enough for me and I literally went into overdrive.
Here was a fish in my arms that was bigger than the British record I had read about as a kid; here was truly the fish of my dreams. I was ecstatic and basically didn’t come down from that high for weeks.
But as the dust settled and the plaudits started to dry up, a sick feeling set in. No matter how often I fished for barbel now, no matter where I went, I will probably never again reach such heights. This was the zenith of my barbel career and an eight year obsession had abruptly come to an end. I was lost and had nowhere to go.
Friends kept asking me to go fishing with them and I enjoyed the company, I even caught a fish just under 13lb two weeks later when showing someone around the stretch but the idea of sitting out on my own watching an isotope had just lost its appeal.
Suddenly I had to really force myself to go fishing, I found my attention span dropped or packed up early when sessions were quiet. My work rate dropped too, normally when I fish I ring the changes, try different swims or fish aggressively; but now I was sitting still and being lazy. An attitude of ‘that’ll do’ descended like a black mist. As a consequence I started to fish very badly, encountered many blanks. I even went to a commercial fishery and struggled because my heart was not in it.
What I needed was a new challenge, something to inspire me. I could, for example, try a campaign on the Avon to see if I could connect with one the lumps from Ibsley or the Royalty, but I just could not put myself through it for some reason. I definitely had no interest in trying to catch the same fish at a bigger weight, that’s for sure. I invested huge amounts of time, effort, money and emotion into catching just that one big barbel. The amount I fished put strain on my personal life, meant I often put important things to the back burner because I was out on the bank and I had to ask myself: “Was it worth it in the end?”
I had converted a beautiful, living, breathing barbel to a mere number. I questioned myself for my reasoning of why I wanted to catch it. Was it purely to put a number on it? To show off to other anglers? Was it to prove my machismo? I certainly did not test out my skill as a fisherman, all I did was drop a lead into a gravel run, so why? I struggled to justify the whole thing. To quote Spock: “It was illogical captain.”
That winter I barely went out at all, just a few trips here and there. I had lost my hunger and despite still wanting to go fishing, I found myself looking for new pastures away from it.
Then, one Sunday around February, I got up early and the thought of going out fishing made me feel really down. It had become a chore and even putting my gear in the car seemed like too much hard work. I had got up that morning specifically to go pike fishing and now I was putting my deads back in the freezer and reaching for the remote control. For the first time in my life I did not feeling guilty about sitting on the sofa for a whole Sunday. To put it simply, I had lost my fishing Mojo.
I started spending more and more time away from it, and for over two months I did not fish at all. The thought of it bored me and, if I’m honest, I was beginning to think that maybe there was more to life than being an obsessed loner dressed in green.
Fortunately though, I eventually came to my senses, and decided one day to get off my fat bum and head down to Sopley Lake with a good book and my carp rods. I had relapsed but, unlike any normal addict, the drug of choice was actually good for me. I caught four good carp that day and all of a sudden I was back, and back with a vengeance!
That is not to say the whole experience did not change me. Even now, four years later I still cannot bring myself to fish intensively for one species. It took ages to get over the psychological block and indeed to this day I still do not fish for barbel by sitting it out. Today, for the limited barbel fishing I do, I concentrate on techniques that I enjoy, like trotting or rolling meat.
If I’m honest I probably enjoy my fishing more now than I ever did. These days, I tend to graze different species, fishing for pike one weekend, roach the next, I will often fish with one method in the morning then change tack and do something different in the afternoon. I learnt a hard lesson and one which was completely unexpected. Never did I think that the style of fishing I loved so much could lose its appeal because it actually worked!
A moment ago I asked: “Was it all worth it?”
Of course it bloody was! That was a very stupid question to ask. I don’t think I’ll ever regret catching the fish, but it did make me re-think why I go fishing.
So the moral to this story is simple: be careful what you wish, it may be more then you bargained for.
