The Secret Angler

I’ve just bought a copy of the Angling Times, the first for many years. It comes with a ‘free carp mag’ and a banner proclaiming that it’s ‘ALL-NEW’. What the newness is I’m not sure because it looks little different to the last copy I read, some time ago I admit: lots of pictures and short paragraphs. We don’t get much idea from the editorial, which is a collection of the old clichés — ‘tactical tips’, ‘top experts’, ‘in-depth, honest tackle reviews’ and so on.

The AT has been around since 1953 and used to be presented as an anglers’ newspaper. Early copies I’ve seen contained a lot more of interest and longer articles by luminaries like Dick Walker. Now it is published in a magazine format, following Angler’s Mail which converted long ago, and filled with photos of grinning (or gurning) fishermen thrusting fish at the camera, mainly carp. Some stare intently at their catch as though the fish has taken control of their minds.

Articles are mostly very short and contain the repetitive stuff of a thousand others. Their main object is to tell readers how to ‘bag up’ using the latest kit (plenty of product placement), mostly poles with a stack of ancillaries.  The ‘top experts’, most of whom are unknown to me, tell readers how to catch a lot of fish with numerous photographs of fish and bits of tackle; and just to show how expert they are, they dress in uniforms, blue or black the favourite livery. Readers will find these guides very familiar because they nearly all say the same sort of thing. I often wonder whether these articles are mainly written by staff writers with a few stock methods to hand — the pole, the waggler, the feeder cover 99%.

One change is the introduction of pellets, an environmentally damaging bait as these are manufactured from fishmeal, a product of industrial (over)fishing. Pellets have given rise to a new item of tackle, a slab of metal unimaginatively called the ‘method’ feeder to which a handful of sticky pellets is moulded. The whole lot is cast out with a loud splosh. The commercial fisheries, featured regularly, are also implicated: the heavily stocked carp are reared on the same pellets. On top, the issue came wrapped in non-degradable plastic. The Angling Times should be doing better.

The effusive piece on the ARP is a matter of concern. There is no evidence beyond the uninformed say-so of anglers to suggest it was any more than a self-flattering waste of time by the two individuals who decided to set up their own breeding programme. Now, according to the AT, it is to be extended to other rivers, although there is no reason to believe they need stocking. This kind of ignorant messing about with fisheries should not be tolerated. Again, Angling Times ought to know better.

I have only passing interest in carp fishing and find it best to avoid lakes with carp anglers, who tend to cast very large and splashy objects around just as the real fish are starting to bite. But I looked through the free carp magazine which, like the AT, is full of fish portraits, this time of fat ugly carp with captors of no more pleasing appearance. It’s a ‘rigs special’ and we are given descriptions of six rigs, all consisting of a hair rig hook and heavy weight. Apart from one with a float, they are much the same. The other articles are also technical expositions of how to find and catch carp without really saying anything beyond the obvious or questionable.

The merit of Angling Times and its offshoots is the visions of fish and fishing expertise it dangles in front of readers’ eyes. When you look at the fishy images, the tackle, the underwater diagrams of hypothetical rivers and lakes, it is easy to think yourself into a state of comfortable fish-catching competence. This keeps you going until the reality of the waterside intrudes once more. The Angling Times, more than ever, survives on clichés and improbabilities; even the experts are fooled into believing their own sophistry, as you will hear time and again on the bank.

Still, some of the photos of the kiddies are cute, and it’s something that the Kingfisher Guild is still going, even if it’s now called a club. Oh for another Dick Walker. But there would be no readership for him.

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Jeremy Wade is probably Britain’s most famous fisherman on account of his television programmes about giant fish in exotic places. Angling on TV is not of itself very interesting, which is why River Monsters and its spinoffs are a cross between those SAS training shows, in which men (and women) turn themselves into he-men via assorted deprivation and violence, and the house building progs which attempt to manufacture drama with tales of incompetence and lack of cash to finish the job. In Jeremy Wade’s case, as he boats about foreign rivers and seas, the tension comes from tales of giant fish that are reputed to swallow native children whole. Usually the fish, once captured, looks only capable of giving you a nip on the ankles. But Wade, dressed in what looks like army-surplus clobber, cultivates the air of an ex-commando and keeps up the dramatic monologue so to convince us he could very well be turned into bait himself. He’s so hunky!

Wade has already written a couple of books based on these TV shows. His latest is How to Think Like a Fish, in which he exposits how to catch big fish, a subject prompted by all the emails he’s received asking ‘How do I catch big fish, Jeremy?’ I would expect the book to be quite fluent given his TV presentations, but then again I saw him give a talk on fishing and that was surprisingly inarticulate. You might also expect the book to be filled with action, rather like the set pieces that intercut his talks to camera. It is more prosaic. It begins with a narrative from a fish, possibly a catfish, demonstrating by example that the book is about thinking like a fish, or rather reading Jeremy Wade thinking like he thinks a fish should think. Fortunately the mind-of-a-fish stage doesn’t last long and Jeremy gets on with the subject in hand, to wit, how to catch fish. This, inevitably perhaps, is an elaboration of ‘right bait in the right place at the right time.’ As pithy summations go this is very familiar and much of the rest of the book wanders around the theme with further discursions on unexceptional topics as knots. There are some moments of adventure, such as getting lost in the Amazon jungle, but these are matter-of-fact and seem less exciting than they should.

I think the problem is that Wade is not a writer. He does not have his own style of expression other than the melodramatic TV personality, and struggles to convey the colour in his situation. Without the film camera he is working in black and white. Despite his travels to fascinating places, there are only brief reflections of the local people he encounters. The most interesting parts of the book for me were his comments on the environmental damage to the Amazon but these are only in passing. Maybe I’ll find more by the time I finish the book.

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