The Secret Angler

Selling enough copies of a fishing periodical to make it pay cannot be easy. Even so, there are a good few around, especially those for fly anglers. One complaint readers often make is on the amount of advertising in magazines, a means of keeping them solvent while ensuring the cover price stays within the bound of what buyers are prepared to pay.

I have no great objection to classified ads in magazines; you can always skip over those pages with hardly a pause. Far worse is the breed of publication that fills its pages with advertorials, text that purports to be an article on fishing but is really a vehicle for a lot of brand advertising. Browsing the newsagent shelves the other week I noticed a new magazine that adopts this model, Today’s Flyfisher, now on its second issue. The contributors are nearly all agents or ambassadors for tackle companies — i.e. they get paid to pump the company’s products. So a typical piece will read something like ‘Kyle’s chosen rod was a Pulser XYZ 9ft #6 while I opted for my trusty Forcefield Madmax 10ft 5-wt, a brilliant rod at a fantastic price that will catch anything that swims and a good more besides.’

Amongst all this puff you might find a bit of fishing, but it is perfunctory stuff. The authors are chosen for their commercial associations, not their writing skills. The photos are not bad, though I do wonder why the anglers nearly always wear chest waders and spend much of their time in the middle of rivers. Scares the fish you know. The fashion for designer stubble is also evident in the more blokey correspondents, foils for the crude logos on their caps perhaps.

Although you may find the occasional article without the advertising, at £8 Today’s Flyfisher is expensive considering the lack of worthwhile material in its glossy pages. Not one I’ll be subscribing to.

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Will Millard gets around. According to his website he is an expedition leader, rather in the Victorian tradition, in which he tramps about wild places. He has made television programmes about native peoples down Indonesia way, and closer to home, on the history and geography of Wales. They make for pretty good TV all in all. I’ve watched the repeats of Hunters of the South Seas and liked the first episode, on the Bajau spear fishermen, not quite so keen on the whale hunters.

Millard’s films have the familiar problem of the modern documentary, the presenter from the skies, or the fish out of water. These programmes risk the presenter becoming the main focus while the notional subject, the native people, recede into the background behind the familiar face to camera. The whale episode dallied with this flaw. Certainly the whale hunt scenes were dramatic, but of equal drama seemed to be Millard’s wrestling with his own emotions at the bloody turmoil in the water and the distress at seeing a great creature slaughtered. His reactions are understandable, yet they are not the point of the films and become intrusive.

The real strength of the documentaries is the mirror they hold up to ourselves in our complacent Western comfort. No longer just small subsistence communities taking only what they need, they are subject to the same prejudices and poverty and desire for money we see in our own milieu. The disabled Bajau boy who is an embarrassment to his father, the discrimination practised by the land-living tribes, and, most troubling, the culpability of the fishermen in the bad practices that feed the Chinese traditional medicine market (a euphemism for large scale quackery). Equally unsettling is their naivety over the collapse of fish stocks. Their view is that the seas will always provide, even as catches dwindle and illegal vessels hoover up the remaining stocks. Corruption on a small scale is also evident: the locals join the boats to earn cash.

None of this should really be unexpected. Similar disbelief in evidence exists in educated cultures that should know better, and cupidity runs deep the world over. That the serpent in the Garden encircles the globe is the unintended revelation of Millard’s overseas sojourns.

The way of life of the native fisherman in simple communities is declining and with it their direct role in environmental damage. This will only leave the oceans open to widespread illegal fishing if governments cannot enforce the laws. There is always a market for fish and consumers outside the West, and many within, don’t worry where it comes from. And that is our real problem. The human population is growing rapidly and little action is being taken to address this. There are solutions, principally the spread of wealth more evenly around the world and the provision of education for women in the developed world. How likely is that to happen in time?

Predicting the future is always difficult. Martin Rees, the Astronomer Royal, guesses the odds of our making it to the 22nd century at evens. That might be generous.

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