The Secret Angler

The internet has earned notoriety for bringing out the troll and the bully in people, and online fishing forums suffer as much as any social media. There are good people on these virtual chatrooms, I’ve even had fishing invitations from some, but many are marred by a clique of bullies who wait to pounce like brats in the playground.

I live on the coast and the earliest forums I joined were sea fishing sites. As the seas have become poorer over the years, I’ve moved to freshwater and dabbled in a couple of coarse and game forums. Some of the sea forums have turned moribund as the fishing has declined (Facebook has rendered some redundant) but one that keeps on going is World Sea Fishing (WSF), the commercial set up of Mike Thrussell’s. I’m still a member but haven’t gone there for some time. It has improved somewhat in recent years following a purge of the old moderators. Before then it was a verbal gunslinger’s paradise (or hell). One of my earliest posts, not controversial, was jumped on by some oaf at a keyboard. I raised objections with the moderators and found them to be even bigger bullies than the members at large. I learned that many of them were not anglers at all but commercial trawlermen, to whom anything that contradicts their right to fish out the seas was game for a volley of personal attacks. I contacted Thrussell about this but he did not respond.

Sometime later Thrussell, mindful of the impact on his business, replaced the moderators, banished the maddest members and conspiracy theorists to their own forum, and today WSF is a quieter place. Although I read that some bullying still goes on.

The experience at WSF reveals a basic truth about these forums: the atmosphere is wholly dependent on the owner or administrator. Fair and sensible individuals generally run good forums. I’ve only come across one, and that has pretty much folded.

A forum that covers freshwater and sea is anglersnet.co.uk, another commercial outfit. I spent a short time on this one, though I discovered that some of the mad ones from WSF reside there too, as well as its own versions. One of the mods is an American, the climate change-denying redneck sort, and it became obvious that anyone who contradicted his reactionary views was in for the chop. Subsequently he banned a reasonable member who’d been one of the site’s originators.

Another commercial forum I visit is flyfishing.co.uk. I’ve not spent much time here but there is less hostility than elsewhere, or so it appears — it does have its share of the usual bigots. The worst aspect is the copious advertising that plasters the screen with ads, jumping all over the place as the images load. (Oddly many ads seem to be aimed at young women — go figure.) You need a good adblocker on your browser to make this site readable.

Which brings me to the forum that describes itself as the friendliest online meeting place for chummy anglers, the Traditional Fisherman’s Forum, TFF to its adherents. The USP of TFF is the collective interest in cane fishing rods and all things old. Well, sort of. It’s a bit split personality on that score. How old tackle has to be is flexible, though only as far as the admin, Mark Sarul, allows. Carbon rods are anathema regardless of age. Tweed is good, Mitchell reels are beloved, anything to do with Chris Yates provokes paroxysms of pleasure. As an earlier Secret Angler post noted, the TFF should really be called the Chris Yates Fan Club. Like sentimental drunks they love to cosy up to open fires with a snifter in hand, pretending to be Edwardian gents. Members adopt an exaggerated olde worlde courtesy, referring to each other as gentlemen and calling each other Sir. Sounds charming? Actually it’s enough to make you gag, because underlying all this apparent matiness is an unpleasant coven of core members.

I remain a member but keep a low profile now, watching the antics of these dubious characters. This is how it works. In a discussion on, well, it could be anything, you might disagree with one of the favoured members who has the ear of admin or one of the moderators. This will provoke a starchy response from one of their number; if you reply they will all wade in, also sending messages to admin declaring the offending member to be unsuitable. Sarul, not the brightest of buttons, will then send the member a warning, or summarily delete their account. If you try to argue with him, you will be taken back to childhood — fingers in the ears kind of thing, yah boo. Topics that invite opprobrium are several, which include anything, however mild, that criticises Chris Yates, BB, royalty, Redmire Pool, bamboo, or one of the inner sanctum. I have seen someone banned for asking about carbon rods; another who said that members just wanted to be Chris Yates quietly disappeared one day. Someone who expressed an adverse view about the last royal wedding received so much hostility that he quit at once. There have been many others amongst the disappeared.

It’s not that sallow Sarul (whose name, incidentally, is Urdu for god) is so much a bully himself, he is just buddy-buddy with those who are, which perhaps amounts to the same thing. They all share similar characteristics — right wing in their politics (right of UKIP, that is), poorly informed (they only read fishing books), a tendency to xenophobia and misogyny, intolerant of views which disagree with their own and consequently hostile to anyone who articulates them. Unexpectedly, the moderators don’t appear to fit these categorisations, with the exception of Sweetcorn Kid, the biggest Yates worshipper of the lot, but he spends far less time online now. Of the other two, one is mostly absent, the other relatively innocuous. Admin does the donkey work on TFF.

Before I leave the subject of forums I will mention one more, these days a kind of offshoot of TFF, thepathbythewater.net. This mostly comprises members or ex-members of TFF, the admin is JAA, himself a TFF ex. This puts me off the forum immediately. I’ve never been a member but the underhand slagging off goes on here too, according to one long-serving member, and looking through posts (it’s open to all viewers) there does seem to be some evidence of this. JAA, I recall from TFF, although more educated than most, is also intolerant and reacts very badly to anyone who argues with him. He advertised this blog though, so he’s not all bad.

It’s worth repeating that I do know some good people from these forums. Even among the spiteful old women of TFF there are some decent individuals who’ve survived the trial of tweed and the bamboo cane ducking stool.

Two articles in Fallon’s Angler 14 caught my attention. One phrase in particular jumped out: ‘… most fishing books are not very good …’. Tom Fort probably understates the matter. Many are pretty bad in my opinion. Are publishers part of the cause? The phenomenon of the short print run with a handful of ‘special edition’ leather-bound copies has appeared in recent years. No matter how bad the book, these leather editions, usually purchased by the author and family and friends, ensure it turns a profit. The remaining cloth copies sell to a few more, a fair chunk bought up by dealers who get the author to sign each one. This immediately institutes a rarity, thus pushing up the price, no matter how worthless the content. It’s a neat commercial trick but it doesn’t add much to the world of angling literature; on the contrary it is a form of vanity publishing and a waste of paper.

Merlin Unwin’s views in the second article (written by Dominic Garnett) are therefore interesting to someone who, like me, finds nearly all new fishing books uncompelling. According to Unwin, a book needs to have ‘a distinct theme,’ ‘a fresh angle and something new or different to say.’ This got me wondering what there is new to say in a fishing book. Instructional books may have something different to offer, some technique, some method that no one has ever come across, but most are just rehashes of stuff anglers have been doing for years. With the story kind of book, the memoir, the accounts of fishing days and ways, what new themes are there? Are they not all just collections, tales of days fishing with discursions on the weather, personal feelings, friends and so on? Consider some of the major fishing books of the past. Sheringham’s best were a collection of disparate essays on the different types of fishing he did; only one stuck to trout. Ransome collected a broad assortment of his newspaper columns into Rod and Line. More recently Tom Fort did something similar in The Far from Compleat Angler. The best-selling fishing writer today, John Gierach, repeats his theme of fly fishing alone or with friends in every book, a subject also covered by many other authors in America. Where is the distinctive theme, where is the ‘angle’ in any of these?

Of course there isn’t one. What marks all these books out is the quality of the writing, the uniqueness of the author’s mind. At heart they are just accounts of fishing trips; some might be devoted to one species, or one river, but this barely amounts to a theme. I took a look at the fishing books published by Unwin to see if I could pick out the fresh angles in those. On the instructional side, there are books on knots, fly casting, fly tying … Nothing especially new there; there are dozens of books on those subjects, presented in all sorts of ways and all much of a muchness. The memoir books are led by a couple of BB reprints. Confessions of a Carp Fisher does have a species theme I suppose, but Fisherman’s Bedside Book is an anthology of various writers. Chris Yates’s Secret Carp is focused on a day beside the water and talks about tea quite a bit — a theme of sorts. Falling in Again is really no more than another collection of fishing tales, it’s angle, if you can call it that, the alternation between childhood and adulthood reminiscences, although that pairing peters out before the end of the book. Another fishing (and shooting) author in the Merlin Unwin fold is Laurence Catlow. The Healing Stream is different in that Catlow opens up his problems of mental illness. It’s as much autobiography as a fishing book, which is perhaps relatively unusual but, from reading some of it, not very interesting. Confessions of a Shooting Man, obviously not about fishing, is a diary (not an original idea) in which he expresses forthright opinions, some reactionary. Maybe that amounts to a theme but not necessarily to a good read.

In the article Unwin mentions a recent publication about bass fishing by James Batty. If it has a theme it is again a species — bass of course. It does have the unusual format of instructional sections in standard font, with descriptions of fishing in italics. I don’t see the point of this; for one, large sections in italics are annoying, and it seems designed to encourage readers to skip passages. But at least the writing is better than many fishing books. It’s written in a journalistic style with a tell-it-like-it-is flavour and is quite readable, although the dogmatic tone may become irksome. Is the book’s strength its slender theme or its readability?

In the past a few editors of fishing magazines have talked to me about angles in articles. I think there is too much of the old fashioned journalist in this. A good fishing book, any book in fact, is good because of the writing, not any theme it may contrive to inhabit. Readers accept that a fishing book is about fishing and that’s that. What we want to read is a book of genuine interest, a book that is written by someone who can write and who has a mind worth knowing. If publishers looked for this instead of some artificial motive we might get a few better books. The true theme is the writer behind the words. Most fishing books really are not very good, and perhaps the publishers deserve some of the blame.