My mate Colin, who matchfished when we were both teenagers, has recently bought a new match box and got interested again, after years of occasional pleasure fishing. So this summer I arranged a day for both of us with Bob Nudd, on Decoy, to get Colin back into the swing of things. I also wanted to speed up my netting of carp, as I seem to take longer than some others to get them into the net.
At my request we fished Oak, where the carp have a big average size, and Bob started us on hair-rigged pellet at full depth. Now I’ve only ever fished hair rigs shallow before, so this was a new experience for me. It worked on the bottom, but I foulhooked so many that I came up in the water, and as Bob had prophesied, the fish were smaller, but at least I did not foulhook any.
Colin did not seem to foulhook many at all, and I still don’t know why. Bob sat beside me to check that I was not striking until it looked as if the fish had taken the pellet properly, and even he kept saying: “Yes, I would have struck at that” only for us to find another foulhooker. So he was as perplexed as I was.
My main aim was netting the fish quickly, so I sat Bob on my box and watched him play the next couple of fish hooked properly – and he took about the same length of time I had. So that gave me confidence that I wasn’t doing anything really bad. I have found many times that often anglers don’t need to do anything different to their normal style – they just need to do it better ie: more carefully, paying attention to detail. And I didn’t see how I could get the fish in any more quickly without taking chances, so I was well happy.
But Bob did say that many matchmen took chances playing fish hard, and inevitably they lose some. I lose very few, so I suppose it’s swings and roundabouts. That alone made it worth the money for me. And for the record he estimated my catch at around 100 lb and Colin’s at 130 lb; we both had fish to 10 lb. I spent time experimenting, using 4 mm and 6 mm pellet on the hook, and altering my feeding from a handful every couple of minutes to half-a-dozen pellets every 20 seconds, which of course brought fish up in the water, as expected. And I tried fishing off the bait, which actually didn’t produce as many bites, though in Winter it definitely can.
So all round a good, relaxing day. I find, when pleasure fishing, that I simply cannot bring myself to bring in fish after fish, preferring to alter stuff – shots, bait, depth, so see what happens. I may not remember exactly, but I think it ingrains itself on the brain!
And it was great to spend some time with Bob, whom I have known for 30 years – I first met him in the 1980s to do a feature on the River Lea at St Margaret’s, where he produced some extraordinary stuff called Van den Eynde Supercup. It was the first packeted groundbait I had seen and I raved about it. Up to then the only groundbait options available to most of us had been white breadcrumbs or brown breadcumbs with some maize or biscuit dust – and the quality was never the same. Sometimes the bread set like concrete and other times it would not bind together! Things are rather different now!
I also spent time in Sweden and Denmark with him, and have met him many times since then, including the day he coached me on the bank while my team was fishing the final of the Supercup. I think we came second. And of course he was always at the Irish Festivals I used to fish – always happy, and willing to talk to anyone about fishing – or cricket!
