Baitboats in a split cane world ...

 

Here's the received wisdom in relation to the legendary Carp Catcher's Club, that small society who redefined the way we fish, created the aura that still surrounds Redmire and showed an unbelieving angling public that carp really were catchable: Dick Walker was the innovator who applied his relentless curiosity and scientific mind to the task of catching carp, and BB was the hopeless romantic, a dreamer and icon for all that's traditional in angling.
Of course, there's more than a grain of truth in those statements. Dick Walker, more than any other angler, gave rise to modern specimen hunting, and BB was a dreamy, mystic, but re-reading his classic "Confessions of a Carp Fisher" along with all the descriptive writing and the evocations of "The Old Copper Mine"(Beechmere) and tales of Father Angelus I came upon this:
"I also experimented with a small raft made from scraps of bark, resting the bread upon it..." , BB goes on to admit that " ... with the boat method I usually manage to get some tangles in my coiled line; a single blade of grass, a leaf or twig, will cause the line to 'snarl', the bait is jerked off the boat and the whole laborious business has to be begun again".
So, there you have it: even in today's gadget saturated carp world bait boats remain controversial, but way back in the late 40's and early 50's BB, of all people, was experimenting with an early form of the bait boat.
It just goes to show there really is, as the writer of the Book of Ecclesiastes put it "nothing new under the sun" ... it's enough to make Chris Yates remove that scene of him blasting a bait boat to pieces from "A Passion for Angling."
BB and boat baits- whatever next? Bernard Venables and hair rigs? Isaak Walton and method feeders?

In debt to Capability

 

 

It wasn't his intention, but Capability Brown has immeasurably added to the pleasure I derive from fishing, for it is he who was the architect and populariser of the estate lakes that form my favourite fishing  environment . Don't get me wrong, I don't exclusively fish estate lakes, and none of my biggest fish have come from them, but there's something indefinably magical about a 250 year old lake of an acre or two set in the grounds of a stately home. It's been said that Brown's intention was to "improve on nature", and while I don't for one moment think that he manged to do that (you can't out-create the Creator!) I love the intimacy of fishing small estate lakes.

Three such lakes (all of which I'll decline to name!) have a special place in my affections; the small pond that has featured in a number of these posts in which I currently fish in the summer for crucians (and where last month I blanked while fishing for perch!), an estate lake in the South East that I lure fished for pike with my brother when in my late 20's - summer piking with topwater plugs and shallow divers and loads of compliant jacks, and a charming little lake I fished with my son for a couple of years either for small wild carp of 2 - 3 pounds or for hoardes of voracious little roach and rudd.

I enjoy and am fascinated by fish-inhabited water of all kinds; big wild gravel pits, small meandering rivers, canals and even the much maligned commercials, but, to my mind, there's nothing to beat a nicely matured estate lake, and so I propose a toast to Capability Brown and all his landscaping successors!

My son, a couple of years ago, with a catch of small roach and rudd from an estate lake