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?
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