In bed with Mr Crabtree

Although there's an element of "Ooeer Mrs!" in the title, this blog post is as upright and moral as one might rightly expect from a "man of the cloth."

The thing is, you know you've chosen to be Vicar of the right church when after the service a member of your congregation comes up to you with a package and says "I found this in a second hand booksellers and wondered if you'd like it", and procedes to unwrap and present to you an excellent condition 1959 edition of "Mr Crabtree goes fishing". Roger, who gave me the book,  (pictured below with a crucian carp) is a recent convert, not to Christianity (he's been a Christian for a couple of decades), but to angling, having been introduced to the sport through his son.

I was doubly delighted, as one of the great omissions in my angling library is a copy of "Crabtree". The truth of the matter is that, at 44 years of age, I'm the immediate post-Crabtree generation, although I did own a similar book by Bernad Venables entitled the "Piccolo Book of Fishing" when I was a boy, which used the same cartoon format, but with a young adult acting as the mentor to a child angler, as opposed to the eponymous pipe smoking father of "Peter" in the original.

And so, on Sunday night, I settled into bed, nursing a throat infection that had made my Sunday sermons sound as if they'd been preached by the offspring of either Darth Vadar or Barry White (and that probably hadn't been helped by Saturday's spinning session in freezing conditions!) and settled down to read. Ironically, following my weekend blank, and in view of the fact that in the 30 odd years that I've been fishing January has been a singularly disapointing month in fishing terms (my first ever pike, caught in January 1982 being the exception to the rule),  I was interested to read just a couple of pages into the book that "The Crabtrees have decided to start their fishing year in January. They could not do better ..." - looks like Bernard Venables and his cartoon creations know something I don't.

I suspect that it'll take a while before it's sensible for me to fish again, and so it may have to wait another year before I see if any of the Crabtree's January optimism has rubbed off on me. Until then I'll have the consolation that I now have one of the "classics" on my bookshelves for those moments when armchair angling has to suffice.

January deja vu

When something's repeated often enough it becomes a tradition ... blanking on my first session of a new year seems to pretty much fit that category! This morning, accompanied by my son, I managed to steal a quick spinning session to the Grand Union. The day was cold (as January day's should be), and we knew that there was every chance that we would fail to catch, but for as long as you have a lure in the water "hope springs eternal" and there's always the possibility. We concentrated on a couple of bridges and a few areas where the tangled tree roots provided what looked like good ambush points for perch in need of a snack, but to no avail.

The highlight of the day was quite possibly "borrowing" one of the tables at a canal-side pub to stop and enjoy a hot drink and a chat, before rejoining the increasingly unequal battle between us and the fish who were either too cold to feed or not hanging around in the areas we were targetting. Several spinners and lures were used, including all the usually reliable ones, but after an hour and a half of "character building" it was time to return home and join the girls.
 A day fishing is never a day wasted, however, and on the way home I realised that my son, who has been fishing for 8 years has only blanked four times, which shows the value of (a) having a fishing parent to provide (often unheeded!) guidance, and (b) the difference being able to access Commercial Fisheries has made to a generation of young anglers - it wasn't that easy when my brothers and I were teaching ourselves to fish in 1981!

So, we still await our first fish of 2013, but as the saying goes; "Piscatur non solum piscator", which roughly translates: "There's more to fishing than catching fish."