The title of this piece is somewhat misleading. My actual middle name is Murray (which isn't much better!), but my angling results at the moment hover perilously between the categories of mediocre and disappointing. After several years of relative success, especially with specimen sized perch, 2024 saw a downturn in my fortunes with no fish of noteable size of any species banked, and so far 2025 seems determined to prolong the run of piscatorial underacheivement. The irony, though, is that last year was one of my most enjoyable seasons for quite some time, largely because almost all of my sessions were fished in the company of my son, or with some of the good friends who I've collected over the course of my angling years, or both.
Today's expedition, a few snatched hours on an early April morning, saw me once again fail to set the angling world ablaze with my escapades, as my friend David and I visited a local lake. I arrived before David and had my first carp on the bank just twenty minutes after making my first cast and before his arrival. I had decided, on a whim, to eschew my normal centre pin and quill float approach, in favour of a Method feeder, with a 2 pound test curve rod, freespool reel and bite alarm. Some regular readers may now be throwing their hands up in horror and recoiling at such wanton backsliding into "traditional angling" heresy, but there are times when a solid screaming tone on the alarms and a rod jerking and bending as the fish tears off feels like exactly what I need, besides which I consider laziness, in moderation, as much a virtue as a flaw.
Shortly after landing that first carp, a second tore off with my hair rigged Robin Red pellet in its mouth, only for the hook to pull as I drew it towards the net. However, with one fish banked and another hooked and almost landed and less than half an hour gone, I felt confident that the morning would go on to provide a steady procession of fish to the unhooking mat. It didn't.
David arrived and set up in the swim next to me, which enabled us to pass the time chatting and catching up with each other's news and lives, which in the event was no bad thing in light of the absence of anything much in the way of angling action!
I added a second fish, a surprise barbel, before David eventually got off the mark with an F1. I am no fan of barbel, coarse fishing's monarch of moving water, being stocked in lakes and ponds but the fish gave a spirited fight and was a welcome diversion from inactivity.
Although the Spring sun was bright in the sky, a chill Easterly wind kept the temperature down and the other anglers around the lake (of which there were more than is normal for this pond) were similarly struggling with only the odd fish being landed. My final fish of the morning was a bream, enabling me to console myself with the fact that what I'd lacked in numbers had been compensated for by variety. David was less fortunate, his second and final fish completing for him a brace of F1s.
By lunchtime I was back home with my net drying in the garden and my tackle neatly and safely enconsed in the garage. Perhaps it's an age thing - I am, after all, now a grandfather and rapidly approaching my seventh decade - but these days I find myself measuring success less in relation to size or numbers ("just as well", I hear you say) but, rather, in terms of enjoyment and, fortunately for me, I've enjoyed both of my, mostly fishless, excursions of 2025 to date. As many a bankside sage has informed me: "it's called fishing, not catching" and from such a truism I draw comfort!
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