SLAVE TO THE RHYTHM

     Back in the day, when I were a lad, my friends and I would often set out to fish for bleak on the lower Thames, close to home. Bleak were resident in their millions and big weights could be built up if one set out to catch them deliberately. My favoured technique was to fish the top three of my old Shakespeare telescopic pole to hand. The float would be an inch or two of peacock quill double-rubbered and un-shotted, a couple of feet above a 16 hook with the barb crushed flat and filed off.

     A single maggot slapped onto the water would attract immediate interest from the teeming hoards drawn close by the occasional scattering of a few loose offerings. The trick was not to watch the float but to strike to a slow count of seconds. One would start at say five seconds before lifting and see if or where the fish was hooked. I had no time for the lip ripping antics of the greediest anglers, I would extend the count until a fish was caught then reduce it until they were just hooked and more or less fell off into the keepnet whose mouth would be positioned between my knees.

     After fifteen or twenty minutes, a rhythm would be established and the weight would begin to build. These days match anglers pretty much do the same with carp on overstocked and hungry commercials, and frequently talk about getting into a rhythm. As a pleasure angler I had more or less discarded the importance of rhythm but just lately it occurred to me that subconsciously I had been doing it anyway. All it takes during a successful spell of catching is a visit from the bailiff, a tangle or answering a call of nature and the spell is broken. Just today, I was catching steadily on wheat over hemp. Things were going just fine until the hook pulled out of a fish and I was faced with the very devil of a tangle around the pole tip. Elastic, float and nylon were irreparably knotted together.

 
     Never mind, break it down and rebuild the rig I thought. Rest the swim while still feeding and when I get the bait back in the water they'll be mad for it. Wrong! It took me another hour to get them going again. My rig, too long really before the tangle, was now a bit too short. Somehow I just couldn't get the depth quite right and the accuracy of my feeding was suddenly far worse. My confidence was out the window and, it finally dawned on me, I'd lost my riddim. It took me another thirty minutes of tinkering to get back to where I was. A few more fish started to stick and all was well once more. It was a classic case of rhythm loss, not always easily regained especially with a lot more years under my longer and tighter belt. These days, I guess I move to a slower beat.