TIME.... IS WAITING IN THE WINGS

     Considering that fishing is, or rather was once, the idle man's pursuit, a way to fritter away a sunny day; time has lately resurfaced as a subject of some importance to me. As a wannabe traditional angler, I have long found myself envying the grass chewing, bucolic wastrel that one sees in so many old prints and paintings. That surely is the pure and true essence of angling; the archetypal "worm at one end and a fool at the other".

     It is a sign of the times that I have failed miserably but I do try to at least not make it a matter of life and death. Richard Walker suggested that to succeed, particularly in the pursuit of big fish one must treat it as a war. It is a matter of record that marriages have been broken, lives and mental health destroyed in the pursuit of fish and the root cause is an obsessive search for efficiency in their capture. Time spent at the water, more effective tackle, high-modulus carbon, teflon coated hooks, self-hooking rigs, scientifically engineered baits; all endured, developed and purchased at great expense to catch fish. The fool wants nothing more than to be left in peace.

     There is probably an equation that employs time as a key factor in the pursuit of efficiency; an equation that would suit very well the approach of the Specialist angler and is fundamental to the modern match angler's whole existence. The fool in me has tried hard over the years to avoid time-related pressure at the waterside but as I get older I find myself failing.

     I've been doing a lot of feeder fishing lately and have, I confess, resorted so readily to a clock-related approach that I'm embarrassed to admit it. Even as a kid I had quickly learned that few things improved my catches more than feeding regularly and had employed my wristwatch to that end. A few casters every ten minutes and a small ball of pinkie-laden groundbait every thirty, caught me a lot of Tench.

     As a confirmed grass chewing wastrel I have tendency to lose track of time so I've been rigorously following the clock of late while feeder fishing. Three five minute casts followed by three ten minute casts and fifteen minute casts from then on gets some bait in the swim early on and keeps it topped up nicely. I'm never fishing for more than fifteen minutes with a tangled rig or a debris-covered bait. I am, and undoubtedly always have been, tainted by the pandemic that nobody mentions - a search for efficiency.

     Efficiency is not the only reason I detest the concept of Time. As my longed-for retirement date receeds into the past, I become more and more frustrated by unfishable rivers, hours that pass in minutes, traffic jams and painful joints. Shall I fish the float, the feeder, the pole? Hemp, wheat, maggots, casters, bread? The club lakes, the Syndicate lakes, the Avon, the Wye, the Leam, the canal? Roach, Crucians, Carp, Tench or Barbel?

 "You run and you run to catch up with the sun, but it's sinking,

Racing around to come up behind you again."

     I loved that song when I was a teenager; now it makes me terribly sad. Take a tip from me; give it a miss once you've reached 70. If by some impossible chance I should end up in heaven, I won't be there for long. I'll have been thrown out for wringing the scrawny neck of the bastard that invented Time.