STEPPING UP OR DUMBING DOWN?

  

     Sometimes I end up buying gear that I never really get on with. Take landing nets for example. I don't do a lot of Carp or Barbel fishing but when I do I feel it behoves me to have a big enough net to hand. When I was a kid, large landing nets were rare and most of us that liked to consider ourselves Specimen Hunters would knock up monster nets based around bicycle wheel rims. Absolute overkill of course but we unconsciously worked on the basis that if you can't catch a monster then you could at least look like you were ready when it came along. I guess that as teenagers we always felt that somehow a big net was the first step up to greater things to come. With age it now looks pretty dumb and one of the downsides of advancing years is realising what a twat you were.

     My God I've had some big nets over the years and my current carp net is no exception and I've hated it since the day I got it. It's rubberised mesh is heavy and the bag, really deep making it unwieldy, inconvenient and heavy. I saw a famous match angler talking about landing nets once and he pointed out that while he got a lot of stick from Carp anglers for using comparatively small pan nets to land 20lbs+ Carp those he did catch were supported properly by the mesh. Most big Carp nets are just tapered sacks that tend to bend big fish in half. Used for long thin fish like Pike and Barbel they are even worse. That demonstration, with a large Carp in a pan net, has stuck with me ever since.

     I have had a lovely hand-made Carp net handle in desperate need of a suitably attractive and decent-sized net for some time now and today it arrived courtesy of Andy Batchelor. The frame made of steam-bent Ash carries a 26" modern specimen pan net. The V block is of polished brass and it is a thing of real beauty as well as being lighter than my current aluminium framed monstrosity. That will now be relegated to some distant day when I find myself on a lake full of forty pounders which I sincerely hope I never do.

     We decided on a handover at the syndicate lake and today was the day, the first time I've ever fished with Andy and it didn't take him long to get the Carp feeding off the surface. The next best thing to catching on cane is to watch somebody else do so and his Mk IV was soon being put through its paces. Hopefully in the next month or two my own Mk IV will be pulling a Barbel or two over my nice new net. Thanks Andy.