Have you heard the one about the vicar and the record gudgeon?
Did Peter Bishop doubt a man of the cloth?
PETER Bishop is a man obsessed with fish, fishing, and stories about fishing. As you will find as you read on, he tells his own stories, and those of his friends, with great aplomb, perception and humour.”
So says our own Keith Arthur, who has written the foreword to Peter’s ‘Crucians at Bedtime – a Net Full of Reel Stories’.
Peter’s second fishing book, following his critically-acclaimed ‘Another Bloody Tangle’, runs to 224 pages and 24 stories. Here’s a taste…
THE VICAR’S RECORD GUDGEON
Anyone who casts a line regularly will agree there is more to their local fishing tackle shop than just a display of equipment for sale.
Apart from being able to service the needs of anglers, the average tackle emporium, particularly the smaller ones, often perform the same role for the local angling fraternity as a village shop does for a rural community. Part provisions store, part meeting room, part information exchange, and even tea bar, for certain regulars, it is a microcosm of countryside sport in an urban setting. Utterly pivotal to the trade of ideas, gossip and, best of all, preposterous yarns.
Once known as a regular customer, you are likely to be greeted by name with a welcoming smile or some goodnatured banter. I am teased unmercifully for my legendary disasters. Indeed, fishing shops are probably the only retail outlet where the customer can get thoroughly insulted yet leaves smiling, and happily returns the next week for more. Sometimes, you might even be offered a mug of piping hot tea and the opportunity to swap stories, ideas and venue information.
Behind the counter of our local angling shop in Eastham, accomplished match angler Terry Parry knows virtually all the regulars by name, and not only supplies the bait and tackle they need, but is very adept at selling them plenty they don’t. He also prises information from some of his more naïve customers with a skill that could make conventional interrogation techniques redundant in all but the most oppressive of regimes.
Maybe it’s something in the tea he makes for favoured customers, but anglers of all persuasions contentedly divulge their secrets to him, and he in turn devours the prime cuts of information and saves the odd scrag end morsel to relay to other customers as a trade for further information!
I find Friday is often a good day to visit my fishing pal Terry for bait and information. For that is when the midweek matches are dissected and analysed by the little enclave of match anglers who gravitate to the shop to ruminate and collect their weekend match
bait. In the process they turn the shop floor into a mini performance theatre, worthy of any amateur dramatics group, or comedy club. I’ve seen them fighting imaginary fish with imaginary rods, expounding tales of woe, exaggerating their angling prowess and match results, and of course, indulging their favourite pastime of winding each other up.
Some of these accomplished angling raconteurs are retired or unemployed, others are selfemployed, or work odd shifts, yet amazingly, the tallest story of all was told a few years ago by none other than the local vicar!
Every angler knows that gudgeon are one of the easiest fish of all to catch. They will take any bait from single maggot or pinkie to a big lump of paste on a size 10 hook at any time of the day, or year, in all weathers and conditions, and when you catch one you will probably catch twenty more. Consequently, because they are so plentiful they rarely grow beyond a few ounces. Yet the local vicar, God bless his soul, stood in the shop one afternoon and swore blind – though not on the Bible – he had
caught the Moby Dick of this much maligned, and little cherished, species from the Llangollen arm of the Shropshire Union Canal.
Now Gobio gobio live for around three years, spawning twice before they die. A big gudgeon might therefore weigh only three ounces, and the British record is a measly five ounces, so when a man of the cloth tells the gathering which loiters around the counter for tea and gossip that he has caught one that weighed seven ounces, both his professional and angling credibility are stretched to new levels. “You sure it wasn’t a baby barbel?” Dave Large asked, biting his tongue. “Bronze flank rather than purple flashes? Could have come through the locks from the Dee at Llangollen….”
But no, the Church of England vicar, a man in his mid-fifties, was adamant it was indeed a gudgeon and while he had no photograph, or corroborative evidence to prove it, he noted the raised eyebrows and pricked our collective consciences by reminding us all of the ninth commandment. “Surely gentlemen you aren’t suggesting I’d tell an untruth are you? I have never been asked to produce a photograph of God to convince my congregation of his existence.”
“Not at all. Heaven forbid,” muttered his present, but less convinced congregation, shaking their heads. I blew out my own cheeks and took a slip of tea.
Under normal circumstances, anyone else recounting a tale like that in the shop would find their story systematically dismantled, piece by piece, like Hercule Poirot destroying a murder alibi.
But still, the vicar’s claim was a hard one to swallow. A gudgeon of seven ounces? No one though felt inclined to challenge the Lord’s work on this occasion. Sure, there might be a huge ‘gonk’ out there lurking in some gravel bottomed river where the food source is rich enough to pack the ounces on, but in a cut where you are more likely to find yourself attached to a supermarket trolley than a British record gudgeon?
“I was having an afternoon on the canal on Monday just using single maggot but feeding pinkies heavily and I think I hit on a shoal of gudgeon. I had dozens and they got steadily bigger and bigger until I landed the daddy of them all. I was surprised too when I weighed him on my new scales, bought in this very shop.”
Having relayed his incredulous tale, the vicar picked up his half pint of mixed maggots, and a bag of cooked hemp, bade his farewells to all, and departed the shop. For once, there was stony, dare I say God-fearing, silence amongst the group shuffling uneasily around the counter. No one uttered a word, until Keith Skinner coughed and philosophically observed, “I suppose we have to believe him. He’s a man of the Church, dog collar and all, and if we cannot accept his word what chance have we got…”
“Jeez, seven ounces; that’s one hell of a gudgeon,” said George Cooke, with an unfortunate choice of profanity. Terry had been in the back of the shop for a few minutes, riddling off the casters, and returned to the counter sporting a supercilious grin. Another of the match anglers, Mark Gould, caught the glint in his eye,
“What do you think Terry? You believe him?” Taking a sip of lukewarm tea, Terry thought for a moment and then with his characteristic smirk of feigned ‘I’m good as gold’ innocence, addressed his audience. “Who
am I, a mere mortal, to question a servant of the Lord? Mind you, six months ago Paris (the shop owner) told me he came in here on a Wednesday and told him he had caught a new ‘Welsh’ grayling record of four pounds on the upper River Dee while fishing for salmon.”
Funnily enough, it seems there were no photos, or witnesses, to that catch either. Clearly, when it comes to catching record-breaking fish the only conclusion one could draw from the vicar’s angling exploits is that God really must look after his own – excluding bishops, of course!