A CELEBRATION OF OUR GREATEST ANGLER
1943 – 2018
IN HIS seven decades as an angler, John Wilson fished all over the world, and during his globetrotting travels he built up an enviable, and arguably unsurpassed, track record of huge fish of countless species.
Yet when asked by Angling Times to pick his favourite catches of all time, one stood above the rest – nine doublefigure bream for the Go Fishing cameras in 1994. This is how the great man recounted that memorable session when he was sitting in a boat on a Norfolk gravel pit, shrouded by the early morning mist:
“It’s amazing how the greatest achievements sometimes happen by accident. We’d gone down to a water I called the ‘Forgotten Lake’ for a few days to do a film on pike fishing. At the first time of asking I managed to land a 25lb fish, so soon I had everything we needed to put that show together.
“In previous sessions there I’d seen some huge bream cruising on the surface, and as I’d brought suitable gear along to target them we decided to try and catch a few for the cameras. It was a ploy to use the time we had left, rather than an essential part of the trip
“I prebaited the deepest spot on the lake with gallons of brown crumb, corn, worms, casters and dead maggots and returned at dawn two days later to fish the slider float for them from a boat.
“I headed out, anxious and unsure as to whether it was going to work… but by the time the camera crew met me an hour later
those fears had vanished. By then I’d already landed two doubles!
“Bites kept coming, and almost every time the float dipped it resulted in a double-figure bream, the best touching 13lb 10oz! I even slipped back a couple of doubles because I only wanted to retain the best. By the end I’d taken nine doubles, and a lot of those fish threatened to break the British record. Back then people didn’t think such feats were possible.”