“Humiliation, I can take. Icy water to my nether regions is different”
“As bad as the repair looked, I managed to catapult the fly out”
MINOR calamities have a habit of shoaling up in our fishing life. There are days when we can’t do a lot wrong and others when nothing goes right.
The truth is that your faithful angling hacks have as many blanks and embarrassments as anyone else. It’s just that we just don’t tend to write about them. Which brings me to my own recent misadventures.
I’ve always been a slightly clumsy angler. I have previous here. Friends marvel at how I can cast a fly on a sixpence, before tripping over in a heap five minutes later.
Recently, though, I seem to have hit a particularly rich vein of comic form. This week it was on a pike fishing trip with my brother. On virtually the first cast I managed to snag up. I gave a quick jerk to free my fly and the rod promptly snapped!
It was an old model I hadn’t used in a while, so I wasn’t so sore about the rod as the fact that I was miles from home with no spare. The best I could do was go back to the car to dig out my trusty roll of gaffer tape.
The repair job looked fairly ridiculous. I’d bound the broken sections with a massive overlap, missing out a ring. I blushed a little as we passed some lure anglers. How was it going? They didn’t really need to ask. Had I snapped the rod on a fish, at least I’d have had a decent story.
As bad as the repair looked, I somehow managed to catapult the fly out. Every so often the line would get stuck on the gaffer tape, fooling me into thinking it was a fish. It was a long afternoon, but considering my dreadful repair job, two tiny jacks was a good result!
Nothing could prepare me for my next disaster. This was on an overgrown old pool rumoured to contain big perch. The fact I couldn’t find even small ones on maggots was the least of my worries, though, as I managed to knock the butt section of my pole into the drink.
Rather than plop into the margin, it glided majestically out of reach. After a stream of obscenities, I pondered the options: pay a fortune for a spare or start getting undressed. You can guess the rest!
Humiliation, I can take. But icy water to one’s nether regions is another matter. Bloody hell it was cold!
The lost pole section was my best catch of the day. I got my clothes back on like a man trying to set a world record in speed dressing.
If there’s any balance in this world, I hope to report on my incredible reversal of fortune in next week’s column. Until then, I’m not intending to do any more ‘wild swimming’.