ARTHUR’S ARCHIVES Inside fishing history
“What could possibly go wrong? Well, quite a bit actually”
WHEN Jimmy Greaves said ‘It’s a funny old game’ he was, of course, referring to football, – but we all know that the phrase applies to angling almost weekly.
To my mind, one of the funniest angling events took place more than 40 years ago at the 1979 World Float Angling Championship in Spain.
It was held in Zaragoza, on a canal that was fishless. But the Spaniards had a cunning plan! They developed an electric barrier system that would be installed and switched on to keep newly-stocked carp contained inside the match length. What could possibly go wrong? Well, quite a bit actually.
The carp were stocked, the switch was thrown... and the system failed to work, with some barriers not operating at all and others not effective.
England had one of the strongest teams they’d ever fielded – Kevin Ashurst, Ivan Marks, Tom Pickering, Ian Heaps, Denis White and Tony Scott. They finished seventh behind winners France, whose angler Heulard took the individual title with 2.155kg.
That doesn’t look quite so bad when you consider that two years later Dave Thomas won the World Champs on the Warks Avon with 1.19kg, then the next year Big Kev won his gold with 0.82kg on the Newry Canal!
Tommy Pickering described the match to me as: “Proper sh*t fishing” – and that wasn’t the only time he endured such sport in that same year, as he ‘dry-netted’ in Barnsley’s victory on the Great Ouse and River Cam Division One National event of the same year, an ‘honour’ I shared with him, along with hundreds of others.
Coincidentally, on that National I was two pegs from Tony Scott, a great angler who I was to get to know when I fished the Upper Trent.
So exciting was his day that he fell asleep on his box, dropping his brand-new 11m carbon pole into the river in the process.
Yes, fishing is most certainly a funny old game.