“No sane person ever thinks: ‘I wish I’d gone fishing less!’ ’’
ALATE winter birthday isn’t always great for fishing, but this year it carried a welcome surprise.
As usual, the vast pike I hoped for was nowhere to be seen, but in its place I got something even more special – almost 20 years of angling records in the logbooks of my older brother.
What a journey and what memories came back, looking through his carefully recorded stats and notes on various fishing trips, species and conditions from 2005. Here was a factual log of virtually every one of our shared fishing days, from well before we had wives, kids and our first grey hairs.
Both of us have kept fishing records of various sorts since childhood, but our ways of doing so are radically different.
While my diaries tended to be reflective and a bit haphazard, Ben’s were always meticulously scientific, taking down data like wind direction, conditions and key measurements.
Skipping between our fishing records is a bit like going from bad poetry to death by statistics.
What treasures there are behind all my brother’s notes and numbers, though. A few things stand out a mile. Perhaps the most galling is just how often we used to go fishing together compared to today. In the mid-noughties, there would often be several joint trips a month. In the last decade, that narrows to half-a-dozen a year.
The other thing that leaps out is how so many trips were solid but unspectacular. While your mind always revisits the red-letter days, most sessions are neither breathtaking nor terrible. There are relatively few blanks, but sessions with half-a-dozen tench or bass of any size get dizzy comments and exclamation marks.
There are also silly sessions that still defy belief. Like the day we caught so many pike we ran out of bait, or a mayfly hatch that produced more than 50 trout! Of course, it’s the rarity of such occasions that makes them special, despite how much you might wish otherwise on a wet afternoon in March.
What strikes me most of all about these records, though, is the sheer amount of shared adventure and happiness fishing has given us. Almost no sane person ever looks back and thinks: “I wish I’d gone fishing less!” let alone “I wish I hadn’t kept a diary”.
The records do make me a touch sad at how much things have changed. You might say everyone keeps a fishing diary these days, via social media. But that isn’t strictly true of any medium where ego puffing and appearances are king.
So much of a true fishing logbook is intensely personal, never meant to be shared. And while I suspect Ben Garnett likes to store these records to enjoy future success, it’s the nostalgia that’s most precious to me.