ARTHUR’S ARCHIVE

Keith remembers when a sporting legend stepped up to rewrite angling history...

“That season saw no fewer than four fish over the 40lb mark”

SIR GARETH Edwards CBE was scrum-half in the Welsh Rugby Union team which, as far as I – a committed Englishman – am concerned was the greatest of all time.

In 53 appearances over 11 years he won three ‘Grand Slams’ and, as scrum-half alongside fly-half Phil Bennett, provided the ammunition for the Welsh backs to produce the most entertaining rugby I’ve ever seen. Oh, and he also held the British pike record!

It all came about after Welsh Water, which controlled the 440-acre Llandegfedd Reservoir – at the time fished exclusively for trout – decided in 1989 to have a trial to see if there was any future in selling tickets for pike fishing. Incredibly, that season saw no fewer than four fish landed over the 40lb mark!

The following year, Gareth was invited, along with the great pike angler and historian Fred

Buller and two others, for an ‘exploratory’ mission.

Obviously, Gareth’s celebrity status, should they be successful, would massively increase the venue’s publicity, as he was a highly-regarded BBC TV sports presenter.

I doubt if anyone could have predicted ‘What Happened Next’ — one of the rounds on A Question of Sport where Edwards was a team captain from 1978 to 1982. Despite fishing alongside Buller, Pete Climo and Bob Jones, all top pikers, it was Gareth who set the hooks into a monster esox of 45lb 6oz – a new British record.

The fish was ‘as fat as butter’, obviously used to a diet of high-protein rainbow trout, and in magnificent condition. Pike, especially, thrive on neglect, and although Llandegfedd produced a new 46lb 13oz record for Middlesex piker Roy Lewis 18 months later, the glory days are gone… possibly not for ever, as the reservoir now holds huge shoals of bream and big hybrids.

Perhaps somewhere in its depths lurks another leviathan. I wonder if Owen Farrell is an angler?