Jay Guevara

On my return from a lengthy angling hiatus of a fifteen years or more I am amazed at the 'progress and development' the sport has gone through. When I was last a regular dipper you more or less had three choices: Waggler float, new fangled scaffold pole or straight through lead/swim feeder. As for baits: maggots, worms, casters and if you were really adventurous - sweetcorn. All this could be bulked out with yer standard breadcrumb groundbait at around minus 50 pence for a non specific in weight see though plain bag. Hemp, tares, bloodworm and luncheon meat were always talked about in the angling press but nobody ACTUALLY used them in real life. I write as someone who rarely felt the need to fish waters other than the Gloucester to Sharpness canal, a few local puddles and occasional visits to the Wye. Bream, Roach, Chub, Dace, good sized Flounder, BIG Eels and plenty of Gudgeon were enough to wile a spotty ragamuffin away from trouble and many a day from dawn til dusk were happily fished away. Fast forward to my return in the tail end of 2008 and you will find an utterly bewildered and spoilt for choice 38 year old with considerably more disposable income than he had first time round. All of a sudden I am fishing on 'The Method', using 'Frenzied Chilli Hemp' as particle bait, experimenting with helicopter rigs, pop up boillies, shrink tube, leadcore, real pebble leads (oxymoron). I am offered ghastly camo gear, wind up bivouacs, rod pods, bait boats, strawberry flavoured luncheon meat, maggot juice, 97 different types of rod, a million - nay a billion and one commercial fisheries stocked with weirdly oversized carp, bream and catfish... AAAAGGGGGGGGGGGHHHHHHHHHHH!!!!!! It all seems to me that a once gentlemanly (even an arrogant working class twerp such as my self used to think so) pastime has now become a catwalk for Mitsubishi Shogun driving plasterers to try and out kit each other in dazzling displays of the latest this, that or the other. Somebody somewhere is making a lot of money. Since my return to the sport I have lost count of the amount of idiots I have witnessed stomping up and down the banks puffing feverishly on a Benson who cannot wait to confirm that you haven't caught anything either - they seem utterly bemused that having spent £3000 on tackle that the fish won't take. Whilst I appreciate that modern technology means that your rod, reel line and terminal tackle is far less likely to give out on you these days I find myself wondering if I wasn't happier sat in a wooden deckchair listening to DLT on Radio 1 and catching sometimes nothing more than a dozen Gudgeon dotted with the odd Ruff, twig or Bootlace. ...actually DLT was terrible, QUACK QUACK - OOPS.