Famous anglers only catch those fish because...

[Rusty]

Fair enough Rusty, I'm not trying rank individuals, the topic was more about people's attitudes to well known anglers, and why they catch notable fish.

 

Yup I know and I have to admit to being a little disingenuous with my responses to your posts (apart from Tigger being a very good angler).

 

The fact is that all this discussion about relative abilities doesn't interest me in the slightest, in my mind it has no relevance to everyday angling. I've bought three angling books, CTI and APFA because I wanted to know how they made the TV progs and Vagabond's book because I thought he was strapped for cash. When Elton posts a 'Angler X moves to Drennan' it goes straight over my head, I don't know who Tony Miles is and have no idea how good an angler he is, I don't care.

 

Probably best I get me coat on this thread.

[lutra]

Can't say I'm a big Bowler fan. Maybe it's all the produce placement that seems to go with him.

 

If its very good all round anglers that have put lots of big fish on the bank we're looking for, I think Terry Lampard would need a mention for me.

 

Why thankyou for the nice comments Chris

Your as good an angler as any yourself and top company my friend . I look forward to a repeat performance but I think we should stay in the pub a little later next time and maybe keep Ste off the wine...his snoring blew my ear drums out

Maybe you were snuggled up to close Ian.

[Vagabond]

I've bought ..............Vagabond's book because I thought he was strapped for cash.

 

 

Now there's a noble sentiment

 

I might need a new pair of socks soon, as I can now see 60% of my feet whilst wearing my present ones.

[Tigger]

Maybe you were snuggled up to close Ian.

 

 

Deffo to close for comfort Brian

[tiddlertamer]

Have you read any of his books? They're excellent.

 

I have read some of his books and they are excellent.

 

One I don't own however, is called 'My way with chub'.

 

There is something about the title that has me struggling to stifle a giggle or two...

[KAYC]

When I was being filmed by the Beeb, I actually caught my own fish, on camera, on the day and at the time...so there

 

Some of us can do it

 

Den (one time famous angler)

 

filmed by the beeb and photographed by me at wingham. thanks for the feeders.

[Andy Macfarlane]

I'm getting the feeling that I don't read enough fishing books or watch enough fishing TV. I don't have a clue who half the folk you lot are on about.

 

Maybe I do OK because I generally do things my own way. If you saw how me and some and my mates go about fishing, you'd probably wonder what the hell was going on.

 

To be fair, lots of the methods we used as kids have turned out to nothing new really. I can think of a couple of methods that nobody I've seen uses. My mate Cammy spins with minnows by threading the hook through the body and then fixes the hook in place with a split-shot. It's basically wobbling of sorts but nobody showed him how to do it. He just did it one day. He still does and by eck he's caught some proper fish doing it.

 

He's also quite adept at using pebbles for weights (mostly because he never has any weights the miserable git....a tub of maggots and a packet of 16s is just about his limit). He was doing that 20 years before Stonez came along.

[Steve Burke]

Having appeared in a number of TV programmes and done lots of magazine features over the years perhaps I can shed a little light on the matter.

 

Of these many of you seem to remember the perch programme in the Predators series best, probably as a huge perch was lost shortly before netting, which in some ways makes better viewing than catching a monster. My brief was to teach presenter Kev Green enough in a short period of time for him to catch a 2lb+ perch. And short period of time is the operative phrase here.

 

Firstly the film crew is pre-booked for the given days and you have to "perform" on those days whatever the conditions. In this case they could hardly be worse for perch - bright spring sunshine, meaning that the only time you'd expect them to feed properly would be at dusk.

 

Secondly, for every minute you see on TV there's roughly an hour of filming. So a 25 minute programme takes roughly 25 hours of filming. Many of the sequences are filmed several times from different angles, plus a lot of them are greatly edited, or in many cases completely discarded. So you don't get much time actually fishing at all!

 

There were two venues in this programme, one a commercial for the deadbait part, the other a gravel pit for the lure fishing section. The commercial was a local water that I was familiar with, although I certainly wouldn't have gone perch fishing there in such bright weather.

 

The gravel pit I didn't know. In fact I was just told to "follow that car". I ended up driving all the way from Kent to somewhere in Oxfordshire! And to this day I still don't know where the venue was. Once again there was bright sunshine, plus to make it worse the water was gin clear.

 

Not surprisingly we struggled, but I did manage several good fish myself, helped Kev catch a two-pounder on a lure, plus of course he also lost a monster on a deadbait.

 

It all looks dead easy on telly doesn't it?

 

In fact it's not just on telly it can look easy. For instance I once had a "pilgrimage" to a Great Ouse tributary to catch a 4lb plus river perch.

 

Just minutes after casting into a swim I had a monster on the bank. Easy peasy!

 

But there was a lot more to it than that.

 

We'd arrived in the weirpool car park one February morning in the dark. Despite this there were already a couple of cars there, plus several more carloads of anglers arrived to fish for the perch whilst we unloaded the gear. All this was on a short section of river, that by the time it got light looked like a holiday camp!

 

With all this fishing pressure I was seriously worried that any big perch would already have hightailed it downstream to the private syndicate stretch. However we had no option but to fish the day ticket section.

 

If the perch had already scarpered there would have been nothing I could have done that would have made a difference. So I made the assumption that there was at least one specimen stripie still present. Where then would it be? Surely in the most difficult swim to fish, and one that most anglers would walk past.

 

Having surveyed the length of the fishery just one swim met the requirements. It was at the bottom of a steep bank on top of which was a barbed wire fence making access very difficult. What's more, there was a small area about the size of a coffee table where the flow pattern just screamed perch.

 

I reasoned that if I fished the spot immediately I'd probably spook any perch present, especially as it would be preferable to float fish it and I didn't know how deep it was. So I carefully plumbed the depth, then primed the swim by baiting up with a handful of flavoured maggots and some chopped worms. I came back a hour or so later and laid on overdepth with a lobworm. Within minutes I banked a very hard-fighting 4-05 perch.

 

Yet if that had been filmed, all that would have been seen would have been a short clip of my catching a specimen with a dead simple rig and a dead simple bait.

 

It would all have looked so easy, wouldn't it?

 

Now, I'm not saying this to show how clever I am. Whilst I could probably keep up with Martin Bowler when it comes to perch, I certainly couldn't with his all-round ability. Even so Martin caught an even bigger perch on "Catching the Impossible" from a difficult swim. Moreover he deliberately chose to fish a pole in that swim to maximise his chances. I confess I wouldn't have thought of that, although my disability means I wouldn't have been able to handle a pole anyway.

 

Yes, almost any competent angler could catch the occasional big fish for the cameras. But they couldn't do it nearly as consistently as the experts like Martin. And it's this expertise that film producers are looking for. They work on very low budgets and simply can't afford to hire anyone who hasn't got a track record.

 

Oh, and by the way, the pay's awful. I got £25 per day plus expenses for the Predator programme!

[tony tinca]

Having appeared in a number of TV programmes and done lots of magazine features over the years perhaps I can shed a little light on the matter.

 

Of these many of you seem to remember the perch programme in the Predators series best, probably as a huge perch was lost shortly before netting, which in some ways makes better viewing than catching a monster. My brief was to teach presenter Kev Green enough in a short period of time for him to catch a 2lb+ perch. And short period of time is the operative phrase here.

 

Firstly the film crew is pre-booked for the given days and you have to "perform" on those days whatever the conditions. In this case they could hardly be worse for perch - bright spring sunshine, meaning that the only time you'd expect them to feed properly would be at dusk.

 

Secondly, for every minute you see on TV there's roughly an hour of filming. So a 25 minute programme takes roughly 25 hours of filming. Many of the sequences are filmed several times from different angles, plus a lot of them are greatly edited, or in many cases completely discarded. So you don't get much time actually fishing at all!

 

There were two venues in this programme, one a commercial for the deadbait part, the other a gravel pit for the lure fishing section. The commercial was a local water that I was familiar with, although I certainly wouldn't have gone perch fishing there in such bright weather.

 

The gravel pit I didn't know. In fact I was just told to "follow that car". I ended up driving all the way from Kent to somewhere in Oxfordshire! And to this day I still don't know where the venue was. Once again there was bright sunshine, plus to make it worse the water was gin clear.

 

Not surprisingly we struggled, but I did manage several good fish myself, helped Kev catch a two-pounder on a lure, plus of course he also lost a monster on a deadbait.

 

It all looks dead easy on telly doesn't it?

 

In fact it's not just on telly it can look easy. For instance I once had a "pilgrimage" to a Great Ouse tributary to catch a 4lb plus river perch.

 

Just minutes after casting into a swim I had a monster on the bank. Easy peasy!

 

But there was a lot more to it than that.

 

We'd arrived in the weirpool car park one February morning in the dark. Despite this there were already a couple of cars there, plus several more carloads of anglers arrived to fish for the perch whilst we unloaded the gear. All this was on a short section of river, that by the time it got light looked like a holiday camp!

 

With all this fishing pressure I was seriously worried that any big perch would already have hightailed it downstream to the private syndicate stretch. However we had no option but to fish the day ticket section.

 

If the perch had already scarpered there would have been nothing I could have done that would have made a difference. So I made the assumption that there was at least one specimen stripie still present. Where then would it be? Surely in the most difficult swim to fish, and one that most anglers would walk past.

 

Having surveyed the length of the fishery just one swim met the requirements. It was at the bottom of a steep bank on top of which was a barbed wire fence making access very difficult. What's more, there was a small area about the size of a coffee table where the flow pattern just screamed perch.

 

I reasoned that if I fished the spot immediately I'd probably spook any perch present, especially as it would be preferable to float fish it and I didn't know how deep it was. So I carefully plumbed the depth, then primed the swim by baiting up with a handful of flavoured maggots and some chopped worms. I came back a hour or so later and laid on overdepth with a lobworm. Within minutes I banked a very hard-fighting 4-05 perch.

 

Yet if that had been filmed, all that would have been seen would have been a short clip of my catching a specimen with a dead simple rig and a dead simple bait.

 

It would all have looked so easy, wouldn't it?

 

Now, I'm not saying this to show how clever I am. Whilst I could probably keep up with Martin Bowler when it comes to perch, I certainly couldn't with his all-round ability. Even so Martin caught an even bigger perch on "Catching the Impossible" from a difficult swim. Moreover he deliberately chose to fish a pole in that swim to maximise his chances. I confess I wouldn't have thought of that, although my disability means I wouldn't have been able to handle a pole anyway.

 

Yes, almost any competent angler could catch the occasional big fish for the cameras. But they couldn't do it nearly as consistently as the experts like Martin. And it's this expertise that film producers are looking for. They work on very low budgets and simply can't afford to hire anyone who hasn't got a track record.

 

Oh, and by the way, the pay's awful. I got £25 per day plus expenses for the Predator programme!

 

 

I wondered if That was you on that predater program and now i know. It made me laugh so much the look of horror when he lost the perch and then you saying , i hate to say it but that was a 4lb fish .

 

I know it was cruel of me laughing at losing such a good fish but it just tickled me, and like you say it probably went down better for the wrong reason . I will certainly not forget it .

 

I have alot of respect for what people like yourself do in bringing us good fishing programmes and fully appreciate the work behind them . Nice one steve

[Anderoo]

What's more, there was a small area about the size of a coffee table where the flow pattern just screamed perch.

 

In my opinion, this ordinary looking sentence is the key to everything Steve posted. A simple rig, a simple bait, a simple approach (although how many of us would have fished the swim straight away?). None of that matters, and ironically that's all any of us would have seen if we'd watched Steve (either on film or in person) fish that swim. Choosing the right swim and being able to spot that little bit of 'perfect water' is the real skill here. The camera can't pick up on that.

 

Saying anyone can do it because float fishing a worm on a bit of river known to hold big perch is easy, is completely missing the point.