One thought on “How the Rich Fish

  1. I well remember being frequently taken to task in very forthright and increasingly rude and angry terms, even being banned, from British fly fishing and online other bait- and spin-fishing forums over the past decade and a half merely for observing something very much along these lines:

    “You can fence off your own little private piece of Paradise as much as you like, fellas, but if all around you – just up the valley or down the road or over the hill in the next watershed – is going to the wall…. Think about it. This, as you a few of you here will know, coming from someone who fished the very best and most interesting of the British and World best before the gates began to be locked by a new very few, to keep it to themselves and keep out the fishy many. Not some wide-eyed teenage wishlist theorising or cock-eyed dangerous socialism on my part, just good long-term fishing, business and conservationist sense: we well-fished olders are going to need others to replace us very soon, and a mere very few thousand wealthy and / or well-connected replacements worldwide are simply not going to be enough to keep the whole, wonderful, I sense now slightly creaking, state of fishing ship afloat. Do please think about it.”

    This was clearly too much for some of my only quite lately come to the fishy table, highly self-entitled British peers. Might be for some of you here now, so I’m gone, offering my apologies if I have rudely rocked anyone’s driftboats or smashed any of their locks as I go. A week in Wales after sea-trout beckons for me at present. It’s raining hard here in southern Britain as I write this, and the rivers will be rising into flood and the fish running them hard, ready for a warm summer evening, clearwater fly when I get down there soon. Which is what it’s all about, of course – just going fishing and not trying to rule the world. Pfff. Gone.

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