One thought on “Black Man Fishing Problems

  1. In August or September 1980 my girlfriend of the time were holed up in an old British Colonial era fishing bungalow on the Bringhi River in Kashmir. We had half of the bunglaow, a newly married and honeymooning Indian couple from Delhi had the other half. The poor guy was really suffering – a keen Angler in prime trout couintry, but not permitted to fish for them……

    Oh, I forgot to mention – he was of the Indian social elite, a former pupil of the Doon School in Dehra Dun, India’s equivalent of Britain famous Eton College, the educator of princes and future Kings and a long line of Prime Ministers.

    Years later, sometime in the mid to late !980s, he called during a family and business trip to London – “Hi, Paul….I’m in Brirain…any chance of a day’s fishing…?”

    Of course there was, a very good.

    So I took him, his wife and their two young children to a then very exclusive few miles of very private chalkstream club water in Hampshire that I had somehow been offered a “Rod” (membership) on a few years earlier. At about this time of yoear if I remember correctly.

    The day went well: the sun shone, some trout were caught on both smal, strictly upstream and dead-drift, maybe with an inducing lift of the second of the following but certainly stripping back or fast-retieving, dry flies and nymphs.

    All was was a fine until two police cars with their blue lights flshing came at us across the valley wheatfields.

    Some English gentleman living nearby in a very fine 16th Century thatched cottage had seen me leading “a gang of Indians” to the river, and had called the police.

    With no small degree of easy English top-shcool charm (not the Eton variety, which tends to be very thin or treacherous) plus a threat of career-harming blunt force, I made those four or five English Country “Bobbies” apologize to my hugely wealthy, extremely well-educated, International Sophisticate Indian friends.

    Sad thing is that on few of our ‘better” British trout rivers the same sort of Stop the Alien Invasion Scenario could still happen happen even now.

    No time for a read-through and edit – posted as typed

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