The dangers of charity
Is the far South West a land of milk and honey? The locals know better! A Devon fly fishing club, keen to engage with teenagers from local estates, got a tackle company to provide rods and reels for the kids to use. All went well, until one week the ringleader turned up without any tackle. “What happened to the rod we gave you?” asked the coach. “I swapped it for this BMX!” said the lad, pointing to a swanky new set of wheels.
“You ain’t seen me, right?”
Angling Times columnist Dom Garnett wasn’t too surprised to encounter a crook on the run on an urban stretch of Somerset’s River Tone. “He came running down the river and begged to use my phone,” recalls Dom. “I lied and said that I’d left it in the car. The next thing he says is, ‘if anyone comes down the path asking for me, tell them you haven’t seen me’. Minutes later, a store detective from the nearby retail park came along asking exactly that! We told him exactly what had happened and he left in hot pursuit!”
The Midlands or the Wild West?
How would you fancy meeting escapees from a secure unit? “Soho Loop Canal in Birmingham was pretty wild 20 or so years ago,” recalls AT match editor Richard Grange. “You would park your car right behind you on the towpath – anywhere else and it would be destroyed! There was a mental institution nearby and inmates would quite regularly do a bunk and walk the bank, soon to be followed by the staff who were looking for them.”
The case of the missing pole sections!
If it wasn’t challenging enough fishing a suburban section of the Leeds Liverpool Canal, in one National back in the noughties, match anglers had to contend with with the local toerags. During the match, anglers shipped out their poles, only to discover that the butt sections had been pilfered. It didn’t take Hercule Poirot to figure out who’d done it, as minutes later, the yobs were back, offering to return the stolen sections for a tidy mark-up! The moral of the story for any towpath angler has to be “look behind you!”
Cruel and the gang
Being pelted with missiles was once a regular risk on London’s canals, according to angler John Weeden.
“At open matches around Kings Cross, local yobs used to throw water bombs and stones at the anglers. It came to a head one week when someone threw a scaffold pole!” he recalls.
“Next match I went round to talk to the kids and asked ‘who’s your leader?’ A lad who looked like the Artful Dodger from Oliver Twist came forward. I told them that from now on I’d give them a fiver if they’d keep out of our way – and it was a deal.
“A few weeks later I was coming home on my bike when I noticed the gang throwing water bombs at passers-by. I stopped short and told them not to target me. ‘Okay, we won’t throw water bombs at you,’ they said. As I went past, they threw a big ginger cat at me instead, which missed and went into the canal. I got completely pelted and soaked as I retrieved the cat from the canal.
“Another time at King’s Cross we watched police divers recover two shotguns from the canal, following a local armed robbery.”
Korma, coconuts and pigeons
“Pigeons were often a menace in London while you mixed your groundbait,” recalls tackle editor Mark Sawyer. “One time they were going for the bait when a dog spooked them. A bird panicked and got tangled up in my gear as it took off, taking one of my top kits with it!” Other times, Mark would fish Camden, with its large Hindu and Sikh populations. “We’d quite often find coconuts floating along, which had been used to scatter loved ones’ ashes. Very disconcerting! On another occasion in West Drayton I was fishing a winter league at Blue Bridge, and soon found out this was where a local curry house would tip its leftovers. I got covered, and the smell was quite overpowering!”
