"The Peterborough Pong" - the intense, sickly smell that used to hang over the city when the sugar-beet factory was in operation.
"Walter the Birdman" - the late Walter Cornelius, an eccentric amateur strongman, whose annual attempts to fly over the River Nene with home made wings attracted the attentions of the national media. Once upon a time, long ago, in a far away universe, England was a country in which snow fell in winter, and anglers in trench coats and wellington boots, sat on wicker baskets, pulled their collars up against the biting winds, and drank dark, stewed tea from tartan flasks. In a place called Peterborough, now known as the arson capital of the East Midlands, but then famous for Walter the Birdman and the Peterborough Pong, a younger version of myself occasionally ventured to the Electricity Cut in search of the mythical monsters within its steaming, mucky, murky waters.
On icy January mornings, strange, frosted apparitions huddled under mountains of blankets, sporting the fashionable footwear of the times; oversized wellingtons, slit at the front and laced to accommodate feet encased in the baby-gro type legs of padded tanksuits. Once, on such a morning, with my feet solidified inside my wellies, the sight of Peter Harvey, dressed as above, recumbent on a white and frozen riverbank, drinking cold milk straight from the bottle, almost made me lose the will to live. After a few hours of watching my bottle tops twitching incessantly as the phenomenal bleak shoals demolished my breadflake, like piranha savaging a fresh, bloody corpse, I would grow numb with the cold, heave my wellies out of the sucking black mud and head despondently for home. How my primitive and unsuitable tackle would have coped with even a medium sized monster was never put to the test.
During the early 70’s, one of the few waters holding carp within cycling distance of Bourne, was the four-acre Maxey No.1. With the exception of Chris Yates, who is quite mad, when was the last time you saw anyone straining against the wind on a pushbike overloaded with fishing tackle? Looking back on it now, I find it incredible that I would even contemplate the madness of the ten-mile bike ride to Maxey. Apart from the sheer physical effort, wearing my special “fishing clothes”, there was also the psychological trauma of clattering past the girls in the town centre, with the resulting loss of whatever personal dignity I may have once possessed. Undertaken in all weathers, with a rod holdall balanced on the handlebars and everything else on a rickety bike rack that was always coming unscrewed, the wisdom and practicality of this weekly endurance test was never questioned. After a season of fighting the whiplash fen winds that tried continuously to propel both me and my distinctly un-streamlined contraption into the roadside ditches, I must have had sinews of steel and lungs like bellows; I wonder what went wrong?
I experienced the entire evolution of modern carp fishing during my time at Maxey. Every item of tackle had to obey the ultracult design guidelines of what would now be referred to as minimalist chic. I bought fibreglass blanks, and equipped them with hardchrome rings and Fuji snaplock reel seats. My one concession to decadence was in the abbreviated red leather handles, which had been made by cutting a big square into strips, and binding it around the blank, tennis racket style. My dad wasn’t too pleased though, as he’d just bought it for covering a stool. A mate of mine went even further in the search for credibility, by stripping the immaculate finish from his new Bruce & Walker Mk IV’s, and painting them a dull matt green. Reels, inevitably, were Mitchel 300’s, and the line was 11lb Sylcast, as Rod said you could tow oilrigs with it.
I anchored floating crust, made specials from cat food and milk powder, acquired my first bag of Red Slyme, flayed away at twitchers, even fished in winter, (for a few hours on nice days), all with moderate results. Finally, one fateful weekend a secretive group of Lincoln anglers caught more fish in a week than the rest of us had caught in a season. The sweetcorn era had arrived, and our previous efforts were suddenly made to look ridiculous. Casting to the bubblers with floatfished sweetcorn in the early morning mist, I could often put four mirrors on the bank before 9am. Averaging about 141/2 pounds, this was superb fishing for the time, and produced seasonal averages to rival that with improved tackle and methods, I often struggle to achieve even now.
Read the rest of this story on fishingwarehouse.
http://www.fishingwarehouse.co.uk/section/articles/articleinfo.asp?articleid=1051
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