Night fishing in winter is...

Written in the ice on the coldest night of this winter so far.

I’m sure every angler has his share of disasters but I’m beginning to think there can be few who has as many as me. Of course boats add to the potential for mishaps. A few years ago I managed to drop my engine over the side. I got it back but it left a mate & I with a long row home. A couple of years later while fishing with the same friend we somehow managed to sink the boat, we haven’t fished together since…. That really was a low point but there are no hard feelings, on my part at least. Last season I heard a splash whilst motoring along on the outboard and thought nothing of it but when I went to edge in on the electric motor…it was gone. A mooring post vanished on the same day.

This season has seen a series of classics. The first was an outboard that refused to run later diagnosed as water in the fuel but God knows how that happened. This resulted in me having to literally drag myself off a broad, along the edge with handfuls of reeds as the wind was too strong for me to row against. After this I had a three mile row back to base. Since then I’ve lost a mud-weight which got snagged in something causing the ring to break as well as one of the bars that hold the (home-made) folding cuddy under tension, which jumped over the side. Later that trip I was blown off the weights and with a precarious drifting boat I quickly started the engine to get out of trouble only to get loads of braid wrapped around the prop!! The law of sod is familiar to the boat angler.

Recently another series of disasters befell me, for starters a collapsing trailer and boat stuck on the slip, nightmare! After an hour of sweat, grunt and “you don’t want to do it like that…” from the growing audience, the situation was sorted. The boat was shifted, the trailer wasn’t terminal but I did have a busted oar. Ah well. I loaded the car and left later than expected only to find the CD player wasn’t working. Radio 5 was tolerable only until they threatened to play Mcfly when I tried the CD player once again and this time it worked!! I was so enjoying the sound of “Magic world” by Eels that I missed my turning….

So why do we do it?  Here are a few reasons...






And of course we do catch a few fish along the way. Here's one from 2011, on one of those occasions when the luck really was on my side but that's another story!