Up and up go the prices of bait and tackle. Perhaps we've been too lucky for too long, but it does come hard when the cost of the working man's simple and innocent pastime starts to verge on the prohibitive.
I mean, it's not as if we were gambling, or boozing, or running around with women, is it?
Is it?
Pausing not for an answer, and looking neither to the left nor the right, he moves on to the next bit. Which is the Patented Piscatorial Quagswagging System of Piscatorial Barter.
The more I think about this idea, the crummier it seems, but that's probably what all the Great Minds of History thought when the still, small voice went Boi-oi-oing!
This system would do away with money and return to the old barter system. We'd just carry fishing baits and gear around to swop. A table of relative currency values would probably go something like:
- 2 pinkies = 1 specials
- 2 specials = 1 gozzer
- 2 gozzers = 1 wasp grub
- 2 wasp grubs = 1 lob
- 3 lobs = 1 hook
- 4 hooks = 1 float
- 2 floats = 1 swingtip
- 2 swingtips = 1 bobbly hat
- 5 bobbly hats = 1 wellie
- 2 wellies = That One More Cast Magic Twig you've never used 😁
- ... and so on.
The advantages of the system are obvious even to the dimmest. (Get out of that. You can't, can you?) Having, by common consent, agreed to them, let us look at some of the drawbacks.
Things could get awkward at times, having to carry around pocketful of wellies, bobbly hats, pinkies and specials. You could have a back pocket full of small change one minute and should somebody inadvertently bump into you, a horrible squashy mess the next.
It might be difficult to find a landlord who would accept a handful of specials and lobs in return for a couple of pints of bitter. And if you were to say, 'One for yourself, landlord,' what would you offer him for the round? Eight six-inch lobs and a couple of inches snipped off a ninth? Or would you give him all nine and say, 'Keep the change'?
Flag-day collectors might look askance if you stuffed their tins with bloodworms. They might get their own back, though, by pinning a dead gudgeon to your lapel.
Casters might be classed as floating currency unless you anticipated the swing and stuck a dust shot to each of their little bums.
And gozzers which survived the hazards of your back pocket might suddenly go downhill. Right down your trouser leg. And thereafter be fit for nowt. Or debased, as we say in the City. So invest in nothing smaller than gilt-edged hooks, chaps, if you want to keep your currency stable.
But even hard currency is not one hundred percent reliable. Top joints can develop a permanent set, even if you stick them down your wellie tops. And nobody wants to handle bent money.
Floats can be a positive hazard. Have you ever seen somebody with a porcupine quill in his trouser pocket forget that it's there and sit down quickly? Have you ever thought how much it costs to mend a bloke-sized hole in the ceiling?
Anyway, to the Arrow forthwith before I get carted off in a straight-jacket, I wasn't going to go but the Avon was so pants 24 hours earlier I wanted to catch something to bend the rod before 2025 arrives. So simple roving tactics (Hello to Tom who has the same idea, hope you caught something) with bread to try and winkle out a fish.
So not a bad mornings session, 3 chub caught from 3 different swims, the best above >4lb I'd imagine with the other two a 2 lber and a 3lber. The Arrow was clearing and pretty low but there is lots of features on this stretch so ideal for chub and luckily that's what I caught, I really do love chub fishing, Happy Days !!
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