I caught a fish a few days before writing this. It was a carp, a common carp. It isn’t pictured here because it was caught from a private estate and I respect the owner’s wishes to keep it so. It was perhaps one of the most perfect creatures to have ever graced my net. It certainly wouldn’t be considered big by today’s standards, but its weight was immaterial. It was immaculate in every sense, fresh out of a mold with the varnish still drying. I’m ninety nine, point nine, percent sure it was the first time that this particular creature had crossed through its watery ceiling to the world above, other than perhaps for the occasional, curious, furtive leap. I admired it for a moment, its unmarred burnished scales glinting in the low afternoon light and then carefully slipped the fish in to a retainer so we could both get our respective breaths back. I composed myself and hurriedly set up my camera to capture the moment. I was delighted, particularly as my catch ratio at this particularly challenging location, when the weather is favourable, seems to be roughly one fish every three or four sessions, maybe even less than that. But rather than reeling in one fish after another with a predictable certainly, this is a reality I’m actually getting to appreciate more and have even missed. Each fish capture is anything but a foregone conclusion and it got me thinking – something I seem to do rather a lot of.

The notion that angling success is now so often only measured in numbers, pounds and ounces, is both bizarre and disappointing, to me anyway. Sure if you’re a competitive athlete, then you have obvious times and targets to achieve and records to break – but the clue is in the word, competitive. And although angling is sometimes referred to as a sport, unless of course you’re a match angler – a curious thing in itself in my opinion, it is not something that is competitive in nature and I have never considered my own personal angling exploits to be so.

In relation to my own angling, I have done my level best to avoid situations, circumstances and people, when even the slightest whiff of competitiveness has begun to creep in. For an experience like fishing, to be reduced to simply a number or a contest (unless there’s a big fat wad of cash at the end of it or its a friendly pub induced challenge) defeats the object. I find the now inherent competitiveness pretty disenchanting and the antithesis of why I go. Fishing to me has always been so much more than just the trophy at end and how much that weighs and I’m often as pleased to see someone else catch, well nearly. The much utilised Ralph Waldo Emerson adage about the value of the journey always rings true.

There were times in the past, when I had become probably more bothered by the actual weight of a capture, than by the value of the experience that led to it. And although I do still find myself privately weighing fish, perhaps now more out of habit and curiosity than a need to measure my success against someone else’s benchmark, I know that as I’m getting older, it’s far less important to me. I certainly don’t feel the need to define or inflate myself by the weights of fish captures or personal bests. I have caught carp here in the UK not too far off sixty pounds, but really, so what. That particular capture, on reflection I actually find far less satisfying or memorable, than one I had last year at less than half that weight. The effort and experience of last year’s endeavours, were far more vivid and I will remember it for so many reasons other than what it weighed. It was an evening shared with a good friend, sitting under a brolly on a warm, windy and wet autumnal night on a wild pit with an unknown stock, somewhere on a private estate I had been granted permission to fish. I’d had no idea the fish even existed and I can pretty well guarantee it had never been caught before. That was special. The other fish, whilst impressive in its own way, was a fat old common more than twice its weight that metaphorically could barely get out of its own armchair, and although still relatively unknown in the grand scheme of things, it had been caught a few times before over the years, and was fairly well documented amongst the small handful who knew of it.

It seems that the essence of fishing as I knew it, is all too often stripped away and reduced to simply facts and figures, nowadays, to the point it often now seems really quite industrial and lacking that old magic that once made it all feel so special. I freely admit it’s easy for someone in their late fifties to jump on the nostalgia bus and stare wistfully out of the rear window at everything disappearing behind, but I often wonder how many out there are still as enchanted when they go fishing, even when they don’t catch. How many will avoid the need to define their exploits by a number and not appreciate the whole experience. I often liken it to sitting down to enjoy watching a movie, only to skip to the end to find out who did it. I am well aware ‘t’was ever thus’ as the saying goes, and I was historically anyway, as interested in seeing what the old Redmire fish in the papers weighed as much as anyone else, but there did seem to be so much more to the story than simply the number. Perhaps it’s all driven by a cultural shift, a reduction in attention spans, the next big clickbait, and a need for more instant and constant gratification, for an experience to be perceived as valid or worthwhile.

And with regards to weight, it also makes me raise an eyebrow when someone catches and weighs a fish, especially in the ‘meeja’, how often that fish weighs exactly 30, 40 or 50lb, or a just a convenient ounce or two more. It’s more often than not, never a few ounces under. Which to me tells more than half of the story. I wonder how many others have noticed the same. Where weight is also now not even enough, the competition has become ‘how many’. This question that was grunted at me by one fella on a syndicate I have chosen to no longer be part of.  He’d fish the same night, week in week out and had become proprietorial over the place, the self appointed king of the pond – there’s always someone with a weirdly inflated sense of self importance. It had become quite apparent the he couldn’t bear the thought of anyone catching more or bigger fish than him, and had even sent me a weirdly commiseratory message for a fish I’d caught being just shy of fifty pounds, the year before. I have no idea whether I was or was not catching more or bigger fish and honestly didn’t care either way, but I guess he and his status felt threatened. Fish there had become numbers and were so often talked about in terms of how much they weighed, like it was part of their name, another peculiarity of carp fishing. Like saying “Oh I saw my mate (…) last week at 85kilos” and someone replying, “Oh I’ve just seen him at 86kilos”. When you write it down and look at it, it all seems pretty absurd really.

At the risk of sounding self righteous or that this appear to be a rant, it’s not. I am not disdainful of the way things are now, things change, I get that. But this change is not for me. I’m also not for a moment trying to maintain that my thoughts and ramblings are right either. I’m not some anti weighing, evangelising, fishing purist, but for me there has to be more. There are plenty of anglers out there, some well-known in the media, some not at all, that I have tremendous respect for and although they always seem to document weights etc, it appears to me that there is so much more to their experience than simply that. Perhaps the number holds greater importance for those who crave attention or a form of self aggrandisement. If that’s really your thing, then good luck with it, I guess. My words here are simply my way of trying to find more meaning in the whole experience, for me, than simply reducing it to one small part of that; the ubiquitous numbers at the end of it.

So having photographed the fish, I slipped it back, ruminating on whether I’d ever see it again or how long it might be until the next mystery character might come along. But in a world where so much seems to have been discovered and catalogued, time and time again, I have once more grown quite fond of the uncertainty and the unknown, and even the big fat zero.