I caught a fish a few days ago, a carp, a common, not pictured here – that’s a mirror for those who aren’t sure. So anyway, 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 it was immaculate, like it was straight out of a mold and freshly varnished. I’m ninety nine percent sure it was the first time that this particular specimen had crossed through its watery ceiling to the world above, other than perhaps for the occasional furtive leap. I admired it for a moment, its unmarred burnished scales glinting in the low afternoon light, and carefully put it in a retainer so we could both get our respective breath back and hurriedly set up my camera to capture the moment. I was delighted, particularly as my catch ratio at this particularly challenging location seems to be roughly one fish every three or four sessions. This is a reality I’m actually getting to appreciate more and more, rather than reeling in one fish after another with a predictable certainly. 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 so often now measured only 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 even 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) defeats the object and I find it quite 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 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’d like to think as I get 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. I have caught carp here in the UK not to 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 – FYI it’s not the picture on this story and I definitely don’t have that colour or quantity of hair anymore. The effort and experience of last year’s endeavours, was 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 guarantee it had never been caught before. That was special. The other fish, a fat old common more than twice its weight that metaphorically could barely get out of its own armchair, although still relatively unknown in the grand scheme of things, had been caught a few times before over the years, and was fairly well documented amongst the handful who knew of it.

It seems than fishing has all too often nowadays been stripped of its art and soul (see what I did there) and reduced to facts and figures, to the point it almost seems quite industrial now. Ok I freely admit it’s easy for someone in their late fifties to jump on the nostalgia bus and stare 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, and 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. It’s almost like watching a movie now and skipping to the end to find out who did it. I am well aware ‘t’was ever thus’ as the saying goes, and I was as interested in seeing what the old Redmire fish weighed as anyone else, but there seemed to be so much more to then story than simply the number. Perhaps it’s all driven by a cultural shift, a reduction in attention spans and a need for more instant and constant gratification, for an experience to be perceived as worthwhile. Apparently there is a video out there right now on the Tube of You, with a well known angler actually crying because he didn’t catch on his trip. I haven’t seen the video personally but come on, really?

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. And where weight is also often not even enough now, it has now become ‘how many’. I was asked or ‘challenged’ even myself, 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 one right). It had become quite apparent the he couldn’t bear the thought of anyone catching more or bigger fish than him. 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 (a slightly ridiculous thing itself), a bit like me saying “oh I saw my mate Bill 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.

I have observed as I have got older, that there seems to be a need to weigh success against others achievements; blokes, particularly middle-aged ones (an age category I’m sadly now part of) do often seem to need that validation more and more. And where angling has become your livelihood there may be the pressure to have to be ‘the guy’, catch the best etc, yeah whatever, it’s fishing, don’t ruin it.

At the risk of sounding self righteous or that this appear to be a rant, it’s not and I am not disdainful of the way things are now, things change, I get that. I’m not for a moment trying to maintain that my thoughts and musings are right either, and I’m not some anti weighing, evangelising fishing purist. 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 grander sense of self. If that’s really your thing, then good luck with it. 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.

And 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, I have grown quite fond of that uncertainty again.