Fishing obsession

My first interest in fishing came about when I used to visit a park with my parents, when I was around 9 years old there was a large lake in this park, and it appeared to hold a large head of fish there were men catching, plenty of small fish with long fishing rods. I remember thinking what were these fish called? The only way I could describe them, is that they looked very silvery when they flashed in the sunlight, when the anglers swung them in with these long rods. It wasn't until many years later I was to learn that competition anglers of today call these fish Silvers. Of course at that time these fish appeared big to me, I remember being very excited at the numbers of fish being caught, whilst all this was happening there were lots of kids fishing with nets and jam jars, full of tiny fish called sticklebacks because they had sharp spines on their backs. Although we knew them as Jack Sharps which may give you a clue as to where I am talking about, yes this was Sefton park. Liverpool where I was born. My Mother and father saw how excited I was at the mystique of fishing. I pleaded with them to buy me a fishing rod, times where hard on my parents in those days so they could not afford to buy me a proper rod, but they bought me the nearest thing which was a fishing net on the end of a piece of bamboo cane.

My parents promised to take me there the very next weekend, I couldn't wait to start catching fish and the thought of collecting them in jam jars and being able to take them home was even more exciting. However we arrived at the park, I had so much fun catching these tiny little fish some of them had red underneath them, and we called them red breasts. We took these home with us and admired what we had caught. Some years later when I was older I used to visit the park with my friends. Whilst we were catching these fish once again, we noticed that some of the kids were scraping the mud around the margins. And collecting these little red worms that lived in the mud. We also noticed one of the boys had a piece of cotton on a stick with a match stick attached and used as a float. They tied the worms about one foot below the float, and was catching these fish a lot easier. So naturally we were curious at this, and we tried it ourselves. And low and behold we emptied the lake of fish.

During my teens I was a bit of a tearaway, I stayed out late with my friends, fishing ponds. By this time we had proper fishing rods. We didn't only catch fish, we also enjoyed the challenge of catching things that had the opportunity to escape including for example Mice, Rats, Butterflies, and even Ladybirds. Needless to say the Ladybirds were the most challenging and elusive, with this in mind I stuck to fishing. With the number of times we went fishing I can recall thinking the neighbours thinking we must be potty. And that we as teenagers should be catching the women. I may add this didn't happen until many years later. I enjoyed my fishing so much and still do, so much so that when I started working I was taking time off to go fishing alone. Something I don't do today of course. However many years later I still found myself going fishing with working at times, I could afford to purchase more and more fishing tackle. I also discovered I could catch more fish than most people. I was becoming bigheaded. I didn't realise this at the time, but then began to wonder why I caught more fish, after reading magazines it became clear, it was down to the art of feeding the fish.