Walton's Rucksack

  While some long stay carp anglers have bivvies more luxuriously appointed than my three bed semi, complete with mini TV, padded bedchair and goodness knows what else (I've even once seen a bivvy in which the angler, who was wearing slippers, had put some squares of rather posh looking carpet on top of his groundsheet!), most angling is done in relative discomfort. Sure, you might have one of those match fishing seatboxes with loads of gizmos that screw onto it, or a nice padded fishing chair, but at the end of most days of fishing, once you're past childhood, you find yourself coming home with, at the very least, a dose of backache. I've often fished without a chair, electing to remain more mobile, and sat on the lid of my bait bucket or an unhooking mat, or crouched for hours on my haunches, which isn't the wisest thing to do when your knees bear the "wear and tear" results of two decades of playing football! And then there are the insect bites, and the sti

  Some forms of angling are more active than others. Lure or fly fishing involve constant casting, stalking carp or chub can involve lots of walking as well as creeping and crawling through undergrowth, and fishing for small fish can sometimes be a pretty frenetic activity, but on the whole fishing is a pastime that requires patience. Catching a 20 lb carp can require hours of sitting behind silent bite alarms and motionless bobbins, and fishing for specimen fish of any species tends to demand a lot of waiting. But patience isn't necessarily passive, nor waiting lazy. Sure, if you want to pull your hat down over your eyes and drift off into a stupor you can, but it's not the best way to end up with a fish on the bank. Waiting can be active. Tying rigs and making up PVA bags, scanning the water for signs of fish moving, altering your shotting pattern, thinking up schemes and plans to outwit the fish. Being a Christian involves quite a bit of waiting, too. After all, it's 200

  Yesterday I blanked. The surprising thing was less the fact that I blanked on a freezing cold day in January (we've all been there!) but that there were three other anglers on the lake, when it's usually extremely rare to see a single angler on the place. I was fishing at the lake known by a number of us Christian Anglers members (the photos that illustrate this piece show Christian Anglers members Pete and Roger with fish from the lake in question) rather cryptically as "the perch lake." We've shared information among ourselves, but haven't ever named or publicised the water, because (truth be told) we've had some cracking fish from it, and at only a quarter of an acre we weren't keen for every perch fishing "Tom, Dick or Sally" to fish it to death- after all, a small pond can only take so much angling pressure before results drop away. The puzzle as to why three (very earnest and professional looking) perch anglers were on the lake on Sun

  Since the angling bug bit at the age of 13, birthdays and Christmas have tended to have a similar theme with regard to the presents I receive, and as you might expect the common thread is angling. From the Observers Book of Coarse Fishing (a Christmas present from my parents in 1981) through seat boxes, rods, reels, more angling books, lures and floats there have been more presents in the "fishing category" than any other. That's not to say that I don't receive non-angling gifts (chocolates, wine, whisky, and books of a non-angling nature also feature from time to time and are very welcome) but it's piscatorial presents that tend to dominate. Among my favourites over the years are a number of rods: my first decent match rod, made by the no longer in existence East Anglian Rod Company and my first ever carbon rod (a spinning rod) both purchased by my parents, a fine custom built lure rod made for me by my American friend Don Morse, and the splendidly refurbished

  Those of us of a "certain vintage" will well remember a time when the closed season existed not only on rivers, but for all coarse fishing anywhere- lakes, ponds, pits, canals, rivers and streams were all closed to angling from 15th March to the 16th June. (except for in Yorkshire, where for a while they recommenced fishing on the 1st of June in what was know as the "stolen fortnight.") As a schoolboy I can recall the excitement of the days and weeks leading up to what was commonly referred to as the "glorious sixteenth." For me it eclipsed Christmas in terms of anticipation, and by the last couple of days of the closed season I was barely able to either contain my excitement or to sleep, as thoughts of tench similar to the one held by Christian Angler's member Greg in the photo above danced through my head. This Sunday sees the church calendar enter the season of Advent, which is similarly a time of waiting, of anticipation and of expectation. In on

  I love bonfires. I think it's probably a "man thing", but the bonfires that we had at the first couple of Christian Anglers Retreats when we were camping on the Dixon's farm were almost as much of a highlight as the fishing. We sat talking and staring into the flames as they leapt skywards, conversations about fishing and faith and life, with all the while the flames exerting a mesmeric pull - you just can't not gaze at a fire as it burns brightly. Fire and flames feature a lot in Scripture, too. Timothy is told by Paul to "fan into flame" the gift he has, the pre-incarnate Christ appears in the flames with Meshach, Shadrach and Abednigo in the "firey furnace", and when the Holy Spirit shows up at Pentecost what look like flames are seen on the heads of the now emboldened apostles. A friend of mine wrote a book a few years ago. Its title was "Fire of the Word", and it's main point was that reading the Bible shouldn't just be