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Review of 2006The best year yet? Well, if you’ve only just completed your second full year that might not be such a huge boast but, by every angling yardstick, 2006 has been a cracker. Above all, it’s been the friendship. You can hardly call Casting for Gold a business at all: everyone, absolutely everyone, who becomes part of the team becomes part of the club. We’re not talking customers. We’re talking best friends and it shows throughout the riotous parties that we actually have the nerve to call fishing trips!  As ever, 2006 has seen great accommodation (we have largely settled on Salthouse Hall now), great food (thanks Pauline, Cookies and The White Horse), great entertainment (thanks all of you plus, of course, the Minstrel) and some memorable hangovers. But, at last, we’ve simply got to mention the fishing which has been fantastic. We basically kicked off the year with pike and had more twenties than you could shake a stick at, topped by John Gilman’s quite stunning thirty-one and a half pounder taken off the top in truly memorable circumstances. Then it was to the Estate Lakes with some of the best tenching we’ve ever enjoyed. Throw in magnificent rudd, some stunning mirrors and perhaps the best wild carp venue in the land and you’re getting a feeling of what we’ve been enjoying. And, to our great excitement, the rivers are well on their way back. There’ve been two pound roach, some superb chub, the odd tangle with immense barbel, the re-emergence of some fine perch, and a renewed friendship with a massive bream. And, best of all, the return of dace stocks. Happy dace are here again is one of the most cringe-worthy puns in angling but it makes us very happy indeed to be able to coin it again. We wouldn’t like you to think that Casting for Gold is some sort of piscatorial wonderland because, as in life, there are downs as well as ups. For example, our coastal investigations are still very much a work in progress. The bass have largely eluded us and whilst we’ve seen plenty of mullet a couple of fish breaking free is about as far as we’ve got. Mind you, we know there’s a huge amount of mileage out there. Imagine endless blue skies, an in-coming tide, water knee deep and crystal clear with big fish brushing past your rod tip and you’re getting the picture.
And we’ve got our problems with cormorants and otters both. It’s a double whammy. The cormorants eat the small fish and if they manage to make it to maturity, then the otters come in to polish them off. There’s a depressingly long list of waters off our visit list due to the activities of these two species. There’s a whole lot more to be said on this issue but, in short, professional and amateur naturalists alike have to understand that you can’t reintroduce otters willy-nilly back into the wild. There just have to be sufficient fish stocks before this can happen and this is a particularly thorny problem since the demise of the eel population. We won’t go on because it would only get us depressed and, throughout 2006, depression has been a long way from our minds. Even those rare days that the fishing has been slow there’s always been something to look forward to…the extraordinarily fine picnics for example and, even best of all, the wisp of smoke curling from Mr Miller’s Kelly kettle. Thanks to all of you from both of us. ** See also November 2006 Newsletter >>
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