A Passion For Angling - The Complete Series

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Just two weeks ago I was fishing with Chris on the River Wye and he caught his first ever Wye barbel … only 7+lbs but a beautiful fish in a glorious corner of our countryside.

tench of over six pounds and Steve’s awesome mullet of 7/12 that fought for an eternity and circled There are also inland breeding cormorants, 2,096 at the last count in 2005, so the pressure on our freshwater fish is relentless and surely unsustainable. This is damaging our bio-diversity, and some rivers have already been denuded of their fish life. Members of the Avon Roach Project created a petition to attempt to change the law and make it easier for us to protect our wildlife from excessive cormorant predation. We plan to deliver the 16,000+ signature petition to the Fisheries Minister in February. We also filmed a gudgeon match ‘to the death’, the pair reluctantly punting out into the hallowed waters through the mist as the sun was rising. Chris doesn’t do early mornings so it was a struggle, even if we did capture the most evocative summer sequence in the whole series.

About Me

The series of six one hour films was first shown on BBC2 in September 1993, and it is amazing that it is still showing on Discovery Channel after all these years. Few programmes can match “Passion” for television longevity, and considering all the changes that have taken place in the world and in angling these past sixteen years…not all for the good!...it is heartening that our portrait of the joys of angling can still pull the right emotional strings. A Passion for Angling’ and ‘Catching the Impossible’ are still capturing big audiences, for they describe the magic of being by the waterside with a rod and line like no others. Like all creative endeavours, making films is an inexact art, there is no right or wrong … which is probably why I was able to earn a living making wildlife films! I have made over sixty now, for all the worlds major TV companies, so I guess I got some of it right. Whatever the truth, it was a privilege to go to so many wild places to share my life with charismatic animals and meet so many great guys and gals. Bernard Cribbins, who has died aged 93 after a career as a much-loved character actor spanning more than 75 years, was a great ambassador for angling who will be sorely missed.

Non-native cormorants of the continental sinensis race have colonised the UK in alarming numbers in recent years. Scientists have calculated that the numbers over-wintering total about 23,000 and that they need a pound of fish a day to survive...so they eat 23,000 lbs of fish EVERY DAY. This equates to about 12,000 two pound trout and/or 1,200 tons of fish every winter, twice the yearly tonnage produced by the largest trout farm in the UK! HUGH MILES:“I was up on the scaffolding and we saw the fish approach. We’d agreed a signal, Chris whistled, the line tightened and it all went solid. Then ping! “Shall we go and have a cup of tea?” I think Bob said straight after! CARPOLOGY: Bob had the Fat Lady and Chris caught that amazing looking twenty-pound common near the sluice. I also remember that sequence where Bob got smashed up…

Health & Wellbeing

Chris had harboured this crazy idea for years but had been ‘dissuaded’ by the various syndicates to try it. I was much more liberal and jumped at the idea. The plan was to place a manikin in the shallows in the area where he had caught his record fish. It would be dressed in Chris’s coat and hat and be holding a rod. Once installed, we baited the spot for several days and the carp became habituated to this silent, stationary ‘angler’ and ended up feeding within a couple of feet … a lesson there for our modern day impatient and noisy angling. The DVD is still available – and always will be – and is still considered by many to be the best fishing series ever made. Sales remain strong year after year, with new generations of anglers discovering that there is a whole world of fishing out there that doesn’t have to revolve entirely around carp, bolt-rigs and boilies. Some also claim‘Impossible’ to be better even than ‘Passion’, others disagree ; you’ll have to decide yourselves. Incidentally, we planned to catch a 3lb rudd for the series but that did prove impossible! So with so many happy memories of his time there, Chris was keen to return, not so that he could catch yet more big carp but so that he could finally try out his eccentric idea of a fishing scarecrow!

A three-pound roach was also on the list and at the time was far from impossible. After all, even I had caught four of that size so Martin raised the stakes and decided that the challenge should be a three-pound roach … but from a river. Now this was impossible, for after the squadrons of killer cormorants had invaded our rivers, even two-pound roach are very rare. Bernard with his beautiful 22lb snapper - it grew on to be over thirty pounds and was named Bernard!The very cold weather was hard for everyone out there, especially our wildlife, and I was very sad when this lovely buzzard that had adopted us in the garden finally succumbed to starvation. We had kept it alive for weeks with scraps of squirrel and rabbit but the weather cut off our supplies and with a foot of snow and ice covering the ground, there was nothing for it to eat. However, we still have twelve long-tailed tits though, thanks to the RSPB's fat-filled coconut treats .... they love 'em We felt that the ‘Passion’ films had to include the famous record carp water, Redmire. In fact, my initial plan was to only make one film but our time at that magical pool was so idyllic and so successful that I convinced Bob and Chris that we ought to make a series of six films. After a further four years of hard graft, they were both wishing that they hadn’t agreed! Thank you to all our loyal customers. The appeal of ‘Passion’ never seems to wain and like fishing, is passed on from generation to generation. Folk still claim that it is the best fishing series ever made and though it’s not up to us to comment, it is gratifying that it still appeals to so many for so long. A Passion for Angling (with Rodger McPhail), BBC Books/Merlin Unwin Books 1993 ( ISBN 978-0563367413)

I'm working on a film for the Trust this winter, highlighting the excessive predation of our fish life by cormorants and the long term damage this may be doing to our bio-diversity. Without fish, our herons, grebes and kingfishers might decline, along with bitterns, and who knows, even those perennial favourites, our otters and ospreys might suffer too. We need a "Royal Society for the Protection of Fish" and the sooner our conservation organisations realise the urgent need to protect our rivers and lakes, the more likely we are to save our diversity of wetland wildlife. Casting at the Sun, Medlar Press limited edition 1986, Classics edition 2006 ( ISBN 978-1899600366) last five years, anglers are once again beginning to catch these silver beauties … so congratulations andMany in the angling world will remember Bernard as the voice of ‘Passion for Angling’ in which he described the adventures of Chris Yates and Bob James, and for his contributions in the ‘Catching the Impossible’ series with Martin Bowler, which featured some of the best angling films ever produced.