THE ULTIMATE ANGLING BUCKET LIST

You only have to look at the wider game and coarse fish record lists to see a whole array of imports.
And as for smuggling and elitism, what about the carp and trout fishing scenes.
Big carp are regular targets for theft and smuggling, while monster trout have been grown on for years
for introduction into waters at record sizes on days when only selected 'high value' anglers are invited
in order to get maximum press coverage.
So either reinstate the wels catfish or suspend the others. We need consistency here, hopefully
introduced by a committee more in touch with what anglers want instead of being dictated to by a bunch
of bureaucrats, many of whom are completely out of touch.
To date, I have only ever fished for
wels catfish on two occasions. The
first was a visit to Spain.
Unfortunately at the time when the
Icelandic volcano saw air travellers all
over Europe stranded.
I was over there for reasons other than
fishing, but as we'd flown in to
Barcelona, with Tortosa on the River
Ebro en route to where I needed to be,
a two night stopover was inserted into
the itinerary for a couple of days
guided boat fishing on the lower Ebro
for catfish.
Terry Pilling, Anglers Paradise
Unfortunately it was April, which is
perhaps a bit on the early side anyway, and especially so that year, which followed quite a severe winter
with snow melt still affecting water temperatures. It was so cold in fact that at the end of the first day
of sitting frozen rigid and bite-less in a small boat, I nipped into town and bought myself some extra
warm clothing.
The second day wasn't much better, though we did have a half hearted take on squid which eventually
came to nothing, while close by I saw a cat being hauled in by another boat, and that was pretty much
was it.
A complete, though in some ways not unexpected blank. Then there was the fiasco of getting back home
by bus, train and ferry, which cost me a planned trip to fish the Baltic. But we made it back, eventually,
and some weeks later, myself and Graeme Pullen were down at Boscastle dinghy fishing for porbeagle
sharks.
That at least was the plan. Unfortunately, technical problems put paid to going offshore, so we spent a
few days at Zyg Gregorek's Anglers Paradise instead, where amongst many excellent fish, I saw a few
catfish in the thirty to forty five pound bracket caught.
Very impressive. So much so that I went back down to one of the lakes after dark fishing with a couple
of twenty two mm halibut pellets on a hair rig, and within the hour I had my first and only wels catfish
on the bank.
A mere fifteen pounder, but still big enough and strong enough to give me a few tense moments. Again,
very impressive, and I can totally see why people become addicted to catching them.
One of those people is Simon Clark, who besides owning 'Tackle Up' in Fleet, Hampshire, is also
secretary of the catfish conservation group, and is an out and out big catfish specialist. So, on a
341