THE ULTIMATE ANGLING BUCKET LIST

Though I had sea fished while on holiday a few times, it wasn't until 1970 that I actually took it up
seriously, and later, pretty much exclusively.
I will be discussing some of my earliest trips to Loch Ryan fishing from a sixteen foot open boat
skippered by Davy Agnew more fully in Part 2. But still I need to mention it here briefly, because Davy
introduced me to the pleasures of both catching cod, and of small boat fishing as a means of getting to
them, which was to play a major role in my fishing several years later.
Sandwiched between those key two events however was the hey day of monster cod fishing in and
around the Clyde and its sea lochs. Doug Dinnie, George Mann and Bill Freshwater, otherwise known
as 'the trio' were making the headlines on an almost weekly basis with cod to over forty pounds from
their little fourteen open boat out over a mark known as the Gantocks.
They were also making headlines for their tactics of using heavy metal pirks, which while these are
common place now, at that time were virtually unheard of and had to be imported from Scandinavia by
ABU.
Lots of good cod were running the Clyde system each winter back then, passing over the Gantocks on
into the various sea lochs where boat and shore anglers were having an absolute field day.
To get a better first hand flavour of how all of that went, I've spoken at length with some of the people
who were involved at the time, including Tony Bridge regarding the boat fishing, and Ken Robinson
from the shore.
I even managed to get up there myself where we picked up a few half decent fish. But unfortunately,
due to a combination of my young age, the distances involved, and having only just started getting into
boat fishing, I saw the very tail end of it all, after which it plunged very rapidly and spectacularly into
terminal decline.
So bad in fact that the Clyde is still even now a virtual desert and may never recover, which again is
reflected in the audio interview I recorded with Ken Robinson.
Though I was travelling north quite a bit in search of
cod during the early 1970's, around 1973 I decided
that I also needed to travel south. The Thames
Estuary at that time was producing both big numbers
of cod and big specimens, though not on the
Gantocks scale of things.
John Rawle and Bod Cox had everyone wanting to
learn about and buy into uptide fishing, with the
usual knock on effect of all the big tackle companies
clambering to get in on the profit generating band
wagon too.
The uptiding scene has come a long way since those
early days of buying in twenty and thirty pound class
boat rod blanks that had not been cut down to size,
then ringing them to be used as boat casting rods.
News paper clip of ‘The Trio’
So I did a couple of runs down to Bradwell fishing
with John, both to learn all I could first hand from
the master, and to get a slice of the excellent fishing
action they had down there, and once again now have in that neck of the woods.
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