To the east of West, so to speak, is “The Berlin Wall”, consisting of the “angry hampster” Sebastian Schulte, so called because he sucks his upper lip when annoyed, Thorsten Englemann and Sebastian Thormann.
Behind Thormann sits the president, the Australian Tom Edwards, and in the bow is Luke Walton from the United States. Five of the Cambridge oarsmen and cox Peter Rudge have competed in the race before. Kip McDaniel, the Canadian stroke, is a first-timer, but he is a steely competitor who has an accomplished machine behind him. Just my luck, none turned up.)It was one of those days when any sane person admires nature’s wrath. Even the filmmaker and writer Andy Nicholson, who will fish in a rain butt, turned down the invitation to join me.So I caught nothing Not a chance, really. Blamed it on the previous night’s carousing, of course, but that’s my rep shot with all my non-angling mates And soon I’ll be 60 Guess it’s all downhill from now on.. It looks as if the wind is determined to ruffle the surface as much as the crews in the 152nd Boat Race today.
The forecast is a strong south-westerly to westerly which will make mayhem of much of the four-and-a-quarter miles from Putney to Mortlake; it is going to be a rough ride, during which the experience on board the Cambridge boat could be the trump card. (I had lost weight in anticipation of old girlfriends being on the guest list. “You’ve got some orders to fill,” she chuckled, and went back to sleep. I reckon she was just bitter because her marvellous present, a complete Highland dress outfit with the Elliott tartan, was too big for me. Unfortunately, both recipes require a fish.Having got to bed a little before dawn, the prospect of fishing in torrential rain was not top of my agenda when my wife, Riva, woke me.
You could just imagine them deciding whether to cook the trout with a lime and caper sauce or with apricot salsa. Nor, alas, was I going to catch trout, grayling or anything with fins in a river that looked more like the Limpopo than a crystal-clear Welsh stream. Unfortunately, non-anglers don’t understand this.The previous night, my friends had seen some pictures, some of which we won’t go into, but others that showed a grinning me holding large fish. Shad look like herring, but seem to have about five times as many bones. Ogden Nash even wrote a poem about its boniness, with the last line being something like: “But its roe is boneless, utterly”.Still, I wasn’t going to catch any shad Too early.
If you’re really lucky, come May (shad also being called mayfish), you might even catch its even rarer cousin, the allis shad.Not for food, I hasten to add. What I hadn’t realised was how many people had been promised trout. What I hadn’t calculated was two days of torrential rain, turning a pretty river into a raging torrent the colour of Cadbury’s, carrying whole trees and dead sheep.It’s an interesting river, the Irfon Salmon spawn there So does the rare twaite shad. Peter Smith, the owner, is a keen angler and knows all the hot spots. The hotel has nearly a mile of the Irfon and several miles of the Wye. It was, after all, my birthday weekend (albeit two weeks before the day when I get my free bus pass). I should have been celebrating and making merry, instead of flogging the River Irfon in the vain hope that something with spots would be dumb enough to gulp down my fly.
So many non-fishing friends were making the journey to Builth Wells for the merriment that I boasted: “I’ll catch you all a trout to order.” In normal circumstances on the fish-rich Caer Beris Manor waters, this wouldn’t have been so outlandish.
Who in their right mind would promise to catch a brace of trout each for 19 people on a flooded Welsh river in March?
I’m sure you’ve guessed the answer But there are extenuating circumstances, m’lud. It just proves you’re in the prime of senility, said one less-than-sympathetic fishing friend Bit cruel, that But he was probably right. There is that one at Aintree, plus an ever-growing list: at Ayr (Scottish), Chepstow (Welsh), Fairyhouse (Irish), Uttoxeter (Midlands and Summer), Limerick (Munster), Downpatrick (Ulster), Listowel (Kerry), North Yorkshire (Catterick), Devon (Exeter) and, yesterday at Fontwell, the Southern National, in which the 6-1 shot Hazeljack gave the conditional rider Willie McCarthy and small-time trainer Arthur Whiting their moment of glory.. He’s a nice horse, always has been, but he’s not easy to train as he has trouble with his joints. But he seemed to like this surface and won this nicely.”There is a National, and then there are Nationals. This horse has always had potential and they did a good job with him last year. “It’s never easy when you take up a new profession,” he said, “so I am delighted to get the first winner in.
