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Angling: The strain of using poles causes back trouble
(March 2006) Half the population of Ipswich and the surrounding countryside has spent months lamenting a certain football club's injury crisis.
This mass despair has led to the most shattering sport injury in the eastern area for many a long year to be overlooked. I refer, of course, to the Easdown back.
A week's convalescence after carrying around compost sacks in the garden seemed to have done the trick and all signs of twinges and aches had departed. The back was ready for the acid test beside the water.
I used a medium pole, just seven and 10 metres of it, for only two hours. By then, I was in agony and, in spite of the lure of a shoal of feeding fish, I packed up and gingerly made my way home.
I won't repeat what the osteopath called me. Suffice it to say that it seems I had made a pretty good job of sidelining myself this time and I dare not even think of the treatment expense.
Sorry for myself? You have got to believe it. After enduring all those bitterly cold days sitting by the waterside, I now find that spring is not too far away and I might not be able to take advantage of it.
Temperatures above and below the surface are soon to be rising, cuckoos will be coughing (or whatever they do), fish will be on the move – and I am a wretched cripple. Fair, isn't it?
I reckon poles are the osteopath's best friend. Hundreds of these guys (and dolls) sun themselves in the Bahamas at regular intervals and enjoy a luxurious early retirement all at the expense of pole anglers' backs.
Although your average 12.5-metre pole will weigh only about 800 grams, it is the leverage or cantilever effect that causes havoc with the user's back.
It must be remembered that most poles these days come at 14½ or 16 metres although, of course, there is no obligation to use those last few sections!
There is an abundance of advice on how to minimise the strain of using a pole. Make sure the thighs are horizontal, even on a sloping bank; never sit with a stoop; always sit with the pole resting on your knees and use an adjustable pole rest.
But, in the heat of the moment, posture defects can creep in, alas.
One might be forgiven for wondering why anglers use such an unwieldy instrument if it causes so many problems but, in truth, the method is a deadly efficient fish-taker on the right day and in the right swim.
I must confess that I love using a pole. The delicacy of bait presentation is unsurpassed by any other means of angling.
There was a time when the use of a pole brought sniggers because of its association with catching small fish.
Those days are long gone and even big fish of powerful species like carp and tench are caught regularly on purpose-made and properly balanced tackle. But you do, of course, have to be sound of wind and back!
Angling is a bit like Christmas, birthdays and holidays. Even, I suppose, like sex – if you will pardon the expression. Ho! I hear you cry – the lad has gone; flipped his lid; completely bananas.
But tarry a while. It is all this anticipation bit, isn't it? Being better than realisation.
Everybody looks forward to Christmas, birthdays, holidays and the other thing but so often when they finally arrive they are not all you had conjured them up to be in your tiny mind.
And don't you think that that is often the case with angling? Do you remember the close season?
Those interminable three months when it was illegal to fish? And when you did finally hit the bank on that wonderful June 16th, it was very rare indeed that you had a successful day.
The present situation is much the same. We are dragging through an endless winter of bitterly cold north-easterly winds that has stopped fishing stone-dead in its tracks.
Readers who follow the weekly match exploits of the Bury Veterans/disabled group can use them as an indication of what I mean.
Most anglers are staying at home in the face of these conditions and are just waiting impatiently for the spring that will promote rising air and water temperatures to encourage the fish to start feeding again. But, at the moment, it all seems so far away.
But enough of this pessimism and foreboding. Let us think positively and follow in the footsteps of Izaak Walton, angling's immortal bard, and quote from his book 'The Compleat Angler'.
'No life so happy and so pleasant as the life of a well-governed angler, for when the lawyer is swallowed up with business, and the statesman is preventing or contriving plots, then we sit on cowslip banks, hear the birds sing, and possess ourselves in as much quietness as the silent, silver streams…'
If you have not read that book, by the way, I would advise you to get hold of a copy.
It was first published in 1663 and has been reprinted a remarkable 600 times, which is more than any other book in the English language apart from the Bible and the Book of Common Prayer, so it must be worth reading.
BURY ST EDMUNDS ANGLING ASSOCIATION. The bitterly cold conditions continued for the Veterans/disabled match at Barrow last week, ensuring that catches would again be limited.
Jack Wetherill (first with 2lb 13½oz) and George Tebb (third with 1lb 14½oz) continued their neck-and-neck sparring in Section A.
In Section B, Malcolm Spear came out on top with 8½oz and Micky Pearce continued his late rush of results by producing a second-placed 1½oz.
Source: http://www.burystedmundstoday.co.uk