How good luck put me 3-0 up on Beckham
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Your support makes all the difference.Sex, sex, sex, Kylie's bum, free tickets to the World Cup! Well, I have to try and get your attention somehow in amongst all this coverage from Japan and Korea. So, fishing. Well, to carry on the football theme, I've just been fishing with the David Beckham of the fishing world and, at one point, we were 3-0 in my favour.
To backtrack just a little. Sportfish – my favourite fishing shop, as they are one of the few fishing shops where the staff actually talk to me and don't make me feel like a freak – has opened a concession in my favourite department store, Selfridges. Right bang in the middle of the men's department. Which is a little obvious, I have to say, but I shall let this pass as I'm so thrilled at being able to buy almost all my life requirements under one roof. In order to introduce me to the concept, we all went fishing.
This is where I met Charles Jardine, who if you don't know is quite a famous author/artist/ general fishing god, and if you do know you will so be jealous. Verily, I saw grown men go all unnecessary in his presence. He, I and Richard from Sportfish went fishing on the Itchen, a lovely chalk stream in Hampshire. I'd never fished the Itchen before, a dreadful oversight on my part. This beat – Abbots Worthy and owned by Orvis – is about a mile long. It's intensely pretty and has just the right mixture of naturalness and ease of fishing that you need on an expensive chalk stream.
The start of the beat is wide, shallow and very clear. This is where I started, fishing off a little footbridge, self-conscious as hell in front of an audience of five. Luckily they bored of me easily and went into the hut for the altogether more pleasurable distraction of coffee. I had to cast parallel to the bank, upstream of course. The reassuring plop, plop of fish feeding was all about me but I found the fly fished out too quickly and I hadn't warmed up sufficiently to keep on top of it. Later I returned to this stretch and, fishing off the left-hand bank, caught a sizeable fish right close to the shallows.
We moved further upstream to a curve in the river, overhung by trees, a point we thought looked particularly fishy. I had on a dry fly of some sort – don't ask me the name of it, because Charles was introducing me to so many flies in one go my head was starting to spin. After a couple of casts Charles started telling me that the fish were feeding off nymphs just below the surface and this is how I should fish. I did as I was told, but couldn't see the fly just below the surface – crucial to this type of fishing – so I shooed Beckham-Jardine away and started following my own instincts. I went back to a dry fly, a Tup's Indispensable. Bingo. One fish, that fought merrily. Then another strong fellow who never showed himself and eventually got off. Then another. All before lunch.
At this point, Charles's hook was unsullied by a fish's mouth. I think I had a lucky stretch of water. He did go on to catch a few before lunch, which he kindly cooked for us: sausage and bacon sandwiches. The day could only have been more perfect if the sun had shown its face. Instead it was rainy and windy and I may now have double pneumonia with a TB chaser. The afternoon brought a few more fish for Charles, lots for Richard, and one more for me.
When you can tear yourselves away from the football, Sportfish in Selfridges now offer a valuable service which I think is worth a mention. If you go in or phone them (020 7318 3818) and discuss your requirements and budget they can put you in touch with companies that can book you some fishing. This stretch of the Itchen might be one of them, subject to availability (normally £190 a day, expensive I know, but World Cup tickets are more). If you're coming from overseas (I mention this because I know I have some overseas readers that read the column online) and fancy some fishing, Sportfish can arrange for you to be picked up – currently only from a London address – driven to a lake or river, guided if necessary and they will provide tackle. This is a great idea if you've come in for a business meeting, find you have some time on your hands and want to fish, but haven't brought your stuff with you/don't know where to go/haven't got a car. Until then, Forza Italia!
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