(published previously on PurePiscator)
Many of you out there may never have heard of the Anguilla Cup. This seems almost inconceivable to those of us who participated. Those who fought in this fiercely contested event, both adult and junior divisions, still remain bemused that the angling world never picked up on the intense rivalry, bitter personal battles, and the agonies and the ecstasies of such dedicated competitors.
I still believe to this day that if the local press had not been put off when they attempted to interview Mick "The Sleeper," after a particularly hard night meeting where he had been awake on at least two occasions, one of them for more than ten minutes, it would only have been a matter of time before the nationals picked up on it. Where would the Premier League be then? Would any one even have heard of David Beckham?
The Anguilla Cup was at its height in the mid nineteen-eighties, and was really three competitions rolled into one. The individual adult cup was fought over by three titans of eel fishing, the previously mentioned Mick "The Sleeper," the wiry, terrier-like Dick, and my father Gary. As well as being great rivals on the bank, they were also firm friends who met at work on a building site. It was to be an enduring friendship of over thirty years cut short only by the untimely death of my father in 2003. It was their common interests that originally brought them together: all three had a love of horse racing, as well as generally horsing about, and of course fishing and the countryside. Myself, Dick's son David, and Mick's son Christopher were the participants in the junior cup, and the team competition consisted of the respective fathers and sons.
The battlegrounds of the Anguilla Cup were the numerous dykes and creeks situated alongside the rivers Crouch and Roach, in Essex, a few miles outside Southend-on-Sea. It was an often bleak, open landscape of farmland interspersed with a plexus of creeks snaking miles inland from the sea. Alongside the river's high sea-walls, but linked with valve-like sluice gates to the salt water lay a series of dykes often no more than fifteen to twenty feet across, and at the most three or four feet deep.
For me the Anguilla Cup not only provided great enjoyment, it sparked a lifelong compulsion to fish, helped cement a friendship of my own now spanning three decades, and was the source of some of my most enduring memories.
I can't remember the exact year that I lifted the junior cup, and tragically all records have since been lost, but I can remember the sweetness of victory as if it was yesterday! I had never won it before, and even now the yearning, the aching desperation to hold that little silver cup comes back to me. I think David had won it the previous year and Christopher the year before that, so my triumph was well overdue. What made it all the more sweet was that my Dad won the adult cup, and obviously the joint cup also fell to us that year.
The rules of the competition were simple: six points for an eel, and three points for any other species of fish, though I can't remember anyone actually catching any other species. I do remember once seeing a sea bass cruising along the dyke. It must have found its way in through an open sluice gate, but it never showed any interest in our baits, which were always garden worms. I wonder whether it found its way back through to the sea, or if it's still there to this day, grown fat on the numerous crabs which we often caught. If it is it must be a twenty pounder by now, living Nessie-like in that small piece of quiet, isolated water, glimpsed only by dog walkers, and discussed in hushed tones in the local pubs.
Fishing usually started at about eight in the morning, and continued for six hours, though as Mick was the only one who drove, and he was never shall we say punctual, it was often nine by the time we started. To this day I will never understand how the six of us with all our tackle managed to fit into one car, but we always did. There were six meetings held on Sundays, and whoever caught the most eels over the six days fishing won the cup. However, it was never as simple as that.
Night meetings took place a couple of times a year. They were one off individual competitions and didn't contribute to the official Anguilla Cup. Night meetings were held across the Thames in Kent in a group of large lakes that lay alongside that great river's estuary, and which must have been crammed full of eels. The walk from where we parked the car took about half an hour. I remember one such night which provided probably the most tragic sight in fishing I have ever had the misfortune to witness. We had parked up in the village as usual and trekked to the lakes with numerous bags of tackle and what always seemed like enough food and drink for a small expedition up the Amazon. As we approached, the first waft of disaster reached our noses. The closer we got, the stronger the stench of death, invading our senses like a cloud of poisonous gas. We climbed the low bank that separated the track from the water and were greeted with every fisherman's nightmare: for seemingly as far as the eye could see, lay thousands of dead eels.
It was a sight I shall never forget. What caused it we never knew, but to our relief the other two lakes were untouched by the carnage. Big eels, small eels and humungous eels were scattered along the water's edge and floated across the surface. Whether the passage of time or the embellishments of youth have affected my memory I don't know, but I recall that along the bank we came across several near conger size eels that must have been easily seven or eight pounds. There are times when I feel almost ashamed to be a member of the human race, and though we never really knew what caused this mass carnage, I'm certain the most likely explanation is that in that isolated spot someone had deemed it suitable to dump some nameless, poisonous substance.
The intervening years have blurred the memories of individual trips, and apart from my victory what stands out in my mind now are those memorable occasions that every fisherman has; there was the day we caught over forty eels, the eel that got off just after showing itself to have a head the size of a small horse, or of course, the night a flying bathtub went over.
One such memory, which still brings the tears rolling down my cheeks, occurred on an Anguilla Cup away day. We were on holiday in Folkestone I think it was, and had discovered just the type of dyke that we fished back home. I remember it was a baking hot summer's day, and we had walked a couple of miles or so and started fishing quite early. It was just four of us, myself and my Dad, and Dick and David. Our floats had been as motionless as we had in the sweltering conditions and by lunchtime all four of us had just about had enough.
Suddenly, completely out of the blue David's float twitched in that teasing, tantalising way that floats sometimes do. David picked his rod up, but Dick, probably determined that this one fish would win the day hissed at him not to strike.
"No, wait! Wait..."
The float dipped again, but failed to go under, and David's arm twitched in response; after all this time he could barely contain himself.
"No! Don't strike!"
Dick stood about six feet to the right of David, who held the rod in his right hand rather unsteadily, and was leaning forward in anticipation, knees bent, eyes honed in on the float as if laser guided. It dipped for a third time, and again the arm holding the rod quivered.
"Wait! Wait!"
The urge to strike at that point must have been almost unbearable, but David resisted. By now we had no interest in our own floats, and myself and my Dad were watching the ensuing drama excitedly, we wanted David to catch whatever it was just as badly as he did himself.
The tension rose a few degrees with every passing second.
"Wait...wait..." Dick murmured.
The float disappeared.
"Strike! Strike! Strike!" screamed Dick.
David, by now with so much pent up aggression within him from the mixture of Dick's cajoling, the intense heat and the unbearable tension generated by the float's seemingly countless dips and twitches, struck.
If he'd been attempting to set the hook in a two hundred pound marlin at a hundred yards the strike would probably still have been unnecessarily aggressive. The hook failed to connect with anything, either that or it ripped straight through the lips of whatever had been nibbling gently at the worm, and the rod, without any resistance from a hook hold, continued in an arc to the right of roughly forty five degrees from the horizontal position which David had been holding it.
It smacked into Dick's forehead with a sound like that of a cricket ball bowled by Merv Hughes and met by Ian Botham's bat as it dispatched it over the Lords pavilion. A stunned silence descended which was broken only by two words from Dick which I cannot bring myself to put down on paper. Suffice to say no son should ever hear his father utter those two words!
There followed an intense period of float watching by myself and my Dad. It was as if what had just taken place over the last five minutes had never happened, and if a UFO had landed in the field opposite I swear our eyes would never have left those floats. This continued for a couple of minutes until I couldn't help but glance over at my Dad. He was watching his float, but his face was scarlet, tears were streaming down it, and his body was convulsing as if the ground he was sat on was experiencing its own mini-earthquake.
I remember a similar episode on a day that couldn't have been more different. The wind blew, the rain fell, and in a brief respite from the rain Christopher decided to take his Dad's brand new fishing umbrella up onto the sea-wall. There were four pairs of eyes that stared far too intently at their floats that day after the inevitable disaster involving umbrellas, high winds and language fouler than the weather that occurred.
My Dad liked a drink, there's no two ways about it. He was fond of a glass of cider, and could also put away a drop of whiskey when required. I don't think that water and alcohol mix myself, not that there's anything wrong with that age old tradition of a few glasses of something after a fishing trip, in fact I think it should be positively encouraged, but on night fishing trips I always remember trying to keep one eye on my Dad. Fishing bags were usually weighed down with a couple of litres of cider or a few cans of lager. The bags seemed particularly light on one night fishing trip, due to the fact that lager and cider had been replaced that evening by whiskey. At about five the next morning I remember Dad leaning forward to rinse his hands in the lake water. In slow motion he leaned further and further forward, before ever so slowly toppling head over heels in a somersault worthy of an Olympic gymnast, and coming to rest spread-eagled on his back in six inches of water.
Fishing has enriched my life in many ways; friendships have been born and developed into lifelong bonds; the thrill of our wonderful countryside and the views of its natural inhabitants that being at the water's edge has uniquely provided; the joys and disappointments that every fisherman experiences. I feel quite sorry for people who never have and never will experience any of the wonderful moments that I have. The first day back at work after a recent trip to the Hampshire Avon brought a comment from a colleague about how boring fishing must be. This same colleague then proceeded to have a conversation with another colleague about how they had spent their Sunday. It had consisted of watching the Eastenders omnibus edition, and probably rotting a few more of their already depleted brain cells.
To this day, I can't catch an eel without it bringing a smile to my face, though sometimes, like when fishing for barbel or chub with a large lump of luncheon meat - my favourite method - they can be a little frustrating! This apparent propensity for catching eels amuses my fishing partner intensely. I don't mind; the enduring memories of my Dad are from the Anguilla Cup days, I don't think I was ever happier as a child than just sitting on the bank watching a float, next to my Dad.
