A lot of you here hopefully don’t know that many years ago I used to present some fishing programmes on some obscure TV stations that were forever changing their name and direction. I never went looking for this TV stuff - it found me in fact - but I grew to really enjoy the whole process of being on location and creating the actual programmes. I learnt a hell of a lot, I used to enjoy talking about fishing to a camera lens even if I did find it a bit daft, and being on location was always such a collaborative process. The only bit about the whole process that I used to find uncomfortable was when the shows went out on TV and a few anglers ended up recognising me. It seems like a lot of people want to be known these days, but it was never my thing..……………
Even back then when social media didn’t exist and the internet wasn’t what it is now, I used to do all I could to try and protect the locations where we were fishing. We stayed away from a number of places I used to bait fish for a variety of reasons, some places we did film I believe didn’t really matter being on camera, and a few places we filmed were shot in a way that didn’t really show where they were. We did some mullet filming and fishing once and the kind angler helping us out asked that we be very careful how we filmed it. We naturally obliged and to this day only about three anglers I know who actually know and fish the location themselves have worked out where we were.
And then you come to something like the amazing resource that is YouTube today (if you find any bits of my old shows on there, you need to know that I am nothing to do with this!). I have dabbled with my own YouTube channel in the past and I am having a bit more of a go at making my own fishing related videos these days, but from a purely technical point of view I still find it amazing how it’s possible to go out and make decent short films oneself, and with such small and lightweight gear. I think back to the first couple of TV series we made and I would feel so bad asking the crew if we could walk a couple of miles to change location - the days of those great big BetaCam SP cameras, really heavy tripods, and a soundman with a mixing desk, attached to the camera via an umbilical cord. That was some seriously weighty gear!
As always it might seem, the main issue I see with filming yourself out fishing here in the UK where we live in a relatively small country with an awful lot of people is trying to hide where you fish. The reasons as to why we generally want to try and hide where we are fishing are many and varied, but top of the list I would put potential commercial pressure, the fear of a few anglers coming in and killing fish unnecessarily, some locations are very specific and can only accommodate a limited number of anglers, the desire for a bit of peace and quiet, honouring another angler’s trust in you, and so on. I really enjoy communicating about fishing as you might have guessed, and I am really interested in doing more filming related stuff for my YouTube channel - but there will always be restrictions and I can’t really see a way around it. I would suggest that if I am going to keep on doing what I perceive to be the right thing, you have to end up somewhat hamstrung because there is so much fishing we will never show for fear of “blowing the marks”. It ain’t like being ten miles offshore in a boat.
And when it goes wrong, and especially with social media these days, it goes spectacularly wrong! It would be much easier if we could all simply talk about exactly where we fish and where we might catch our best fish, but if you fish yourself then you will know this isn’t possible. I am going to give you an example here of how things can get out of hand, and whilst one of the anglers did end up apologising to me privately, I just don’t get the whole, very male it seems, “lash out without knowing the facts” sort of behaviour. If you know me personally you will know that I don’t compete with my fishing, I seriously don’t care who catches the biggest or most fish, and I genuinely love seeing other anglers catching. It’s fishing at the end of the day, and as much as I love it, it ain’t life or death.
Anyway, so back in September 2018 I got lucky and landed what at the time was my biggest bass. I was really happy of course, but it changed nothing about my fishing or me as a person or an angler. It was only a fish at the end of the day, and it didn’t suddenly make me a better angler or father or husband. I don’t spend my time banging on about big bass to my wife and girls, so when I told them that dad had landed his best ever bass it didn’t even really register with them. I did write an article for Sea Angler magazine about the experience though, and I obviously made damn sure not to mention anything about where I was fishing when I caught this particular bass. I always write and photograph my magazine articles and I deliberately didn’t include any location based photos with the words when I submitted the piece. The designer did in fact come back to me and ask if I could please upload some general estuary photography of anywhere that made sense from a bass fishing point of view, but I said sorry, I would rather not if that’s okay because I do know what UK saltwater anglers are like with locations. I am a UK angler myself of course.
So the article gets published in Sea Angler, and unknown to me the designer had obviously gone online with a photo stock library and bought the use of a generic Cornish estuary photograph to include with my feature. I get no say over which of my photos are used in a magazine feature but I understand why a stock photo was used to try and give some context to what were a load of photos submitted by me which basically showed very little other than angler plus fish, close ups of the fish, the fish being released, and some of the fishing tackle used. If we didn’t have to protect where we fish for any number of obvious reasons then my photography and indeed fumbling filming work would be oh so much easier - why didn’t I get into an easier career?! - but it’s the way it is and at the end of the day I am an obsessed angler above everything else.
And then the proverbial hit the good old social media fan! A few anglers took umbrage that an article in Sea Angler had dared to include a generic estuary photo which happened to be of an estuary they love to fish and in fact the specific estuary in the library photo was never named in the article anyway. So Henry Gilbey became Satan For The Day which of course has happened numerous times throughout my working life and I’m pretty used to it. There was absolutely no interest in the actual facts because that doesn’t seem to be the way on social media - hang on, you mean the Coronavirus isn’t real AND we’ve got full control of our waters again thanks to Brexit? - and instead it was a more typical case of lash out, be unpleasant, and in a roundabout way generate far more interest than there ever had been in the unnamed estuary. There’s a classic mistake that some anglers make, and that’s that fishing is such a small world. If you work in fishing you know all about this.
Now believe it or not I am not one of those people who then goes and lamps these people the next time he sees them. I might love violent music and I still think that Predator is the greatest film ever made (Get to the Chopper!), but I am not actually a violent person. I am also not one of those blokes who says right, next time I see so and so I’m going to have it out with them and when the time comes they don’t actually say a word. I have had to do it so many times before and I will have to do it plenty more times - if you are unpleasant to me and I end up meeting you in the real world and not from behind a keyboard, I will confront the issues face to face and try to get to the bottom of it in a polite and reasonable way. It’s always interesting how the bravest people online usually can’t even look you in the eyes in the real world. As I said earlier, I did actually get an apology from one of the lads, but how many people would then go back to their social media rantings and say sorry, what I did was not really fair? Obviously not because we are blokes, and when are blokes wrong? Don’t go asking my wife by the way.
Sorry, but my going off on a bit of a tangent did actually have a point, and that was the issues around trying to look after your fishing and the filming and putting photos on social media thing. If you fish where I caught this bass above then I would fully expect you to recognise where it is for example, but in most respects it’s a pretty generic bit of reef filmed in a wildly unexciting way for two reasons - I can’t show many other angles because I like a bit of peace and quiet and I feel that I must respect where I was fishing, but more so I was messing around with a new GoPro for the first time and I just happened to go and hook a nice bass when the camera was locked off on a tripod.
And then you’ve got a simple sort of fishing tackle review video above which I shot back in the winter. I don’t fish for bass where I shot this video, but being an estuary in the south west I would imagine that you could catch bass there when the time is right. I chose to film this video there because I don’t fish there and I’m therefore not trying to “protect the mark”, but what if some people do and I have unwittingly drawn attention to a place they like to fish? One thing I do know is that you’re never going to win at any of this, and as much as many of us do as regards trying to protect where we like to go fishing, do I have any more right to these marks than you? Of course not. The video below was shot where I do my co-guiding work in Ireland, and John and I took the decision that so few anglers ever end up in this part of the world that we’d just make something like this and not worry too much about the locations. I still find it amazing just how few anglers we ever see when we are out and about with clients, and I would suggest that as a species we tend to stick mostly to what we know. You all have a good weekend, I hope you do find a good excuse to stray off a well-trodden path, and my apologies that this turned out to be a much longer blog post than I intended……………...