BLOG: Foreign exchange

I have had very little experience fishing overseas but the exposure I have had leads me to say we are one blessed country!

This was reiterated to me very recently when my in-laws came home from an extended stay in England. They know intimately I am a fishing manic and bought me some souvenirs. In the surprise packet were some nice hard body lures, some weird looking soft plastics with more trebles sticking out of it than a porcupine has spikes and some local fishing magazines.

Obviously I was chuffed with the additions to the lure collection, but it was the newsstand publications I was most interested in. It was as if I was behind enemy lines peering in on what the competitors were doing. This was first hand evidence of others similar to me plying their hobby as fishing commentators.

Based on those four magazines I can make some very generalist comments. The first is my belief that we live in God’s very own hand selected fishing hole and it has once again been vindicated. It seemed the pages of these English mags consist mainly of sole, carp, pike, plaice, flounder and dabs. Not exactly the sportsfish to dominate the pages of an expensive 4 pound mag.

Production values in these magazines were fairly poor also. The images were drab and lacked punch and at times seemed a little off topic. The same fish was used multiple times in the one article but in different poses and blonde stingrays were featured adorningly; beside some very happy anglers! The saving grace was the cod. But how many brown cod or pollack can you look at before you become uninterested?

The other glaring anomaly in this magazine was the language. I know Aussies have resisted the temptation over the past few years to integrate colloquial US fishing jargon into our sport but some of the things the Yankees call their stuff is "darn right" cool. I don’t know anyone who wouldn’t like to "pitch 3 inch chompers into dense weeds" or "slow roll some lipless crankbaits". In fact East Coast fishos use lipless crankbaits regularly. We just call them vibes.

It is amazing though to interpret what our European cousins are feeling and saying when they relate to their sport. Here is a snippet of an article from on old-timer regaling his experiences of a time past. “Dabs and flounders also like this area, particularly the dabs. But it was plaice that we were particularly interested in. Fresh blow would be dug in front of Bigger Bank car park at low water, and then it was over to Earnse and up into the Duddon, fishing it on three-boomed paternosters until it ran out, then either home, pirking for cod, or a crack at the tope”. Hmmm! Somehow I lacked the excitement the writer was feeling as he wrote this.

I’m not one to gloat but give me the sweet old Aussie outdoors any time of day.