So long and thanks for all the fish.

Usually deserted especially compared to its glory days, yet occasionally still a destination for drips and drabs of an odd mix of tourists for whom it was never really intended or promoted to. Amongst them the nostalgia tripping old age pensioners, drawn here perhaps having a last look at theironce honey-moon destination, re-kindling the feeling of romance or at least, searching for a little last warmth from itsdying embers. Or delving their memories further back into the archives of their creeping oblivion, to revisit that bright andhappy place of their childhoods.

Here in the unaccustomed clear air, escaping from the shadows of the factories and mills, the whole town seeminglyin those days, used to be transported in on busses, the Charabancs, for a week’s holiday as the mill machines and weaving looms, stilled and finally fell silent for a brief period to allow them to escape en-masse.

Lapping in they would arrive in waves, one week from Rochdale or Bolton, the next from Manchester, then Burnley, Glasgow came in like a high tide for a whole fortnight of August. Throughout the spring and summer each week a new town or city would turn up. Entire streets and next door neighbor’s all holidaying together, home from home, the timing though not chosen with free will, but dictated with precision and efficiency, by the owners of those weaving looms, the foundries and the ship yards. For those children of the industrial revolution, the bosses who owned their parents lives, granted them a week of rest, before dragging them back into another year of grime and grind.  

Here at last Dad belonged to the kids for a week, and they got to taste a new side to him far from exhaustion and beaten down by the looming shadows of the sooty factory wall or the ominous shadow of the pit head wheels. Now under the gaze of a friendly Iron tower away from the cold cobbled streets, with crowds of other families crammed onto the sandybeaches between the three piers in their hundreds of thousands. And there in front of you all day was dad, bare footed, trousers and shirt sleeves rolled up and best braces dangling down, he was your mate now for a week and full of adventure. There would be deck chairs, buckets and spades, sand castles and paddling in icy waves. There might be ice cream and jam butties, and a special treat of battered fish andchips one day of that week; a luxury to be savored and remembered all the coming year, and to become a life time of memory, a place and feeling that could never quite be reached. This was what Blackpool was built for, to accommodate the mass movement of the working classes of another era.

By the time I came back to Blackpool it was the fuzzy shadows of this era that remained, nothing had moved it onand as a place it was irrelevant. Everything from the knackered Donkeys offering trudges along the beach, the rickety roller coasters in ghost town fun fair, the ridiculously slow trams trundling up the promenade barely above walking pace. And those decaying piers shortening yearly by degrees,as the Victorian ironwork finally eroded with time, neglect, and then picked and pecked apart by the dark wings of those fierce winter storms.

The added layer of shmaltz, the1960’s makeover in a effort to liven up the place before the Brits discovered an escape route to Costa Brava and Benidorm, had aged badly both in taste and integrity, and become faded and grimy. There was on the surface little to recommend the place or be proud of. 

I grew up just down the coast and the place was an embarrassment for many locals, as teenagers we would do anylife choice available to leave. There was little to convince you to stay and so much to propel you away.

When I returned and briefly based myself there. I would travel away to photograph landscapes , or go to Manchester or London and do street photography which was much cooler. At the sniff of an overseas trip,  my days were dictated bycatching the best light of the day, seeing things like through a child’s eyes first encounter, and photographing everything and anything. And then back in Blackpool I would put my blinkers back on, braced to shuffle down streets where icy winds and driving rain came straight in your face from the roaring Irish sea and cut through every layer. Be embarrassed by my surroundings. And I would hibernate into my darkroom developing pictures from much cooler interesting places. Blackpool was now a weekend haunt of rowdy hen parties, those nostalgic pensioners and becoming the growing Gay capital of the north, during the weekdays it was mostly just functioning on bare bones and if you existed there, it was an uninspiring subject to document or capture.

Why am I telling you this?

When I was there, unbeknownst to blinkered me, someoneelse was seeing Blackpool with a different eye, a National Geographic Magazine special, a photographic essay, came out featuring the town.

American Photographers had come over and photographed it in its glory and made it look magnificent and unique, and had recognized a narrative of the place that was enthralling. It wasn’t a lie they were telling, it all existed exactly how they said, I’d just failed to notice that what was this world around me was not at all mundane. It was just too familiar for me to see it or realise that it may appeal and be of interest to othersgiven a voice and perspective. Sadly it had needed seeing through another’s eyes to notice it existed.

When I joined the sexy loops community it opened up strange new worlds, I really enjoyed the front page and the weekly updated tales of living and fishing from strange far off places.While then reading on the Board about people casually casting beyond the 120 feet with a five weight like it was a regular daily occurrence. That stripe of line on the tape measure was a mythical and strange, far off place that I would never likely visit, or pass through in this lifetime.

On the Daily Cast I was reading of life and fishing with Reindeer’s and the onset of savage winters. Life in Japan and an insight being there as a fishermen and fly tyer. Living and fishing in a tug , in a lake in the middle of a steamy jungle. Of using techniques for big fish in big rivers from Norway to fishing in the southern states of the USA.

And of course Carol Northcuts weekly snap shots of life somewhere near Yellowstone with the cabins and nativeforests, kayaking up rivers with evocative names like Southfork and the Devils Elbow on fishing adventures. Between fishing and teaching casting, she’d be knocking together the decking and the shingles and being a mountain woman. I just loved my weekly view into life and living in what sounded like pioneer country set in a photogenic Ansel Adams landscape. Every week I looked forward to visit Carol and experience that life. And while reading her words each week I was there with my imagination engaged fully.

When you exist in the middle of England, and your in a little fishing club with a short stretch of skinny stream that yourtrying to coax small wild Trout out of, and deal with the petty restraints of club politics. All this seems terribly uninspiring and mundane by comparison.

James and Tracy cast  together, compete together and drive the British Fly Casting Club ‘bus’ around the country, so we were covered with a UK perspective, and as I got to know them became part of that adventure… though not the white beached, paradise island, tropical sunshine, bone fish episodes. But the windswept cricket pitch casting comps, the cold drenching’s and the inebriated evenings camping at the Game fairs, I took part in the suffering and then read about a week later as an FP.

But then I thought, like with the jolt from the national Geographic, maybe for other people around the world, this life, the silly politics and cartoon characters, of a small fishing club in a little overgrown stream in the middle of old England.An area not known for Trout streams and dry flies, maybe of some interest, maybe I could find a narrative and give a voice to the place and some character to the individuals who inhabit the tale.

There is at the heart of it a relevance, an environmental message and battle with bureaucracy and capital, that is universal and increasingly urgent. Its central character, the Brown Trout, is for better or for worse, thanks to those Victorians, mostly a global character now, its plight on this shrinking and warming planet is universal, it is our litmus for the state of our freshwaters and environment.

My fascination with fly fishing started not with catching the fish but with beautiful loops, and a wish to create and control them at will. I recognized distance casting disciplines would focus on mastering those infamous fundamentals and the trickle-down effect would hopefully achieve this.

I envisaged exploring the fascination with creating perfect loops, as well as returning a stocked water back to wild, polluted waters back to clean, as tandem searches in these posts.

But then considering the technical levels of knowledge that casting discussions hastily reach here in the discussions, and the scientific jargon that quickly loses me ( and I suspect many) from any discussion or understanding on casting. This was a no-go zone.

For an average caster in the discussions, you are soon lost and I felt frankly embarrassed to bring the subject up. Often it is a place where you feel you need a Phd in Physics or sports psychology to contribute or comprehend. Thankfully a few knowledgeable contributors recognize this and step in often with some plain speaking and guidance,( thank you often John Waters, James, and Lasse amongst others) to make it more accessible for us duffers.

Please don’t forget, people search this place out for knowledge and understanding when they are hoping to become more interested in casting, its so easy to inadvertently freeze them out and make this world more elitist and exclusive, and just knock the fun and joy out of it!.

And so with my postings, I stuck to comfortable ground that I felt I could explore. And I feel it’s now done.

Thankfully Paul gave me the opportunity, what I didn’t envisage is my start would coincide with the last of Carol’s weekly posts, and my weekly update from that magical place… And I miss them, so much. I would much rather read what she’s up to with the Bears, than dealing with the fallout from my encounters with a grizzly; bellicose; claret guzzling; jobs worth of a chairman, via a bomb drop, deeply insulting,late evening email about installing cattle drinkers. And I suspect many others would too. 

You’ve suffered just over a year of my rambling and excessive alliteration as I try and squeeze some interest into a place that the Tudors considered the middle of nowhere and a forsaken realm, and they were probably right!

A little stream that, when Blackpool was in its heyday, was hammered by the toxins from that Victorian industry. Then silted up, straightened and robbed by the ravages of shortsighted agricultural policy, followed by a ridiculous unsustainable stocking of farmed fish.

The Brook has come through all this, to be the little wild Trout stream, that it may or may not  have always been, and our little endeavor’s, setbacks and battles will repeat and continue, but it’s time to move the focus elsewhere and hear from someone new. 

My spare moments away from work and life have largely gone into writing these at the expense of being on the local field and practicing to get over that 120’ line with a 5 wt rod, it may seem a modest ambition to many on here, but it will be a hell of an achievement to me…I got to within four inches in the past and now feel I’m 40 feet away. And I’m sure those dog walkers are missing the lunatic on the grass and having something else to bitch about.

By the time this gets posted I’ll have seen Tracy and James at the last BFCC event of the year. I will know who won and who came close. But there’s no spoiler alert here you’ll have to wait until Wednesday. I’ll have picked up a rod and stiffly cast it, and felt aches and unfamiliar strains and thought, “Good grief your worse than ever, you really need to get back to practicing”.

Out of the window between the curtains the rains that have drenched us over the past few weeks seem to have ceased at last, there’s a blue skies and traffic moving past my window.. Traffic moving means the water has resided and the road out of the village is open again. The Brook has been up to the top of its banks, I cant get in and deal with the gravels. Its now starting to get feeling very close to breeding season and there’s much to do within those banks. But, this flush through of big water will have brought many benefits and done some of the work for me.

Someone else now needs to give us their perspective of their corner of the globe, life and fishing or casting adventure… What about one of Paul’s students and their journey from a free lesson with a newly bought rod, and the progress to the world championships? That would be a hell of a tale.

For those who have started to read my posts and managed to complete them; thank you. And thank you for Paul for giving me the opportunity, for dealing with my very last minute,panicked deadline drops. If its wanted I will up-date occasionally anything news worth from the Brook, but for now your all off the hook!

All the best to all. Wishing you tight loops and dry waders.

Chris Avery