One Last Cast: Rob Maylin

ONE LAST CAST

THE DIARY OF A CARPFISHER

BY

ROB MAYLIN

For Flo & Max

Introduction

Haulin’ forty years ago!

When are you going to write another book, Rob?

I’ve lost count of the number of times I’ve been asked that question, especially at the Carp Society Conference, Five Lakes, or the Brentwood show where I normally have a stand selling books. Of course in 2007, I reprinted Tiger Bay, Fox Pool and Bazil’s Bush, as they had all been out of print for some years, but literally thousands of people have asked me about doing a follow-up to Bazil’s Bush, and I’ve got to be honest with you, the only reason I haven’t done it is that I just haven’t had time. You see Tiger Bay and Fox Pool were both handwritten during dinner breaks, and very often during slack periods, while I worked as a draughtsman, and at home. I would come home from work in the evening, have my tea, and then lock myself away in the kitchen and begin writing. I was so passionate about those books but I could never have imagined the effect that they would have on the carp world.

I wrote them just for my own personal satisfaction; they were a bit of a laugh really. Those of you who have read them will know that there’s quite a lot of humour in them; they did end up with quite a cult following, and the feedback that I have had from people over the years has been quite phenomenal. I’ve had people calling me or writing to me with stories that would break your heart; people telling me that I’ve saved their lives when they were on the verge of suicide, or one guy, serving a long prison sentence, who said it helped him through that time. Also, it astounded me the other month, when Chilly and his wife Lyn were round, and he was telling me how much Tiger Bay meant to him. Apparently, as a para, he had taken Tiger Bay on over a hundred missions; it was his bible, and he read it over and over again. He said it was the only thing that kept him sane.

He told me one extraordinary tale; he was out on one of these missions somewhere, very close to enemy lines, when he had picked up his toothbrush, towel, soap and his copy of Tiger Bay to go off and do his ablutions, and then take a shower. While sitting in the toilet block, a bomb went off only about forty metres away, actually killing over twenty of his good friends, and completely demolishing the toilet block on top of him. Some hours later when they managed to dig him out, barely alive, the first thing he said to his rescuer was, Find my copy of Tiger Bay, or I’ll hunt you down and kill you. Sure enough they found it, and off to hospital he went with his copy by the side of him on his stretcher. However extraordinary it sounds, this is typical of the effect that these books had on people.

Bazil’s Bush came along a little while later. Most of this was handwritten, but some of it was done on tape on the bank while I was actually fishing. It was finished, all but one chapter, by about 1991, roughly around the time when I brought out Big Carp magazine. The final chapter was to consist of fishing for, and the capture of, Bazil, and the book couldn’t come out until I’d caught it, which took a couple of seasons. Eventually I finished off with a handwritten last chapter after I caught Bazil in September 1993, and the book was out by Christmas.

As I mentioned, time is the one thing that I just don’t seem to have these days, not since I started Big Carp magazine anyway. The magazine eats time, and because I’ve kept it very close to me, it has become a very passionate and fulfilling part of my life. I haven’t employed people, like some of the other publishing companies have done, to do many of the tasks involved in putting a magazine together. Obviously I’ve got a printer; I don’t print the magazine myself, and I’ve also got designers and typesetters who design adverts and put the pages together – I don’t do all of that. I also have a proofreader who proofreads the magazine, because my English isn’t that great, and his is. He’s proofreading this book too by the way, so if there are any mistakes in it, blame Phil, not me!

The point I’m trying to make is that I do virtually everything that you see on the pages of the magazine. For one week of the month I commission and write articles for the magazine, which involves going to visit well-known anglers with a tape recorder to listen to their tales of a season’s (or sometimes a lifetime’s) fishing. Sometimes I’m there for a few hours, sometimes I’m there all day, and sometimes it involves driving long distances, as not everybody I interview lives close to me by any means. I also write a diary piece for the magazine most months, and I have other people who write regularly for the magazine, who all have to be contacted to find out what they’re writing about, and whether it’s suitable for that particular edition. I have technical writers, and I have writers who are writing diary pieces, so one week of the month I’m making sure we have enough of the right material to fill all the editorial pages in the magazine.

For another week of the month, I sell advertising. This involves ringing round a lot of companies and shops, and many of these people I have become good friends with. I’ve had the magazine now since 1991, so that’s eighteen years of Big Carp. Many of the advertisers have advertised in it since day one, and I’m indebted to them for that. They are the reason I’ve been able to keep the magazine all these years, and produce a magazine, which, to be honest, is not for every type of carp angler. It’s certainly not for the total beginner; there are no articles in there about how to catch from day one, as most of the guys who write in there are seasoned carp anglers. Some of the best carp anglers in the country, if not the world, write in the magazine, and just about everybody who’s anybody has written in Big Carp at some time or other. Some of them have written many, many articles, and lots of them have written their whole life stories in Big Carp. So it’s not only ringing round these days; it’s emailing and faxing back and forth too. Some people require many, many calls before we come to an agreement on advertising and anything else we can do for them as regards fieldtesting or reviews and editorial support – something I think is very important, and which we offer every advertiser, so that’s another week of the month gone.

The third week is the actual design of the magazine, where I sit down with our designers, and we plan the magazine out. We position photographs, and decide upon the size of those photos and captions for the pictures in some cases. The layout and planning of the magazine is a very important part of making sure that the magazine has a rounded feel to it. It’s not all advertising; we only have 30% advertising in the magazine, and 70% of it is editorial. I know as a carp angler that anglers don’t want to sit down and read pages and pages of adverts. On the other hand, the advertising is important to keep the magazine going, so you have to have the right balance.

The fourth week of the month is paperwork; letters, invoicing, accounts etc – the procedures that anybody who runs their own business has to take care of, so as you can see, my weeks are pretty much taken up. Add in to that equation the fact that I want to go fishing as much as possible, so any time that I finish early, the rods are in the back of the car, and I’m off. Luckily these days I have techniques and waters available to me that offer me the luxury of being able to catch fish in just a few hours, otherwise I’d be up a gum tree to be honest, as gone are the days where I could sit there for weeks on end waiting for a bite. I certainly haven’t got that sort of time available to me any more, so I want to be fishing as much as possible, and as you can see, it doesn’t leave any time for writing a book. I like to write longhand on paper, and it was the same when I was a designer; I much preferred the time when I was drawing on a drawing board with a pencil to the time that I spent drawing the same things on a computer, and even to this day, I would rather write a letter with a pen than type it out on a keyboard. So when I decided that I really needed to start another book, and more importantly finish another book, I had some decisions to make, because I certainly haven’t got the time to sit down and write longhand.

When I’m writing, I need to be in that zone, in that frame of mind, and my time must be exclusive to the book. When I was a draughtsman, my head was filled twenty-four hours a day with the book; what I was writing, and the stories I wanted to tell. All the time I was at work it was running through my head, and when I was at home I would lock myself away in the kitchen and just write. Even when I was lying in bed sometimes I’d been thinking about it, remembering little things, and I’d have to get up in the middle of the night to make notes so I didn’t forget in the morning. These days I haven’t got a clear head for six months of the year, and I haven’t got time to just put everything else to one side. I’ve got a two-year-old son, and I’ve got a wife of five years, who both want to do things with me at the weekends, and I want to be with them too. I’ve got a business to run, and a magazine to get out every month, so I can’t just put that on the backburner and let it bubble away on its own.

I’ve done that sort of thing with the magazine in the past to its detriment. I’ve got to be honest; Big Carp magazine has had its ups and downs over the years without a doubt. It was great when it first came out; I stopped being a designer, I worked from home, and I put everything into the magazine. But I suddenly realised I had a lot more time on my hands, so my fishing time grew and grew until eventually I was a full-time angler rather than a full-time publisher, which is what I should have been, with a bit of part-time angling thrown in. But when you suddenly find that you have all this time, and more importantly you have the money available to be able to support a family, pay the mortgage, and go fishing all the time, then if you’re as passionate about fishing as I am, that’s what you do – you go fishing. I remember from 1981 to about 1983, when I was writing Tiger Bay, I was only fishing short sessions after work, and rarely, on the odd day at the weekend, I was fishing Arlesey Lake, which had a night fishing ban on it, so you had to be off there by 10pm. I was finishing work about 4.30pm, and with the gear already in the car, going down to Arlesey, packing up at 10pm, having a couple of pints in the pub, and then getting home by 11.30. Apart from that I also managed an odd day’s fishing at the weekend. I got married for the first time in 1983, and this was the sort of fishing time I was doing; two or three evenings in the week with an odd day at the weekend.

After I had been married to my first wife for about six months, she came to me one day in the bedroom and told me to sit down, as she’d obviously got something serious to say to me. She said that she didn’t like me going fishing, and that I had to make a choice; it was either her or the fishing. It took me about ten seconds to make my mind up, and although it wasn’t what I wanted, I said to her that she’d better get her stuff together and be on her way, because no way was I going to give up the little bit of fishing that I was doing. Actually, she never left; we stayed married for eleven years, and my fishing time just increased.

Later in 1983, I joined Savay, which was run on a rota system; one week on, one week off, and I began to fish alternate weekends. I did this for the first couple of years of my time there, fishing one weekend in two and spending the other weekend at home with the family. When I got a ticket for the North Harrow Waltonians, I carried on doing my couple of evening sessions down there, but things were to change when I left Savay in 1986 and went on to Fox Pool, because there was no rota system on there. I wanted to fish every weekend rather than every other weekend, along with all the other guys I was fishing with – the Famous Five. Steve Allcott, Phil Harper, Ian Guy, Dave Wibley and I all left Savay at the same time, and decided to go down to Fox Pool. As you know, we went on from there to fish Johnsons Railway Lake, the Snake Pit, Harefield, Pit Three – the list goes on, and it all involved fishing every weekend, so very little time was spent with the family, as you can imagine.

As a draughtsman I was coming home late at night and leaving early in the morning, which meant that I wasn’t seeing my children during the day on weekdays. They were in bed by the time I came home, and I was gone for work before they got up, and Friday night I was off down the motorway to go fishing. Selfish I now know, but it was my driving force, and the thing that kept me going; the thing that I wanted more than anything else in life at that time.

When I started the magazine in 1991, I soon found that I had a lot more time on my hands. It was at this point that I was finishing my fishing at Harefield, and contemplating the three lakes on the Yateley Complex – the Pad Lake, North Lake and Car Park Lake. When I started on Yateley, I soon found that even more time was needed, and when I began fishing for Bazil on the North Lake, I was fishing three or four days a week. By the time I got onto the Pad Lake, I was at home for only one or two days a week, and once I started fishing the Car Park Lake, some of my sessions were a week, two weeks, or even longer, as I had the time, and was able to do it.

What I didn’t realise was that I wasn’t putting enough time into the magazine. It just couldn’t carry on as it was, without proper input from me, and it was during this period that I felt it went downhill in many ways. Fortunately I had some good writers over this period of time, seeing me through my divorce years in the early 90’s. Terry Hearn, Nigel Sharp, Dave Mallin, Wayne Dunn and others who were fishing at Yateley during this era did keep some good stuff going into the magazine, but of course, I wasn’t at home to do the advertising or to oversee the layout and design. I certainly wasn’t going round the country with a tape recorder doing the sort of pieces that are