november-2026-free-line-part-2 - Flipbook - Page 113
FREE LINE / FIELD JOURNAL
KEVIN BEAUMONT
FIELD NOTES
Like so many other anglers, I started my angling journey on the match
scene as a young whippersnapper, sitting for hours upon end on local
club waters, commercials and various stretches of the River Tees. I would
sit all week at school and think of nothing else but getting on the bank
of a weekend.
My uncle would pick me up at 0500hrs on the dot. I remember my teeth
chattering, not from the cold, but from pure excitement like I used to get
on Christmas morning. I remember the smell of the wild garlic beside
the rivers and the pungent smell of pig muck, which even today strangely
enough makes me feel kind of happy and brings back so many good
memories of stretches of rivers alongside pig farms.
At the age of nine, I would happily sit there catching small rudd, roach,
perch and the odd skimmer, checking the keepnet every 20 minutes to
see if my catch had escaped and admiring my catch.
Looking back now, I was probably a pain in the arse to my uncle, asking
so many questions and getting him to unhook deeply hooked perch. As
the years went on, I became more confident in the whole process from
tying my own knots, using the disgorger and rig presentation in different
situations, and my fishing stepped up another level, targeting specimen
chub on the rivers. At first the wait and time between bites would drive
me nuts, but when you re 11 years old and hooked up to a 6lb chub in
some slack water over the back of rapids, wow, does that get the blood
pumping. One session we had 14 chub on homemade cheese paste and
eight were over 5lb in weight, certainly making the new style of angling
with long waits worthwhile.
In June 1999, we moved outside of the town I had grown up in to a little
village called Middleton St George. The village contained three reservoirs,
which were run by the local parish council. The lakes were once stocked
by an angling club run by a local engineering business in the late 70s,
mainly tench, bream and carp around 2lb in size.
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