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IS THERE A DENTIST IN THE HOUSE? There is only one thing more annoying than having juniors drop out of events, and that is not being notified that juniors are dropping out of events… Carting a tackle shop of gear to a windswept lake, setting it all up and then packing it all away again without a single drowned maggot is annoying. The annoyance is escalated by the fact that the Head coach KNEW that this junior wasn’t going to attend and had completely forgotten. I can still fe

Before we start the mixture of silliness, moaning, desperation, and occasional fishing, I want to pause to wish our very own tame Wookie the very best of luck with his Angling Trust Level 2 coaching assessment next weekend. Jerry has booked his flights to Godalming, which was the nearest venue to Dorset, the forgotten county. Other venues included the Outer Hebrides, Los Angeles, Guadalajara, and somewhere just outside of Oslo. Jerry will face many challenges like, incompeten

As I write this blog on Sunday morning, it has just started to rain. It is the light misty rain that feels like your face is being washed by the tears of an angel, or a dribble from a faulty sprinkler system on low pressure. For those too young to remember rain, it is a wet substance that falls naturally from the sky and did not just come from taps or bottles. Can you believe that we used to complain about the stuff??? Honestly, we used to say there was too much of it! I coll

On a normal day fishing with the JJAC family, anxiety is at a reasonable level because I want everything to go well. On an Open Day like the one at Lodden Lakes yesterday, the anxiety is off the scale! Sleeplessness and stress fatigue are out-weighed by a tidal wave of adrenaline, which is the only thing that gets you through in the end. Of course, not everyone feels the same as me and will take it all in their stride. Good for them I say, I don’t… Even Sgt Bracey was feeling

I think we all got a glimpse of life in hell fire this week and it was a relief when the weather app said ‘only’ 26 degrees for Saturday’s coaching session. Typical of myself to realise too late that, tucked at the back of the freezer was Mrs H’s migraine headache mask. The relief when I attached the ice pack to my face was immeasurable, and I remember congratulating myself for ‘completing summer’. Mrs H wasn’t as pleased as I was with myself because the mask made me look lik

It’s been a funny old week. Now the universe seems to have stamped even harder on my life’s accelerator, it only seems like a few days since we were at Whitemoor. In a way it is, but it feels like less days than it is… Global warming has seen fit to keep us on our toes as the weather changes from winter to spring, on to summer, back to spring, little of winter again and back to summer. All this with the occasional heat wave, windstorm, and ice age. Mrs H is now done with resp

Jurassic Juniors is nearly two months old now and, well, there are times when I have thought that things could be better. From a membership of thirty-seven, we are now struggling to get past twenty at the time of writing. It would be easy to get despondent and wonder if it was worth the long hours, days, and months of preparation. Then a day like today comes along and one starts to think that those that couldn’t or didn’t want to come to our coach session, really missed out.

All you gotta do is call… Before most of the junior events, especially matches, it’s always beneficial to have a little dabble at the chosen venue beforehand. That’s exactly what Sgt Bracey and I decided to, this time at a distant Orchard Lakes (funnily enough)… Car sharing was the order of the day to save us some liquid gold, be nice to the environment, and to deny some fat cat corporation some undeserved profits. Well, that was the plan anyway. The reality of the situation

It didn’t take long for the moaning to start. But not about what you’d think… Look, I knew that it would be ok and that all the fretting was for nothing. But, when you plough your heart and soul into something, you just want it to succeed. I’m fairly confident that we would have had only one participant if we had not have moved it closer… But all’s well that ends well, and we did have a very good session. I’m sure that Sgt Bracey was beginning to wonder what he had let himsel

Eh? What? I beg your pardon… The day had finally arrived. The first ever official JJAC event was upon us where, maybe not for the first time, we could wheel out all our shiny new things and start what I hope to be a new era for local junior coaching. The weather forecast which had been promising for the early part of the week had decided to take a huge download on the affairs of the day. Breezy with sunny spells had turned into ‘Let’s try and blow all the water up one end of

Unlike the Christmas match last year, the Senior/Junior Pairs Match which marked the official end of events with DDAS, didn’t really pull on the emotions too much. It was kind of nice that I was the last angler to be weighed in at a DDAS Juniors event and, do you know what? I flippin’ deserved it too… All the hours, all the stress, the conflict, disagreements, the joy, anguish and sleepless nights, all came to an end with a mediocre performance by a once good angler. I say th