Tracy&James | Thursday, 22 December 2016
Tracy and I are back in North Wales for the Christmas holiday catching up with family and friends and fitting in a bit of fishing and casting practice when we can. During the break I intend catching up with a friend of mine with whom I shared some spectacular drinking sessions with in our earlier years. We used to call these all day events Norris’s as in ‘are you up for a Norris this Saturday?’ The name came from Norris McWhirter who presented a children’s show about records – we suspected we drank so much in the course of the day that it must be some kind of world record (such records were never ratified though – to be fair after about 9:30 our recollection of what exactly we’d drunk always became a bit sketchy, often to the point where we couldn’t remember who’s round it was despite there only being two of us!)
Drinking used to start at 11am on the dot (although I do remember knocking on the door of one of our selected starting establishments though – it was 11:05 and our schedule said we should be halfway down our first pint at that point. The ‘schedule’ only lasted as far as pint 3 or 4). As we swapped from pub to pub we’d be joined by the lunchtime drinkers, the early afternoon ‘pissed off with shopping’ shoppers and then the ‘swift pint after work crowd’. Then we’d hit the dreaded lull time! The afternoon and after-work drinkers having dispersed and the evening ‘out pubbing and clubbing’ crowd yet to make an appearance. At this point my friend and I would often decamp to the local snooker hall (this had a bar of course) where we’d play some of the finest pool that had ever graced a green baize – or that’s my recollection of it anyway.
This lull time was part and parcel of the day, inevitable and unavoidable. I was reminded of this when fishing the Dee the other day (my mind tends to wander at these times). We’d picked up grayling steadily all morning and then it went completely dead for a good couple of hours. We continued to fish hard, kept mobile, changed tactics but nothing was doing. It was almost as if the grayling had sloped off to their equivalent of a pool hall en-masse. Then, at about 3ish, we starting catching again. So I guess a question is; was there anything we could have done differently (other than go to a pub) or is this fishing lull as unavoidable as a drinking one?
On our second trip to the river this week we seemed to catch it on an all-day lull, or maybe that’s best described as a hangover? A couple of tiddlers for Tracy and a blank for me, although I did lose a fish that would have shattered my grayling pb if landed – hopefully next time.
I hope you all have a great holiday wherever you are. Now who’s up for a Norris?
James.