A Passion For Angling - The Complete Series

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The year started with a grand gathering of friends in Martin Bowler's local pub to celebrate his birthday. Seeing him singing karaoke in a grass skirt should come with a government health warning. Despite that, we repeated the gathering in July...without the karaoke - instead the generous gathering raised money for Macmillan Nurses. Being a wildlife film-maker I’m constantly in search of new stories, and I was aware that not much has ever been shown on television of freshwater fish and their natural behaviour, underwater and truly wild. There has always been an enthusiastic audience for British wildlife so what better than to show them something they’d never seen. We’re beginning to get to grips with this new challenge and the results are fascinating, in fact I almost enjoy filming fish as much as catching them - but not quite ! Programmes seven and eight show lots of truly monstrous fish being landed, so we hope you enjoy the climax of our journey around Britain in search of “impossible” sized fish. I've heard it mentioned before that the BBC seem to be quite "anti-angling". Have they ever shown any other angling programmes?

A Passion for Angling DVD - River Reads

However, as you'll see by viewing the series 'Catching the Impossible', Martin, Bernard and friends did achieve an amazing number of goals and the story of how they did it is still out there on DVD for you to enjoy. We hope you do. Unfortunately there are no plans at the moment to release the product you require on DVD although the BBC are constantly reviewing their publishing list. Our Targets: Carp – 40lbs, Pike – 30lbs, Perch – 4lbs, Barbel – 15lbs, Roach – 3lbs (from a river!), Achieving a showing was probably the most ‘impossible’ catch of them all, despite Martin, Bernard and friends catching some truly remarkable specimens. For me, I guess the 32lb pike, the 44lb carp, the 5lb perch and above all the 3lb 5oz river roach stand out, but there were so many amazing catches it is difficult to believe it really happened.

The only sad aspect of all this success is the decline of so much of our available fishing. The series title ‘Catching the Impossible’ was simply a device as nothing is impossible … but it is now! Martin believes that attempting to make the series today would be madness and it took us more than four years when it was possible. Many of our rivers have declined so much that many of our targets are simply out of reach.

Passion For Angling For more information - Passion For Angling

I would like to say huge thank you for your films about fishing. You changed very much things in my life (in very positive meaning). Hope you are doing well. All this conservation work and wildlife film-making has reduced my fishing to virtually nil, but on one memorable visit to Sway Lakes, this magnificent 2lb 14oz roach showed up, along with one of 2lb 4oz and six others of around 1lb 12oz., all on a tiny waggler and single red maggot on a 20 hook – proper fishing. Maybe you have an idea, where i can buy one. I am from Czech republic, currently living in Germany. If you don't, never mind... then i have to wait.When we had finished editing the films last week, I had a memorable day of celebration with Chris Yates and Trevor Harrop (of roach project fame – see links). We fished in a peaceful little lake, caught lots of good roach to a pound and one or two good perch, and all this was interspersed by generous quantities of kelly kettle tea and big slices of Sue’s famous cake. What a great day. Chris Yates is an angler, photographer, broadcaster, tea connoisseur and author born on 19 April 1948. He is a former holder of the record for the heaviest-recorded British carp, a 51.5lb specimen captured from Redmire pool in 1980. [1] Yates is a former co-editor (with Jon Ward-Allen) of Waterlog magazine, [2] and is a regular contributor to The Idler. Thank you all for your encouragement and support along the way, a vital ingredient on the long journey. Our first days shooting was July 22nd 2004 and we finally made it onto terrestrial TV on June 13th 2010, almost six years from start to finish. And was it worth it? You bet. Hard work maybe, but how can you beat visiting so many lovely waters with Martin and Bernard and a galaxy of star anglers … and so many are friends too. And then there were all those "Impossible" fish – and with the declines in fish populations since our filming, they are now!