The good old days...

[northeast1]

I think by the time i get to your lots age my storys will be "i remember the time we could fish our waters"

Sad but true.....keep them going love to hear them lads

[sam harris]

Good Old Days.

My first rod was a one-piece "supposed to be" 12 ft bamboo cane. (it lost 3 inches off the tip during delivery). I bought it from the Cornish Bamboo Cane Company, Lanivet, Bodmin, Cornwall in 1949. It cost me the princley sum of 10/- (50p) with carriage charges of a further 10/- and, if I cared to send the packaging back I would have got my 10/- back! .... except it was going to cost me that to send it back - so I didn't bother. In those days I couldn't afford things like decent rod rings, so I managed to get hold of some fairly strong galvanised wire and some porcelain rings that electric cables used to be passed through. After spending a month shaping the wire around the porcelain and whipping them on to my brand new beachcaster, I went off to meet the lads on King Edwards Bay promenade. Everyone admired my handiwork. Anyway ... it was low tide and we decided to fish the flat rock on the south side at the end of the Oxfauld. Going down the steps from the promenade to the rocks, I slipped and bounced on my backside from step to step - landed in a pool of water at the bottom - and when I looked at my rod, it was just a piece of cane with a Scarbrough reel on!!! I had knocked off every damned ring I had spent a month whipping on.
In those days - before nylon - we used to use what was called 'cutty hunk line' - which looked line brown string. We used to get this from Freeths, a trawler supply shop (it's now long gone) on North Shields Fish Quay. This line would retain water and to put a lead out, we used to have to use a 10 oz sinker. The reels were all Scarbrough reels and, as Alan said earlier, if you caught your finger on those handles, you said more than "damn and blast". The problem was, on a cold winter's night, you didn't feel the pain for 10 minutes and when it hit you, you really knew about it. I bought my Scarbrough reel off one of the members of the club (Tynemouth). He was a bus mechanic and worked at the Norham Road Bus Depot and used to churn the reels out for the almighty sum of 10/-. He used to use the spindles from bicycle wheels which is what the reel turned on and the wood was generally teak or greenheart - or something along the lines - a hardwood. Once you got the hang of these reels, it was possible to put a good line out. I was Vice Chairman of an organisation called The National Shore Casting Association. Some of the older ones among us may remember Maynard Atkinson (Silver Grey of the Evening Chronicle) who was chairman of this association. We used to hold open casting events each year - in fact at one of them Les Moncrieff came along - 6 ft odd of pure power, and a lovely man with it. In the Scarbrough reel casting event which we held one year, winner was Ronnie Meikle (gone now) who was the harbour master of Cullercoats. He put a lead out 123 yards 9 inches. Second was Byron Barawitczka - also no longer with us - who was one of the North East top anglers. He cast 117 yards 11 inches. I managed third with 109 yards 8 inches. Remember, this was all with this string like line and 10 oz sinkers which we were using.
Next time, I'll tell you about the first time we ever saw and used nylon line - that was about 1952.
Tight lines
Sam

[Charlton]

Sam, you're not telling me you didn't have a rod made from the bamboo canes that carpets came wrapped in, and you could take away as many as you could carry, with home made wire rings taped on with electricians tape, you know the black sticky stuff. Still caught fish though. As for casting can remember the time the first of the so called big casters with their new fangled multipliers and fancy rods came up to show the NE anglers how to cast. They got beat by the scarborough lads, simply because they could cast far, but couldn't do it in a straight line.

[sless]

loved reading the last 2 posts,
im suprised you's know how to convert from blackboard and chalk to keyboard
hahaha

[Davyred]

loved reading the last 2 posts,
im suprised you's know how to convert from blackboard and chalk to keyboard
hahaha

Like Sless says though, it's great reading...keep them coming.


My first decent (?) rod was a Milbro thing, and I matched it with a Mitchell 600 - one of the worst multipliers ever made. Its retrieve rate was the lightning fast - 3:1. You were buggered if you were fishing over heavy ground, and trying to cast it without getting a birds nest was nigh on impossible.

I remember being over the moon when I got an Abu 7000 (red alloy side plates) for christmas, but the rod had to go cos it bent double with a 12oz coalie on it. Enter the Pateke Morton Tony Taylor SC6. Glass fibre, 13.5ft, Alloy butt and weighed a ton. I've still got it though, modified it by cutting a foot off the butt and it was a far better rod.

[Charlton]

my first decent rod, was designed by the afore mentioned Leslie Moncrief, a fibre glass spring heeled (tapered both ways) with a 602ap reel, wow could i wallop that out, well after getting used to a multiplier, but the retrieve after using a scraborugh, terrible.

[g-force]

I remember my first beachcaster (late 70's), an 11ft yellow Temples thing, bendy as owt, coupled with the trusty 602AP multiplier. The rod soon got upgraded to a Conoflex Cod5 then DC6, then the reel to an Abu 7000 & 9000. Also got a Temples Scarborough about the same time.

Then onto the Tony Taylors, one fibreglass & one semi-carbon, which along with the Scarborough are the only rods surviving from that era. I still use the Scarborough, but the TTs just seem too heavy & fat compared to todays rods.

[josum]

first rod was split cane about 10ft , progressed to milbro with an alvey sidecast. then a penn seaboy multi, moved on to the temple specials, this increased casting to about 80yards max but the fish were well within range.
you saw every rod from tonkin poles to apollo steel rods and the lines were something else, 60 or 70 lb on scarborough and 45 or 50 on a multi none of this thin modern stuff , the fishing was better although we still had poor winters occasionally.
john

[steve ifa]

I see a lot old faces on here but one person i bet a lot of you will remeber is lotty jamerson i think that was her name i fished with her when i was junior in tynemouth club always the bottom of the stair she used to get her fair share of fish.

[Topfly]

Nice one lads, i feel relaxed on here now. Still got a pateke morton (if anybody wants one) and a scarborough. My first decent rod was made by my old man from greenheart , split down the grain,tapered, and then scraped with broken glass before finishing with sandpaper. I remember cutting my fingers and getting linseed oil in the cuts... ouch.
I remember him whipping fine hemp to the joins and melting shellac to bed the brass ferrules on. the butt had a fine cord up to the winch fitting. he made me spend hours and hours with a soaking linseed rag, rubbing the dam stuff in. That was in '58 , and i thought all this work to catch a fish . ( in later years i realised it was to catch me) He used to fish some qeer times but there was usually a couple of good cod on the stone slab in the larder. I say decent rod because coupled with a lightweight mahogany reel, it was cutting edge, and i had some great fishing with it.

My first glass rod was a milbro marine with an Intrepid fixed spool reel, then a gentle progression to a hardy tourney and abu reels. I'm all mags and carbon now , but it doese'nt catch any more fish.. It's a good job my old man taught me how to do that...

keep them coming

[sam harris]

Good Old Days

Many years ago I used to have a Bedford Dormobile Mini Bus. The damned thing was falling apart with holes in the floor etc. front wings flapping like seagull's wings, but this was in the days before M.O.T's. Now a few of us had arranged to go fishing on the Sunday, but on the Saturday the whole exhaust dropped off ! So, I went out and bought one thinking that, if we fished somewhere like Blyth Quayside, the lads would help me fit the new one. 7.00 am Sunday morning, I collected two or three of the lads in the Newcastle area, where I lived at the time, and that left me only one to pick up - a young lad who lived in Whitley Bay. You can imagine what this thing sounded like with no exhaust on - I must have woken everyone up between Newcastle and Blyth.
On the Sunday morning we picked the young lad up - he sat himself down next to me on the passenger seat - off we went heading for Blyth along Whitley Bay sea front. Now, a couple of days before, I had been given an old car radio. This thing weighed a ton and was about 18 inches square. Where the hell you were supposed to fit that in a car I don't know. What I did was to put it on the floor of the vehicle at the back with a piece of wire hanging out the back door as an aerial and the two power leads fastened directly onto the ignition of the vehicle. As I said, driving along the sea front, we just got onto the dual carriageway by the Briardene doing about
40 mph or so, when suddenly I smelled burning. All the lads in the back started yelling that we were on fire. Wondering what the hell they were talking about I turned round to see flames shooting along the two wires towards the radio and in the process, setting fire to the carpet. The next thing I knew, the young lad sitting next to me, slid the door open and jumped out ... but he forgot to let go of the door and was being dragged along. Now he had studded waders on and was sliding ... with sparks flying in all directions from these studs, screaming in gibberish "Please Stop" !!! Meanwhile the guys in the back were doing everything trying to put the fire in the carpet out. One of them even pee'd on it and all that did was to poison us with the smell. It wasn't funny at the time, but afterwards we couldn't stop laughing.
Oh, by the way, I forgot the name of the young lad was "Chris Stringer" ... (do you remember that Chris?).
HAVE YOU GOT TIME FOR ANOTHER ONE LADS ...
When I lived at Tynemouth, 5 or 6 of us used to fish King Edwards Bay on a very regular basis and one night we had arranged to meet down on the beach. Three of us got there first and stood around for a few minutes and just decided to carry on. Now it was one of those nights that there was a very thick fog, no wind and not a sound to be heard. When we got to the water's edge - which was low water by the way - we realised that there was a big sand bank in front of us with a gulley filled with water only about a foot deep. So we decided to cross out on to it. We tackled up, cast out and just stood there lost in our thoughts, not making a sound. About 20 minutes or so later, we heard the rest of the lads coming down the beach towards us. After a while we realised that they had stopped on the beach and hadn't noticed the fact that there was a sand bank in front of them. The next thing we knew, leads were dropping on the sand beside us. For some reason the three of us all thought the same thing at the same time and, without saying a word, we picked up the lines that had been cast next to us and gave them some almighty tugs. This resulted in yells from the beach "What a fish" and so on. What we then did was to keep tugging at the lines for two or three minutes and the three of us got close together and very slowly allowed them on the beach to wind us in. As we loomed up out of the fog, there were screams of terror - rods and reels were thrown away and the last we saw of them, they were disappearing up the beach at a hell of a rate of knots. When they discovered it was us, they threatened to beat us to jellies, but after a while they did see the funny side of it.
Even now, when I think about it, I still laugh.

[Davyred]

Great stuff Sam.

I was fishing a mark called the cross at Sunderlnad one freezing January night (the beach in front of the coast guard hut) at about 2am. I was standing in the surf, holding my rod and just kept glancing back to my box further up the beach. Anyway, after an hour, I turned round to see this bloke looking in my box, so I legs it out of the water towards him, shouting as I ran.
The poor blokes face was a picture when he seen me running out of the sea towards him

He said that I must have been daft to be fishing in those temperatures, so I asked him what he was doing walking about at 2am in these temperatures.

He was walking his dog.

[snatcher]

Recall catching cod during daylight of Whitley prom,by the clock,about that period.I know it made the papers-not me,the fact that cod were being taken during daylight off the beach.

Also about that time was fishing whitley pipe just past the bend,had been there an hour with no takes.Down comes one of the nixons,has 4 casts,takes out 3 good cod and buggers off again.I ask you !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! LOL

[tonynufc]

Many years ago I used to have a Bedford Dormobile Mini Bus. The damned thing was falling apart with holes in the floor etc. front wings flapping like seagull's wings, but this was in the days before M.O.T's. Now a few of us had arranged to go fishing on the Sunday, but on the Saturday the whole exhaust dropped off ! So, I went out and bought one thinking that, if we fished somewhere like Blyth Quayside, the lads would help me fit the new one. 7.00 am Sunday morning, I collected two or three of the lads in the Newcastle area, where I lived at the time, and that left me only one to pick up - a young lad who lived in Whitley Bay. You can imagine what this thing sounded like with no exhaust on - I must have woken everyone up between Newcastle and Blyth.
On the Sunday morning we picked the young lad up - he sat himself down next to me on the passenger seat - off we went heading for Blyth along Whitley Bay sea front. Now, a couple of days before, I had been given an old car radio. This thing weighed a ton and was about 18 inches square. Where the hell you were supposed to fit that in a car I don't know. What I did was to put it on the floor of the vehicle at the back with a piece of wire hanging out the back door as an aerial and the two power leads fastened directly onto the ignition of the vehicle. As I said, driving along the sea front, we just got onto the dual carriageway by the Briardene doing about
40 mph or so, when suddenly I smelled burning. All the lads in the back started yelling that we were on fire. Wondering what the hell they were talking about I turned round to see flames shooting along the two wires towards the radio and in the process, setting fire to the carpet. The next thing I knew, the young lad sitting next to me, slid the door open and jumped out ... but he forgot to let go of the door and was being dragged along. Now he had studded waders on and was sliding ... with sparks flying in all directions from these studs, screaming in gibberish "Please Stop" !!! Meanwhile the guys in the back were doing everything trying to put the fire in the carpet out. One of them even pee'd on it and all that did was to poison us with the smell. It wasn't funny at the time, but afterwards we couldn't stop laughing.
Oh, by the way, I forgot the name of the young lad was "Chris Stringer" ... (do you remember that Chris?).
HAVE YOU GOT TIME FOR ANOTHER ONE LADS ...
When I lived at Tynemouth, 5 or 6 of us used to fish King Edwards Bay on a very regular basis and one night we had arranged to meet down on the beach. Three of us got there first and stood around for a few minutes and just decided to carry on. Now it was one of those nights that there was a very thick fog, no wind and not a sound to be heard. When we got to the water's edge - which was low water by the way - we realised that there was a big sand bank in front of us with a gulley filled with water only about a foot deep. So we decided to cross out on to it. We tackled up, cast out and just stood there lost in our thoughts, not making a sound. About 20 minutes or so later, we heard the rest of the lads coming down the beach towards us. After a while we realised that they had stopped on the beach and hadn't noticed the fact that there was a sand bank in front of them. The next thing we knew, leads were dropping on the sand beside us. For some reason the three of us all thought the same thing at the same time and, without saying a word, we picked up the lines that had been cast next to us and gave them some almighty tugs. This resulted in yells from the beach "What a fish" and so on. What we then did was to keep tugging at the lines for two or three minutes and the three of us got close together and very slowly allowed them on the beach to wind us in. As we loomed up out of the fog, there were screams of terror - rods and reels were thrown away and the last we saw of them, they were disappearing up the beach at a hell of a rate of knots. When they discovered it was us, they threatened to beat us to jellies, but after a while they did see the funny side of it.
Even now, when I think about it, I still laugh.

they've got to be two of the funniest storys ive ever read, keep em coming

[josum]

remember lottie well and her husband jimmy, just lived round the corner from her. lottie would fish even if jimmy wouldnt but he would fetch the flask of tea down for her.i think she must have spent more time helping juniors and telling jokes than fishing but she often had something to weigh in.
john