Don’t Get Him Started #9

When I joined the Army, the ethos that was used in small arms fire was that a single, well aimed shot was more effective than letting loose half a magazine of ammunition in the hope that one of the projectiles would hit the intended target. It is probably why the Army took so long to incorporate an individual weapon (SA80) that had an automatic facility. We did have the SMG (submachine gun) but that was really a close-quarter battle weapon and not that accurate when it came to any kind of range. What that single shot tended to do was concentrate the mind just a little more, and in an effort to ensure that your single shot was as effective as it could be, you practised, and once you had practised a while, you practised some more. It was almost a matter of personal honour to be as accurate as possible, be the best.

Anyway, I tried to take shooting to the ultimate level, and found myself enrolled on a sniper course. Before the course began, however, I decided that I would try and be as good as possible before it all began. It was, after all, one of the most difficult things to achieve at the time and anything I could do to improve my chances of success was okay with me.

Now, shooting and shooting at range are two very different disciplines, and I was just about to get my eyes well and truly opened. The weapon we used was a Russian 7.62 sniper rifle, and once I had acquainted myself with its nuances, I began to increase the distances at which I was shooting. There are far too many things to do with sniping to go into here, but the further you are from your intended target the more these things come into play. And at 1,000-metres I started to wonder if I would ever get it right.

One day we had been at the range for some time and I had taken on a target at 1,000-metres in a bit of a side wind. I was sure I had done what was intended and inspected the figure 11 ‘Huns head’ target. As the name suggests, the target is of a soldier’s head and is surrounded by what I can only describe as a border of a couple of inches. My five rounds had found their mark as far as I was concerned, but I could see that they all punctured the target in the border area. I was actually pretty chuffed, and told my mentor that that was simply the bollocks!

“No Chilly, it’s not the f*****g bollocks, he would have definitely shit his pants, but you missed. No matter how you jazz it up, or how near you think you were to the mark, Herman here is still very much alive.”

I remember that day as if it was yesterday. In military parlance, near is not good enough and it is something that has given me the ability to look at life with very little in the way of grey areas. For me, it is black or white and there should be no in-between.

I was reading a magazine many years ago and not really knowing the score way back then, I read that the author had a very good session. He had joined a famous water to catch his first thirty-pounder (yes, people actually once wrote about such notable things!) and amongst a whole cacophony of words he told the reader how very good he was at this carp fishing game. In short, he landed five fish, and two of them were big, but he couldn’t tell you their exact weights because then he wouldn’t be able to use the words he wanted to in his article. Those words were “thirty-pounder”. To rectify this, he told the reader that he had landed ‘two near-thirties’ and even back then I nearly choked on my coffee.

Whilst it may be true that the fish he had landed were close to thirty-pounds, they were nothing of the sort. The article didn’t say how big they were, but even if the fish weighed 29lb 15oz then that is what they weighed, nothing more and nothing less. The day I caught my first forty-pounder, and my second largest carp ever, was a stark reminder that I didn’t want to say something that didn’t represent the truth. As we weighed Horton’s Jack, someone said that I had just landed a carp of nearly fifty-pounds, it annoyed me enough to say something, and again that revolved around the fact that the fish weighed what it weighed, 49lb 4oz, and nothing more!

Fast-forward a few years and this angle of “making oneself look a little better than I am”, still prevails. Indeed, I read an article the other day where the author had landed a few fish and they were all “near-thirties”. Again, I spat my coffee all over me, because the biggest one weighed 28lb 12oz. And it gets worse. In an effort to make them look so much better, we have come into an age when it is fine to say, “a near-forty, a near-fifty” and, in one monumental self-appreciation campaign, “a near-eighty!”

Look, in a time when things are being bent out of shape to sell an extra hook or bankstick, why do people have to bullshit about themselves as well? The anglers are the most important people in this industry (I hope to hell and back that doesn’t sound condescending because it’s not supposed to be, and if it does, I am sorry), because without them it wouldn’t exist and all our efforts should be directed towards giving them the respect they truly deserve.

Things in life are what they are, if you take a shot and you miss, then you have missed. If you catch a carp and it weighs 39lb 4oz then it weighs 39lb 4oz and the words forty-pounder don’t have to be mentioned at all. Even if you miss out on the chance to make yourself look a little better, you should feel comfortable with the fact that you haven’t tried to blur the lines between reality and what you think should have happened. Only my opinion of course. Laters.

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