Richard Stewart: FilmMaker And Podcast Host

Nobody in my family fished (apart from a few hours off the rocks for mackerel on holiday), so I’d have to say a guy called Bill Reeves was my angling mentor. I caught my first carp on his Jack Hilton glass fibre rod (he’s a member of the Golden Scale Club, so even glass was a bit modern for him), with him watching over my shoulder on a summer evening, around 1995. He inducted me into the smokey (everyone smoked then, especially at club meetings), secret world of carp fishing, which was very much silver paper indicators and trout pellet paste even as late as the mid-1990s. It’s mad to think that just the year before Terry Hearn caught Mary, I was still using a float with paste for my fishing. After Bill, my mentors were those I could read: Yates, Paisley and Maylin.

When it comes to the greatest asset an angler can own, I’ve considered impatience, confidence and relentlessness, but I’m going with belief. I think that most other attributes only come into play once you’re at the pond, yet belief is the thing that keeps you going back, allowing those other key attributes to kick in. I’ve found it hard to keep consistency and confidence if my motivation drops away and belief that it’s all doable will keep you coming back for more. 

What would I like to own that I currently don’t? Hmmm, maybe a time machine? Those of us lucky enough to have grown up in the 1990s were inspired by what I consider to have been the golden age of carp fishing. Sure, I can make a case that we’re living in a new golden age now—more big carp than ever, advanced tech, the best information, etc., but I just wish that I felt that in my bones and I don’t. So, if you don’t mind, I’ll pop the rose-tinted specs on and hop back to 1999 thanks very much. I think it’s key to point out that I’d not fished the lakes that inspired me back then, which might be why they still hold such fascination. 

The last thing I bought and loved were my Fox RX+ alarms. I’ve got a bit of an alarm fetish. Optonics, every Delkim model since the conversions, Bitech Micros, Fox Mini Microns, the original Rx Digitals, Parson’s etc.; they’re all gathering dust in my loft because the new breed of RX are that good. 

With time on my hands I’d get round to sorting out the shed. Nah, who am I kidding? I’d go fishing. Even if I’ve only got the morning I think you can always move your campaign forwards by being at the lake. I guess I wouldn’t always get the rods out if I was short on time, but I’d be looking hard for something to cast at, or work on for next time.

Picking a past lake and swim where I was happiest is a tough one. So much contributes to happiness. I’m going right back to the lake that I first fished for carp properly. An old quarry in the North West, which had a Leney stocking. It’d be a clear August evening after a hot day and I’d be enjoying the intensity that only first flushes of romance can lend to an experience. I’d be float fishing in very shallow water so any feeding carp would stir the water around my float with their tails, making it sway and dip. Once it’s too dark to see the float, I’d walk back across the cool stubble fields to the house that my folks still live in. 

I don’t have a bait bag, but I have lots of buckets (some of which should carry a health warning), but during the summer I’ll always have some particles on the go, so you’d find a mix of hemp, maples and tigers steeping in their own juices, dosed with a lashing of Himalayan rock salt once the hemp has split. On the day of the trip, I’d be adding some of the oiliest pellets available (T23s) and maybe a few 12-millers if I’m feeling flash!

The game-changing moment which altered everything for me was starting work on Advanced Carp Fishing magazine. Imagine: you’re the keenest young angler and you get to go out and actually watch the very best in the business doing what they do, with no secrets kept from you. I actually can’t imagine what kind of an angler I’d be had I not started in the industry 17 years ago.

I’m lucky that I’ve met and worked with all my fishing heroes, so it’s tricky to pick one angler I’d like to fish with, but I’d love to have shared an autumn trip to the Mangrove with Tim Paisley. A late dawn and a few of Tim’s coffees…

What I find most irritating in other anglers is a lack of respect for the environment that we fish in. Be that littering, hacking away at vegetation or their attitude to the birds and animals that call lakes their home. 

When it comes to losing something I wish I still had, maybe my ‘lucky’ black shirt from my uni days? Other than that, I honestly don’t tend to get rid of stuff, so I reckon my set of Nevs and JAG sticks and bars that I left at the lake a few years ago. I went back and they’d gone.

If I wasn’t doing what I do, I would mostly be reading.