The Politics of Club Angling - Striking the balance

The politics of club angling

During my time as member of the Salisbury and District Angling Club, we had a few years when there was open animosity between various sections of the club. The club already had two types of anglers in its membership. We had coarse anglers, which included carp fishermen and we had the game fly fishing fraternity.

When the club had the chance of acquiring new water, you would have a battle between the two main factions, as to whether the club should spend the money or not.

The game fraternity would obviously want stretches of river or lakes which contained only trout and the coarse anglers would prefer that the club would buy mixed or coarse fisheries. The coarse section had further divisions within their ranks as they had match anglers, specimen hunters and carp fishermen.

The carp and specimen hunters disliked the match anglers because they wanted to close waters on match days and there was always a battle between various committee members. The match anglers wanted more matches and the others wanted less match days so the waters were more available to others.

What tended to happen is that committee members representing each type of angler would follow their hidden agendas. At times various committee members would probably do deals with others and make promises to back others at a later date to enable their own ends at that time.

What seemed to happen at the time I was involved was that I was doing match fishing as well as the ordinary pleasure type of angling I tended to be a middle of the road type of member. As the club accepted more and more young carp anglers we found ourselves being squeezed regarding match angling days.

The club’s stocking policy changed towards more carp. The game anglers almost wanted to split the club up and go their own way as they found it harder to get trout fishing waters. This was a non starter as the only waters we as a club actually owned were coarse fishing lakes.

The equity of the club could not be split with any fairness and it did not happen as far as I can remember. The sudden influx of carp fishermen caused an imbalance within the club between coarse and game anglers and that changed the atmosphere between the various factions of the club membership. 

In my opinion it was a pivotal moment in the history of what was a lovely well balanced, nice family friendly angling club and it has never been the same since.