Last year about now I made this interview


Posted on December 26, 2008 - Filed Under Fish, Fishing

At this time last year I did the following interview with the Madrid based magazine the broadsheet The interview came out Jan. 2008. I thought i’d put this up here for you to read some of my comments about Fishing in Spain. I hope you Enjoy. Friday, 26 December 2008 TBSmagazine.com Fishing in Spain and the joys of putting something back If you’d told me three-and-a-half/four years ago when I left England to come to Spain that I was going to be the editor of a magazine; a Spanish-language carp fishing magazine at that, I would have said you were crazy. But I have been interested in fishing for a long time… My first fish, I imagine would have been a roach, caught in the UK at around the tender age of twelve. I fished until I was about 18 but kind of knocked it on the head until I moved here. I started to notice the lakes around Madrid, I did a bit of fishing and had a bit of success. A lot of people are surprised really. They say of Madrid – ‘what does it have?’ But when you start looking at maps and looking at satellite pictures and start seeing what’s here, there’s actually quite a lot of water around. Because construction is just crazy they’re constantly quarrying and making gravel pits, (graveras) – they need the stone. The water table is so high that these mines start to fill up as soon as they stop quarrying, so within five years or so nature takes its toll and boom! Life. Frogs, newts, insects, larvae, worms – you’ve got a little ecosystem going on. Granted, it’s called ‘fishing’, not ‘catching’ but it is still such a joy to catch a fish. It’s fun. If young people can get into the sport, they start to realize that maybe they shouldn’t vandalize or leave litter in canals and lakes and reservoirs. They actually start to enjoy different things – wildlife, birds etc. Like I do. Killing fish simply for sport is totally unnecessary. Caza is awful. I don’t hate anything but I hate cazadores. I hate hunting. I hate the killing of any animals for sport; the cruelty. It’s a money-driven thing; a status thing. What we do in the magazine is as far left of caza as it’s possible to be. I’m going to try force away from hunting, and seperate and change any Spanish people’s minds about this, a clear difference must be shown. If you say there’s a 25 kilogram carp in a particular lake, it can be caught, photographed, weighed and returned to the water. Nowadays with digital cameras, videos; you can show it to your family with this media. It’s prestigious, it’s a a trophy, and best of all it’s not dead! If that fish is photographed and returned and the photos sent to us at the magazine – the number of people that will come from outside of Europe to try and catch that fish and the money that will be spent by them is amazing. If you take a fish back to the kitchen, show it your grandad and then throw it in the bin, it’s pointless. If you catch it and eat it, I feel slightly more comfortable about that, but carp is a spiny, bottom feeding fish, so it doesn’t taste good, or so they say. Imagine the situation when someone catches a 20 kg carp. That’s a big fish. I guarantee that the person who caught that fish will never forget that day and the joy they experienced catching it. They don’t need to kill it. Imagine if they return the fish. Next year, somebody else can catch it. I swim the waters, I go down on the lake bed ad find out what’s in there. Watercraft is like a sixth sense. It’s pure instinct – you’re looking at the wind, looking at the make-up of the water, looking at the depth; reading it and gauging how to match your bait to the fish’s natural food sources. It’s strategic, it’s military. You need determination, dedication, and good presentation – you can end up thinking like a fish! Certainly swimming the lakes is more acceptable here and is definitely safer than in the UK. The last time I fished in the UK, I scratched my eye and caught an eye infection. UK waters and fish are rife with disease. In England they police waters, we have more control with these aspects, but this is partially because it’s such a big problem, here they don’t know as much about those aspects – farmers do release pesticides into the waters quite freely, but fish kills occur because of drought and poor water management not disease. Fishing and preservation seem to be two very seperate things here in Spain like it is in the UK, Spain needs to advance. We’ve got more harmony with these two elements in the UK, fishing for CARP is not a very well respected sport or activity here. It is a recognized sport now at least and next year they’re going to start legalizing night fishing, so things are moving, but still behind. Which makes Spain a paradise, it’s unknown. I feel like Christopher Columbus rediscovering America. It’s already been discovered of course, but there are so many lakes here and we have absolutely no idea what exists. For sure, on the reservoir Santilliana near Manzanares el Real, Madrid there’s a world record carp less than 45 minutes from the centre of the capital. When that fish is caught it will bring so much money, so much custom, so much tourism from France, from Italy the UK; from all over the world. The current world record fish reside in France and Germany – two different fish that are about the same weight. The lake in France is called Rainbow Lake. To fish there for one week costs a large sum of money. There are few swims around the bank, but d it’s full every single day, all year round. Just for the chance of catching this one big fish! Until 1987, the UK record was about 20 kilos, but I’ve got photos from El País in 1982 of a carp that was caught in Madrid that weighed 35 kilos. It wasn’t counted on the world ranking because the carp is not accepted as a native fish here even though it’s been here for god knows how many years. As yet there’s no board, there’s no ombudsman, there’s no federation. There’s no association that’s actually bothered to even note it as a record, even though unofficially we know it was. That fish attracted some of the top anglers from England to Santilliana in the Communidad de Madrid. In a way, I’m passing in their footsteps. Fishing is an industry that’s passion-driven and objective driven. If I know that there’s fish of a particular weight in there, I want to catch it and I won’t stop until I do. In England, there are 1 million fresh water fishermen alone and some of them have been fishing for 15 years and are not able to catch anything larger than 18lbs. Here, the record is 70lbs plus – massive! Obviously, I did the research and saw that there was a hole in the market for a Spanish language carp fishing magazine here. The market’s sustainable, so I thought, let’s try and make it work. We’re raising awareness. We can get political. We can have a voice and really start kicking up some scourge, pushing things on. There are at least 5,000 carp fisherman in Spain now and they are aware that things are not quite as they should be. They’re reading in the magazine about what’s happening in the UK. The magazine is intended as a platform for people to voice their opinions on these anything that matters. I’ve denounced the Ministerio de Medio Ambiente and the Canal Isabel Segundo II twice for not managing the water systems; for dead cows in the water etc. I expect that in Africa, but Spain is not a third world country. There’s loads of money from the EU and basically its being pocketed and water usage on a social level or for pleasure like fishing is being almost completely neglected. I think the government has turned a bit of a blind eye to carp fishing due to its associations with the dictatorship: There is a rumor that Hitler gave Franco the carp for his embalses (reservoirs). I know for a fact that the fish in the Retiro were given to Franco by Hitler: The Retiro fish are Nazi carp. As for the other carp introduced to Spain, I can’t get the evidence. But basically, Franco commissioned many reservoirs: he was obsessed by water. The carp is from the Seine. Hitler had carp – it’s a fast growing fish, it’s a food source. When you’re in times of war and the country’s in poverty, what better to have in your lakes than a source of food? They breed like hell; they grow massive. Who knows?… Andy Macgregor is the editor of the bi-monthly magazine Carp Diem, available in fishing shops and kiosks around Spain.

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Last year about now I made this interview

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