Another angler who got into trouble but has survived to tell his tale. If or when you can go fishing on the coast, please buy a lifejacket and then wear it……….

Part of me feels like I should almost be apologising for putting a blog post like this out this morning at a time when our world seems to be in turmoil and people are dying from this virus, but I will continue to do what I can to keep things normal from my end whilst it seems that most things out there are becoming increasingly abnormal. I went out on my own for a few hours last week (blank!) and as has become normal for me when I am fishing the sort of rock mark I was on, I put my auto-inflate lifejacket in my rucksack for the walk out across the fields and down the cliffs, and then I put it on before I started fishing and as ever I was reminded just how easy these things are to wear and almost like what we all now know as social distancing these days - what’s the point in not?

A lad called Phill Lewis put a post up on Facebook a week or so ago and he kindly gave me permission to grab his words and put them up here (thank you kind sir). As you can read below, he knew the mark very well but he very suddenly got into potentially serious trouble and I was very glad to be able to read his words rather than be reading a report of another angler fatality. This is what happened to Phill: “Well that was bloody scary!!!!!!! Just went to fish a mark I've fished a few times before. When I got there the waves were just about breaking over the rock that I wanted to get to so I had a bit of a walk & came back once the tide had receded. I climbed onto the rock I wanted to fish from, which was about 2ft above the water at this point. As I was setting my rod up, I could see a wave coming in my direction so I turned side on & braced myself expecting a small wave to wash against my feet. What I wasn't ready for though was the wave taking out my legs from beneath me!!! I got washed off the rock and pulled out away from it. After a couple of attempts at swimming back, I managed to use the tide to wash me onto a submerged rock which I used to pull myself out. My sling bag with all my lures in had come off my shoulder in the waves and I watched it sink in front of me, but at least I managed to escape relatively unscathed, apart from some scrapes and cuts. It scared the living sh*t out of me and it certainly put things into perspective. Even though (I thought) I knew the mark well, it can quite easily go pear shaped and I will be ordering myself a lifejacket and making a point of fishing with a 'buddy' from now on as I may not be so lucky next time. I would urge anybody who doesn't think they need a lifejacket to reconsider as I will not be going anywhere without one from now on.”

I am not here to try and tell you what to do and of course there is every chance that a lot of you reading this blog post can’t go out fishing at the moment for any number of obvious reasons, but at some point in the hopefully nearish future we will be back to whatever normal actually is. Anglers will head out fishing on the coast again and to get back out there with full freedom of movement will feel incredible. When an angler like Phill Lewis above is honest enough to go on the world’s largest social media platform and tell other anglers what went very suddenly wrong instead of trying to hide away from it and pretend it never happened, surely that’s yet another example of just why an auto-inflate lifejacket which costs less than a decent selection of needlefish needs to be part of your armoury going forward. You all take proper care out there, both as an angler and of course as a human being during these mad times……………..