I am being sensible because I have to be, but not being able to go fishing (and running) is driving me up the wall!

I am not being remotely blase about all this, because aside from actually having a heart attack, I accept and can’t ignore the simple fact that every single thing went my way just over three weeks ago when it hit me - and I am still here to be able to talk about it. With how severe my heart attack was, I don’t think it would have taken much deviation from what actually happened for things to have gone very differently and my family finding me dead on the floor here at home when they got back from the Isle of Wight. There’s no point shying away from it and I am sorry if talking like this bothers some of you, but what I am getting to here is that I need to take my recovery seriously because I got lucky and I want to get back to 100% or better…………..

But bloody hell it’s doing my head in that I can’t go fishing and indeed running (which I never thought I’d be saying). I’m doing plenty of dog walking with my little bottle of GTN spray and a mobile phone - making sure to warm up into a walk and warm down from a walk as I have been told to do - and it feels really good. I am up over 10,000 steps a day now on more days than not, and the main factors which are now reminding me of my heart attack are that I find myself getting really tired sometimes so I need to sit down and be quiet - reading a book is always good, I can’t sleep in the daytime, socialising is far more tiring than walking for some strange reason - and my wife and girls trying to get more and more vegetables into me without me knowing too much about it. They are succeeding I might add. Hell, I am starting to dream about chewing a carrot.

The fact that there seems to be bass all over the place at the moment and I can’t go fishing for them is wrecking my head! A few mates are very kindly keeping me up to date with what’s going on out on the coast and in a few estuaries, indeed a friend of mine had a session yesterday morning the likes of which he doesn’t think he has ever experienced. It was that good, and we’re talking about a lot of good bass smashing surface lures with no other angler in sight. For sure it fries my brain that I wasn’t out there with him, but on the flipside I get to hear about it and damn it’s so good that with this much pressure on fish stocks there is still the chance of having absolute world class lure fishing like that in UK waters. I reckon most of us would agree that it’s been a weird bass fishing year so far, but there seems to be so much bait around right now that it must act like a great big homing beacon to hungry predators.

I sincerely hope that if you are out there targeting bass you are catching a few and enjoying what hasn’t exactly passed for much of a summer if we are honest about it. Who here thought that we’d end up paying for May and June because that’s the way we tend to think about weather on this island we live on? The selfish part of me wishes that the coastline was in a hell of a state at the moment and the rivers were full of freshwater, quite simply because it would make me feel better about not being able to go fishing, but of course I would far rather the fishing was good and lots of anglers were out there enjoying it - which they seem to be at the moment. Yesterday I was honestly putting different spinning reels on different lure rods to see how they felt and remind myself what it feels like to hold a lure rod. I am fantasising about finally getting around to putting some proper time in with the various creature baits I have bought.

When specialists tell me that the first four weeks after a heart attack are absolutely vital, I’d be a fool not to listen. They don’t want me lifting anything heavier than a 3/4 full kettle for the time being, and they worry that repeated casting could damage the scarring on my heart which obviously needs to heal. The worry they have about running and/or lots of up and down the cliffs is that they don’t really want my heart rate getting too fast at the moment, and especially with the drugs I am on and I guess my body getting used to them. I can’t believe how much I want to get back to running as well because back in February when I started Couch to 5K I didn’t know what was possible and how much good it did me. How much do you want to do something when you are told not to do it? I have never been very good at that.

But I’m being really good at the moment. How long that lasts for depends a bit on how much I can hold out on not going fishing. There are of course a lot of much easier fishing options which don’t require cliffs and rocks and scrambling around, but it doesn’t exactly help much when my wife suggests I ask a mate to do the casting for me and I then wind the lure in! Can you imagine the piss-taking if I went down that road and then hooked a big bass via a mate’s cast? Not sure my heart could take it…………….