Dick Walker's views on carp rods

[TheDodger]

You will probably enjoy this one then, from a letter of 12th August 1970 - again, typical Dick Walker style

"A healthy fish in water weighs nothing and what breaks your line is not the weight of the fish, but the force applied through the fish's swimming ability"

"The momentum of a fish is the mass times the square of the velocity divided by the gravitational pull, if you want to get all technical about it! This means that a 10lb carp going at 10 miles an hour would, if you tried to stop it dead in its tracks, apply a force of more than 30lbs. on your line!"

"This is why it isn't any more difficult to land a 40lbs carp than a 10-pounder. It may be more difficult to hook the 40 pounder because in the first place, there are fewer 40 pounders to hook; in the second place, a carp that has reached 40lbs. must live in a water that is rich in natural food and is therefore less inclined to take your bait; but once the hook is in, it ought not to be any more difficult to land the big fish than the smaller one, simply because the smaller one will go a lot faster. You can work it out quite easily; a 40-pounder going at 5 miles an hour will take exactly the same pull to stop it as a 10-pounder going at 10 miles an hour. After carp have grown beyond the 10lbs. mark they get progressively slower. This is a thing that puzzles a lot of people who are apt to think that the strength of the line ought to be in proportion to the weight of the fish."

"That explains why Ron Clay, Eddy Price and your truly all managed to land 40lbs. carp on lines of about 10lbs. effective breaking strain."

A couple of weeks later Dick adds

"A fish can sometimes break a line whose stregth is many times the weight of the fish! I have seen rainbow trout of no more than 2lbs. snap a line of 8lbs. breaking strain. It is all a matter of speed. If you want to try an experiment to prove the point, tie a brick at the end of 8ft. of 12lb. b.s. nylon, the other end of which is attached to your bedroom window frame. Then drop the brick out of the window. Although the brick weighs only weighs about a couple of pounds, you will find that when it comes up sharp at the end of that 8ft. of nylon it will break it without a pause in the rate of its descent. That is the sort of thing that happens when you get a fish moving fast; the impact of the force on a line that isn't allowed to run freely may be many more times than the weight of the fish"

Amazing clarity of thought and expression isn't it? Who else would straight-facedly advise a sixteen year old lad (as I was then) to chuck a brick out of his bedroom window in the interests of angling research - you just don't get that class of writing now; its all about flogging tackle? The more I think about the above bits the more Dick sounds more akin to Patrick Moore than Mr Crabtree...

[Santiago]

I always thought landing big fish was less about skill and more about venue!! This agrees with my way of thinking so thanks!!!

[Nailbourne]

Reading these letter excerpts reinforces my youthful hero worship and, later, genuine appreciation of Dick Walker. He backs up his concise, clearly-written statements with science and logic - unlike many so-called experts today.

A high percentage of the questions asked on this forum could be easily answered (with reasons) by reading Walker's books of 50 and 60 years ago, or those of his close companions. He may not always have been correct, but you'd have to be pretty smart to disprove what he said!

When I heard that a 'media star' had been voted 'the greatest angler of the present century', simply because he made good TV programmes, I shake my head in disbelief. Walker never embraced the tele-visual media - he just caught a lot of very big fish of a wide range of species. Yet - seemingly on this forum as well - he has not achieved the accolades that he richly deserves. If anyone deserved a knighthood for 'services to angling', he certainly did.

[Santiago]

Well said NB!!

[Gary Bills]

Well said NB!!

I agree. Without Walker, none of us would be writing on this forum.

[Mark]

Well said NB!!

I agree. Without Walker, none of us would be writing on this forum.

Very true FB.

[Mushy]

Now I'm going to be a bit controversial here and say that I don't fully agree with what DW says

The force applied by a carp is surely not just about its speed and weight. If you hold tight to a hooked carp, giving no line, the carp's swimming action and waving tail will exert force down the line, but there is no movement or velocity, and a whopper with a big paddle will exert more force down the line than a little 'un and put a greater strain on yer line and rod.

Just for the record, like all of us, RW is an angling hero of mine and I wouldn't want to imply criticism in any way

[Julian]

Now I'm going to be a bit controversial here and say that I don't fully agree with what DW says

The force applied by a carp is surely not just about its speed and weight. If you hold tight to a hooked carp, giving no line, the carp's swimming action and waving tail will exert force down the line, but there is no movement or velocity, and a whopper with a big paddle will exert more force down the line than a little 'un and put a greater strain on yer line and rod.

Just for the record, like all of us, RW is an angling hero of mine and I wouldn't want to imply criticism in any way

Yes, it is worth noting that although Richard Walker was a great angler, highly intelligent, innovative, and developed some great angling equipment, techniques, insight , etc , he is not infallible and was therefore not always correct in every angling thing he said or wrote.
I remember reading about how he was very outspoken at one time in stating that a common carp could not possibly reach 4 feet or longer in length (when the early sightings of the Redmire King were all the talk), whereas there have now been a significant number of carp caught in Europe that are 4 feet long.

[TheDodger]

More from Dick Walker on rods from that second letter of August 1970 - this should get a few of the cane-obssessives going!

"The MkIV Avon has never been any other length than 10-ft. and it was designed strictly for legering and free-line fishing. I think 10ft. is to short for satisfactory float fishing, except at very short range. In the old days before we had fibreglass, I used to use a 3-piece rod called the Hardy Wallis for most of my float fishing for the general run of fish like tench, bream, chub, perch, and barbel. Nowadays there is a wide range of quite good fibreglass rods from 11-ft. to 13-ft and I am at present engaged in designing a general-purpose rod for float fishing for the sort of fish I have just mentioned, for Hardy Bros."

"Since I wrote 'Still Water Angling' in 1952 thered have been a lot of changes in rod design. In those days fibreglass rods were very poor indeed; they were made from straight taper blanks imported either from America or the continent, and not only was the choice of tapers limited, the glass itself was nowhere near as good as the stuff we get nowadays."

"With Hardys and Bruce and Walker having set up their own production arrangements for making their own fibreglass rods, we can now produce compound taper rods that are correctly designed and I would say we have reached the stage where these rods are very bit as good as the split cane ones. There is one difference however, that has to be appreciated and that is that these new fibreglass rods are considerably lighter than their split cane counterparts and this means that you have to adopt a somewhat different technique for striking, otherwise you will fail to stick the hook in properly."

"With the split cane rods, all you needed to do was to strike in the ordinary way, tightening up on the fish in one stroke. With the glass rods, especially when using fairly strong lines and good sized hooks, you have to tighten up on a biting fish, and then, as soon as you feel him, give an extra dig to ensure that the hook goes in over the barb. Provided that this is done, there are no problems about using the glass rods and they certainly have the advantage that if you have to give a big fish a lot of stick, you don't end up with a rod with a permanent bend in it as so often happens with split cane, especially with split cane made in the last ten or fifteen years, during which the supply of really good raw material from China has got steadily worse."

Now there is food for thought, and does anyone know if the Hardy general purpose Dick Walker fibreglass rod ever saw light of day?

[Dave Burr]

I love Walker's technical articles, they really make you think. In his assessment of fish's weightlessness in the letter above there is no consideration of momentum, surely it takes more to stop the momentum from a forty than a double? Back in the seventies a mate of mine had the audacity to question one of his theories after an article in Angling Times and was delighted that the great man took the bait.

The debate was about the tell tale shot on a float set up and that walker claimed that ' as the float lifted as the shot was moved, the fish would never detect its weight,' theorising that a swan shot was no more likely to be alarm fish than a dust shot. I mention this in passing and not to reopen the debate

As with some other angler's writing, if you want to disagree with them you have to be pretty sure of yourself and therefore it makes you think long and hard about the subject and that is always going to improve your fishing.