The Directors Update October 2024

In a month which has seen huge emphasis placed on our mental health, logically, many people have highlighted the growing need to explore the outdoors and embrace pastoral pursuits....

Things which do not demand anything from us, are not confrontational but instead are gentle and calming – elements which take us to a place of quiet contemplation and relaxation.  

Fishing, angling - call it what you will - does just that for many of us. 

During the early days of David Lyon’s Tackling Minds, we at Fishing for Schools discussed where things might go, and given the phenomenal success of his initiative, mental health and wellbeing have become synonymous with fishing.  

Angling, like it or not, helps to take us to calmer waters; places where our imagination can soar, and bad things dissolve.

From my own perspective, this has been the case for something like six and half decades, from being bullied at school through to times of teenage difficulties and a host of other challenging areas, there have been two points of refuge – fishing and art.  

Art, similarly to angling, almost demands total immersion into another – some might say a safer place. A point amplified by our wonderful coach, Warren White, and his amazing work within Kent mental health. Warren urges people from very vulnerable places in their lives to explore both fishing and art. The combination is both cathartic and exciting.  

You can see some of the results below and if one imagines, just for a moment, this work of amazing imagination stems from people that know metal anguish, who have been in the past set up to fail and often undermined. It says so much about both areas that we can make life better, if only a little bit of it.

I leave you with words from John Gierach – the famous outdoor writer, and arguably our greatest contemporary Angling writer who passed away on 3 October - and they are:

“They say you forget your troubles on a trout stream, but that's not quite it. What happens is that you begin to see where your troubles fit into the grand scheme of things, and suddenly they're just not such a big deal anymore.”