WITH THE LOCKDOWN RESTRICTIONS FINALLY LIFTED, ADAM - LIKE SO MANY OTHER ANGLERS - WAS KEEN TO GET BACK OUT ONTO THE BANKS, NOT JUST TO HAVE THE CHANCE OF CATCHING ONE OR TWO CARP, BUT TO BREATHE IN EVERYTHING WE ALL LOVE ABOUT FISHING…

BY ADAM PENNING

PHOTOGRAPHY ADAM PENNING AND FRIENDS

CAPTION: SPRINGTIME ONES AND ZEROS: CANON 600D, 35mm, f/3.5, 1/4,000

March saw the descent down the corona rabbit hole.

Home schooling: I loved every moment!

It was the beginning of the strangest of times - the most bizarre page in human history that any of us had lived through. When fishing was prohibited it seemed a very strange move - why ban an outdoor activity that is largely practised in isolation? To begin with, there were lots of anglers claiming to be ‘self-isolating’ at a lake and it seemed to be the perfect bolthole from the madness unfolding around us, but it wasn’t to last long. For me, keeping the proverbial wolf from the door was difficult - the government advice was to continue working but ‘only if you cannot do so from home’. As a professional angler, I could clearly only do the majority of my output on the bank and so, although I could continue working in line with the government ruling, I decided not to because it would simply not have been a great example. Besides that, you can imagine the bitterness and the sniping that would have arisen… -

So there we all remained, spending huge amounts of time with our families, largely living in fear. For me and my wife and son, it was actually a hugely enriching time but I often thought about families who weren’t so fortunate - those that had a dynamic of abuse and dysfunctional relationships. For a great number of people the lockdown would have caused more damage than the virus itself, and the scars continue to become evident as the figures for mental health and suicide spiral to numbers never seen before. Whatever your view, I think most now know that there is far more to this whole thing than we have been told. Open your eyes, open your mind and I encourage you to look beyond what the mainstream media is feeding you.

I spent the phase enjoying time with my family. The weather was, rather strangely, entirely composed of high pressure, blue skies and endless sunshine. I’d do plenty of writing work and a fair few ‘Insta’ live interviews and stuff like that, along with product reviews and dealing with the huge amount of social media questions I get. It all finally came to an end on May 13th. The government eventually realised that preventing people from camping and fishing was pointless and unnecessary. Germany and one or two other European nations had allowed angling to continue throughout and had seen zero negative impact on death/ sickness trends as a result. Finally, we were free to angle and unshackled from the longest period of enforced ‘closed season’ since the mid-nineties. For many, angling is an essential part of keeping sane and as the switch was flicked back to ‘go’, anglers flooded the banks in numbers never seen before.