CARPING ALLEGEDLY
Everest, egos and even personal grooming… Bill Cottam’s with us once again to dish out another dose of cynicism and sarcasm
BY BILL COTTAM
@ cottamcarpangler
Bill Cottam Carp Angler
THE EVEREST OF CARP ANGLING?
read quite regularly these days, that several of Europe’s particularly challenging waters are referred as being ‘the Everest of carp fishing’. Now, as tough as they may be, and as gruelling as they undoubtedly are, this does strike me as being something of an exaggeration…
For the non-mountaineering experts amongst you, Mount Everest is 29,029 feet high. To put that into a more comprehensible perspective, it’s five and a half miles to its peak. Scaling it involves a ten-day trek to reach base camp, intense and lengthy altitude training, and an eight-to ten-week expedition costing something in the region of forty thousand dollars per person! Climbers can expect temperatures of -19ºC in summer and -36ºC in winter, and it is snow-capped throughout the twelve months of the year. After around 26,200 feet, climbers reach what is commonly known as the death zone, due to the likelihood of mountaineers meeting their demise on this particular part of the climb -Mount Everest has claimed the lives of some 300 people!
And for those of you who have a fascination with climbers’ toiletry habits - and I know there are a few -those on the world’s highest mountain are required, by law, to carry a poop tube: a section of plastic drain pipe with a removable end. The accepted procedure is to have a number two in a resealable plastic bag, before stuffing the bundle into the tube. The contents of the tube can then be deposed of when you eventually make it down the mountain -and there was me thinking that being forced to answer the call of nature in the woods and burying it was a little inhumane!