Telling Tales

2010: A Year In Carp Fishing

RRP £24.99

When Korda release a book or other media, it is usually a technical guide to performing the tasks that the angler requires from the purchase, but when it was announced that the guys at Korda were putting together a book on angling stories throughout a complete year, a lot of anglers sat up and took notice.

When the Telling Tales book was delivered to the UKMA office, it was eagerly read by the team. What did we make of it?

On opening the hardback cover, a look at the list of anglers who have each written a chapter within the book, reads like a "Who's Who" of European angling. The contributors include the well known names of Danny Fairbrass, Damien Clarke, Tom Dove, Ali Hamidi, Elliot Gray and Adam Penning, along with lesser known writers such as Jon Mann and Neil Spooner plus a couple of chapters from Korda's European team on the venues and situations they face on the Continent. Each of the chapters covers different challenges faced by the anglers and holds nothing back.

Each angler has written their piece without going indepth in technical information, but where required, Korda have included their well put together strip of photos showing how to construct a rig safely and correctly. Rather than shove the Korda way down your throat, they have left it up to the angler to read it and make their own minds up to if it would suit their angling on the venues they fish.

The book itself has been published in a landscape format rather than the traditional portait style. This may mean that it doesn't fit the bookshelf in line with the others in place, but what it does do is allow the pages to use full landscape photographs on a full page without requiring cropping or losing the impact of the fish or scenery.

Final Thoughts

Since picking up the book for the first time, I have read at least one chapter a day, even re-reading a previous chapter to recap what was written, and I must know most of the book word for word now. This type of book is my preferred format rather than the basics repeated time and time again. The two chapters that I have read the most are the first and last by Danny Fairbrass and Adam Penning respectively. Danny's chapter goes through his very few sessions over at Wellington Country Park and really goes in-depth to how a Chod rig should be correctly assembled and used (something that a lot of anglers still get wrong regardless of how many times it is published). Adam's chapter goes through a session of a lifetime over on Linear Fisheries in Oxfordshire where he basically "empties" the lake of its inhabitants.

Telling Tales is a book that deserves to be on every carp anglers bookshelf as it truely is a superb read. I have read books that have not lived up to the hype in the past, and Telling Tales is definately not one of them.

I hope that Korda release Telling Tales 2011 this time next year, as it will 100% be on my bookshelf as soon as I can get a copy.

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