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The Secret Waters
by Del Harding
Format: Hardback
Publication date: 16th November 2011
ISBN: 978-1-908477-37-8
Price: €25
The Secret Waters is a fishing book with a difference.
It assumes you already know ‘how to do it’ and is, instead, about actually doing it. Doing it in the past, in the present, and also of doing it in the future, translating those angling dreams into a reality.
It is, moreover, a book about place, or places, for doing it. Places that exist, in reality; unfished, forgotten or undiscovered, that the average modern angler would be forgiven for thinking existed only in fantasy. Places that embody a tranquillity and beauty that is almost extinct in the modern world. Places where you can almost feel the presence of that enormous fish to beat them all. Places that engender the purest form of that essential yet elusive ‘Spirit of Angling’.
It is a book for the armchair fisherman beside a warm fire on a dirty winter night, it is a book for the local angler, about places he knows and loves, it is a book for the tourist angler for whom the places it describes are all new and as yet unseen, and it is a book of true fishing stories, splashed throughout with a wry tongue-in-cheek humour.
‘The Secret Waters’ fills the gap between the instant push-button success of the overstocked ‘commercial’ waters and the severely degraded ‘natural’ waters of Britain and Europe, and shows the way to the experience of real fishing, the way it used to be in the halcyon days of the past, what fishing is really all about.
About the Author
A fisherman since early childhood, he spent his early days fishing the park lakes of suburban London, graduating in his teens to the mighty Thames and the tiny Darent, with occasional schoolboy forays to the Broads and the Scottish Highlands.
Leaving school and finding himself stultifying in an office, he walked out one day leaving it all behind and armed only with a tent, a billycan, a bowie knife, his fishing rods and, later, a shotgun and dog, he lived the life of a footloose nomad, living ‘off the land’ (and water) for many years and ended up in Ireland, where he has been ever since.
Back in the Sixties, he made his television debut when he appeared on Hughie Greens ‘Double Your Money’ show, and in recent years has featured with Matt Hayes on a Sky TV documentary on fishing the Shannon.
