Blagdon
Mark Chamberlain
If you can net fish in Blagdon Lake it’s said that you’ll be able to catch fish vitually anywhere. One local fisherman has been telling us what the lake he has fished since he was a boy means to him.
Since he was 11 years old, Mark Chamberlain has been fishing in Blagdon Lake - a spot known by many anglers as the ’heartbreak lake’…
“Only another angler can know the absolute frustration of having a guy sat in a boat 10 feet away from you catching fish after fish after fish, you have exactly the same fly, fishing exactly the same way, but you are catching nothing!”
But that’s the challenge of Blagdon and the argument goes that if you can catch fish in this lake you’ll be able to catch fish virtually anywhere.
As a boy his aunt told him that the lake had the power to hook men, but at the time he didn’t understand what she meant.
“I remember her saying that there’s something about a broad expanse of water that will change a man in a way no woman ever can… now I know exactly what she meant.”
Transcript
I’m Mark Chamberlain, I live in a place called Blagdon just slightly to the south and west of Bristol. First time I came here I was eleven years old.
Blagdon was renowned as being a heartbreak lake and it still can be. Even in those days it took me until my second season to catch my – to actually beach or land my first fish in Blagdon. I’d lost a few by then and got incredibly frustrated but it takes you a while to pick it up.
[Sound of water and fishing reel winding]
This old lake is an incredibly vivid place. It’s very moody. You can tell almost to a week what’s happening by the birds that come in, by sometimes the insects that are hatching and what they’re doing, by the activity that’s going on down here… it is an absolute backdrop for your life.
It’s an odd thing: one of my aunts described it brilliantly once and she actually said that it hooked men in a particular way and made women entirely jealous and I’m far too young to know what she was talking about in that day and age but… she sat there and she said you know that certain men’ll get hooked up by a piece of water. There’s something about a broad expanse of water that’ll change a man in a way that no woman ever can… and she was absolutely right about that.
[Sound of water and fishing reel winding]
It’s got its own temper to it, and it some respects it’s something you adjust to, you don’t, you know, there’s no way you could - don’t think anyone could have the arrogance to say that they’ve overcome the place or that they’ve ‘beaten’ it. Can’t view it in terms of that, it’s something you accommodate.
It’s one of the most restful sounds I think I can ever remember is right in the depths of the summer when you get the heavy showers coming up in the summer. You can lie awake at night; after it’s rained you can hear the coots just waking up, stirring themselves, and you can hear the Canada geese flighting in and you go straight back to sleep (laughs). It’s one of the most relaxing sounds I think you’ll ever hear is just the call of waterfowl coming up off the lake on a still night and just after a rain shower.
I can’t imagine anything that would pull me away from this. There is no “opportunity of a lifetime”. The opportunity of a lifetime is something that kept me here, not something that pulls me away from here.
Most people in their lives look for some degree of certainty, some degree of surety about everything and this is, to a certain extent, a constant and something you can rely on, even if it breaks your heart every five minutes (laughs).
