Going with the flow? Place and event in anglers’ understandings of rivers

1. Going with the flow? Place and event in anglers’ understandings of rivers Christopher Bear Department of Geography University of Hull c.bear@hull.ac.uk

2. Angling in the Rural Environment • 2006-2009 • Studying the Rivers Swale, Ure and Esk in North Yorkshire, UK RES-227-25-0002

3. Stability and fluidity • Pegs on a river • Placed along rivers by angling clubs • Permanent • Organisation of fishing competitions • JAMES Certain pegs where they get them all the time, where you know if they’re feeding you’ll get them. INTERVIEWER Are they always the same pegs? JAMES Mostly. 47, 49, they’re good. 25, 26, 74 at the rear end, but it’s a long walk... That can produce as well. 63, 64, they’re supposed to be reasonable barbel pegs. • But what is it to return to the same pegs? What, exactly, is being returned to?

4. Place as event • Massey - For Space (2006) • Place (or ‘here’) as ‘where spatial narratives meet up or form configurations, conjunctures of trajectories which have their own temporalities’ • ‘Here’ as transient: • ‘... “here” is no more (and no less) than our encounter, and what is made of it. It is, irretrievably, here and now. It won’t be the same “here” when it is no longer now.’ • What configurations of place do anglers engage with in their fluid angling environments? • How do they deal with and conceptualise change and continuity in rivers? • To what extent do they engage with the ‘now’? The importance of time? • How do people move through and make sense of their everyday environments?

5. Methodology • Fieldwork on the Rivers Swale, Ure and Esk in North Yorkshire, UK • 55 in-depth semi-structured interviews, 2 focus groups and participant observation with anglers • Taken place in anglers’ homes and on riverbanks • Sampling • through clubs, by attending matches, contacting online groups and snowballing • Interviews analysed using a grounded theory approach with NVivo • Part of a wider interdisciplinary project on Angling in the Rural Environment

6. Stability • Cartographic conceptualisations: • Pegging effectively produces a grid structure around which competitions might be organised • James’s ability to reel off peg numbers • MARTIN ...sometimes you know exactly what you’re going to get when you get there. That’s a fault with fishing it a lot of years. I can go somewhere and draw peg numbers, say I’m on peg 20, and I know what I’m going to get.

7. Engaging with fluidity • MARTIN ...you get summer and winter pegs... I think in the winter chub are spread out in every peg. But in the summer you might have a quarter of a mile with no chub. • INTERVIEWER So does that mean that what’s a good peg in May might not be by July? KEN Definitely, definitely. You tend to find that as it comes into the colder, they’ll move off the shallower pegs... You tend to find that they’ll drop off into a deeper section of water. And the deeper ones...are not good in the summer, because they’re all up in the shallows, where the water obviously warms up quicker, and like I say in the wintertime they drop into the deeper pegs. INTERVIEWER OK. That’s interesting. So you’ve got to really, you don’t just say ‘Peg 168’s good’ - you’ve got to know the month of the year and KEN The likes of these frosts, if you get a really hard frost, that can just wreck the whole day... Like 3 degrees or a couple of degrees drop in the water temperature and they’re not going to like it. They don’t like it at all.

8. Learning, re-learning • Piecing together a variety of spatial narratives • Direct engagement with rivers: • KEITH With the tree being stuck there, though, it’s created a lot of sediment, and the river at the back of the tree’s only that deep. INTERVIEWER A foot or so. KEITH Yeah. And that’s a peg where it used to be 5-6ft deep. INTERVIEWER Really? KEITH Yeah. INTERVIEWER So that’s changed a lot then. KEITH There’s a lot more big chub coming out of 38 - what used to be caught in 37 is now caught in 38. but if you get the river right, you need to be in 37, because they tend to move up round the back of the tree. That’s what I say about re-learning new pegs and everything. And when that happens, you can spend a full season learning that peg. Or learning how to catch fish all over.

9. Learning, re-learning • Talking to others: • JOHN It’s like, it’s not unfamiliar. If you haven’t fished it before, you’ve got an idea of how it does fish. INTERVIEWER Because you’ve read the match reports? JOHN Yeah, and talked to people fishing at a match and this sort of thing. I mean the first thing you do when you draw your peg at Ripon, you just have a little confab with your mates - ‘what do you think of this one?’- even though you know roughly how good or bad it is. You still need to get updated. There’s several hundred pegs that we know quite well. So it isn’t sort of blind.

10. Eventful pegging • The use of pegs often belies their apparent rigidity: • Not uniform distances apart • Determined by access and fishing potential • Non-conformity to the rigid grid: • DAVE Well, what you tend to do is, if you’ve got reasonably good pegs, like 18 and 19, they’ve got some form, so there you can just give them two pegs. INTERVIEWER Form, so that’s past form, is it, past winners? DAVE Yeah… But there are some other areas where they’re not as good, so there I’ll give ’em four, maybe five pegs, to compensate for it. INTERVIEWER And is that affected by what kind of a day it is and what’s been happening or is it just based on which areas you know have been winners from? DAVE It’s which areas we know. And based on the river level. If the river was up, higher up, the pegging would have been different because some pegs and some areas will fish well in normal conditions, this is a normal level, but if you put 3 foot of water on the river, the same pegs won’t produce, the fish drop down into slacker water. • Pegging as an attempt to correct the unevenness of rivers • Fairer competition • So even the use of the grid plan can be an eventful engagement with a heterogeneity of space-time narratives

11. Configurations of place • Two broad configurations from these examples: • River, fish and peg intrinsically linked • E.g. Look forward to fishing a particular peg that the angler associates with good catches • ‘Eventful’ engagements • Anglers engage with multiple spatial narratives • Flow of water, temperature, depth, movement of fish, histories of pegs and understandings of other anglers • Peg numbers and place names as points of reference • Fluidity in rigidity

12. Conclusions • Emphasis on the heterogeneity of event-place • Humans and non-humans ‘negotiating a here-and-now’ (Massey, 2006) together • Space and time as intrinsically linked and intertwined • Different conceptualisations of place • Unexpected fluidities? • Dealing with fluidity by being fluid • Anglers as part of their fluid environments – as fluid actors themselves