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_at_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
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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 theyre feeding youll
  get them.
• INTERVIEWER Are they always the same pegs?
• JAMES Mostly. 47, 49, theyre good. 25, 26, 74
  at the rear end, but its a long walk... That can
  produce as well. 63, 64, theyre supposed to be
  reasonable barbel pegs.
• But what is it to return to the same pegs? What,
  exactly, is being returned to?

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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 wont 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?

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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

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Stability

• Cartographic conceptualisations
• Pegging effectively produces a grid structure
  around which competitions might be organised
• Jamess ability to reel off peg numbers
• MARTIN ...sometimes you know exactly what youre
  going to get when you get there. Thats a fault
  with fishing it a lot of years. I can go
  somewhere and draw peg numbers, say Im on peg
  20, and I know what Im going to get.

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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 whats a good
  peg in May might not be by July?
• KEN Definitely, definitely. You tend to find
  that as it comes into the colder, theyll move
  off the shallower pegs... You tend to find that
  theyll drop off into a deeper section of water.
  And the deeper ones...are not good in the summer,
  because theyre 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. Thats interesting. So youve
  got to really, you dont just say Peg 168s
  good - youve 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 theyre not going to
  like it. They dont like it at all.

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Learning, re-learning

• Piecing together a variety of spatial narratives
• Direct engagement with rivers
• KEITH With the tree being stuck there, though,
  its created a lot of sediment, and the river at
  the back of the trees only that deep.
• INTERVIEWER A foot or so.
• KEITH Yeah. And thats a peg where it used to be
  5-6ft deep.
• INTERVIEWER Really?
• KEITH Yeah.
• INTERVIEWER So thats changed a lot then.
• KEITH Theres 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. Thats 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.

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Learning, re-learning

• Talking to others
• JOHN Its like, its not unfamiliar. If you
  havent fished it before, youve got an idea of
  how it does fish.
• INTERVIEWER Because youve 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. Theres several hundred pegs that we
  know quite well. So it isnt sort of blind.

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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 youve got
  reasonably good pegs, like 18 and 19, theyve got
  some form, so there you can just give them two
  pegs.
• INTERVIEWER Form, so thats past form, is it,
  past winners?
• DAVE Yeah But there are some other areas where
  theyre not as good, so there Ill give em four,
  maybe five pegs, to compensate for it.
• INTERVIEWER And is that affected by what kind
  of a day it is and whats been happening or is it
  just based on which areas you know have been
  winners from?
• DAVE Its 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
  wont 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

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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

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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