In 1972, John Wilson told me that if I were to have any future as an angling writer I’d need to become proficient with a camera, so I trotted up London Street to Coe’s and bought a Zenith B that, because it was built in Russia out of one of Stalin’s tanks, lasted me for years.

I upgraded over the next three decades of course, both in cameras and ability to use them, and even learned to develop my own black and white prints, courtesy of the much-loved Johnny Walker, pottery and art master at Norwich School back then.

Fast forward to 2006, John Wilson again advised me to go digital one night we‘d had too much to drink, and I did. But photography was never the same again for me. It had somehow lost its silky magic and the anticipation of picking up transparencies became a thrill forgotten. Cheaper, more efficient, easier to correct mistakes, digital is all these things, but the love, the craft is not there for me, the Fred Flintstone of the photography world. 

All this has more point to it than painting me as a sad old git, which I undoubtedly am. My meandering introduction is all because the Environment Agency newsletter this month was about eels. It didn’t actually add much to anything we already know, but it piqued my interest because I have always been passionate about them, mysterious creatures that they are. I can remember the ankle deep river Stiffkey in Great Walsingham alive with elvers one May afternoon when I was no more than a fascinated 10-year-old... the river was a moving, glistening carpet of the tiny needle-like fish as far as my astonished eye could see.

When I lived at Old Costessey mill, I let a guy come to catch clonking silver eels on late autumn nights as they ran back to the Atlantic to spawn - some were like tree trunks. I can recall the wonderful Jim Deterding draining a Kelling pond and turfing up an eel that was 52 inches long; this anaconda must have lurked there for decades. I’d thought to write this column about eels, but when I scrolled through some 20,000 digital images, know what? I couldn’t find a single one with an eel as its subject. And remember, I am out bankside almost every day with a camera: it’s like eels have vanished off the face of our waterworld.

Now, this set me thinking. If I still had access to the scores of thousands of prints and transparencies that I had accumulated the later years of last century, there would have been a veritable cornucopia of eel shots to decorate my piece, and posting them to the sports editor might mean they would not be lost, as is usual with digitals, in his Spam box. But let’s take this further. The fishing world I recorded with my Zenith and latterly my beloved Nikon F5, no longer exists and it’s not just eels that demonstrate this. The most obvious example is roach of course. On film, black and white or colour, I photographed around ONE THOUSAND 2lb Norfolk river roach.., not all mine, but many were. In my digital library, built up these 16 years or so, I think there are EIGHT such monsters recorded. It’s the same with dace. Analogue, some 50 1lb fish. Digital and the closest I come is three 12oz specimens I caught with Robbie Northman three years back.

True, back in film days tench were considerably smaller than now, carp too, but I still managed a few '30s' of the latter and that’s about all the good news there seems to be. In black and white, I had an array of JB images with hair to his shoulders clutching north coast sea trout to an incredible 15lb and more. River trout too. Back then, the Wensum was bustling with vibrant wild three- and four-pounders. I never got any of the real monsters myself, but I saw them, they were there, they honestly were.

Take venues too. Then, the whole panorama of glorious estate lakes shone on film. Now it is all pits pretty much, many behind otter fences with car parks and wood chip platforms. Until the 90s, half the shots my film cameras took were of anglers river fishing. And more than that, most of the subjects would be trotting a stick float, an art you see practised today once in a blue moon.

So, Environment Agency, it’s good to know that you are bothered about the crash of the eels, but you don’t tell us anything at all about how you think you might bring them back. Nor do I think you have much hope of seeing a return of river roach, dace, oodles of massive wild browns and sea trout the size Wye spring salmon used to be. So perhaps I’m not quite the Fred Flintstone of angling photography. At least back in film days, there were fish worth taking images of and a variety that was breath taking.