Between the ages of five and seven, I wanted to catch anything with fins.

From nine to 11, my fishing was all about catching a tench and the next year, a carp.

In my teens and 20s, all I dreamed of, all I struggled for, was a 3lb Wensum roach.

On and on, through the decades it has been like that for me, an obsession with this or that fish that has driven me as far as the Scottish highlands and then even onto the mountains of Mongolia and India.

I mention this because I have just been guiding a guy who is a successful London property restorer but whose whole focus outside work is on catching a 30lb river pike. For two days we struggled to catch a 16lb-er, a good fish but only half his target. He didn’t mind, not at all. As he said, failure in a true angling campaign is part of the deal, the fuel that ignites the entire quest. If success came easily, then how could it possibly be called a campaign, an angling adventure that can last years?

In fact, 'angling struggle' or 'endurance angling' would be more accurate names by far. For example, in 1980 I began to fish for Scottish predatorial trout - aka 'ferox' - and I didn’t catch one until 1990. My then fishing partner, Roger, made 18 trips after them with me. That’s 30-some weeks spent storm tossed on huge glacial lochs without even a sniff of success. We laughed at that failure. We scoffed at the weather. The capture of a ferox for us was do or die stuff and you don’t conquer a legend in a morning,  a month, or in Roger’s case, sometimes even a lifetime. I can only repeat, that’s exactly how it should be, that’s true angling, when sport transcends the normal.

I don’t want to imply only I or my angling friends have mounted these campaigns. Big or difficult or fabled fish have driven anglers to waters on the edge of the world for two centuries at least, perhaps even before then, when these campaigns would never be written about. Herman Melville’s novel Moby Dick was published in 1851 and has been described as a allegory of life, or a book dealing with fate, religion, the new economic age and whatever. What the critics overlook is that it is the first, vast, angling campaign ever to be written about… even if, strictly speaking, a whale is a mammal, not a fish. We piscators have been following in Captain Ahab’s wake ever since.

I like to think of anglers sailing  to Norway in the late 19th century after enormous salmon and weathering weeks of failure. I recall Norfolk pike anglers heading to Lomond in the 1960s and 1970s in search of supposed 50lb monsters and, of course, coming back defeated again and again but always with heads held high. Some of the famous carp captures these 70 years past have only come about because of hundreds and thousands of hours on the bank. Remember Eric , the monster mirror carp of the  Railway Lakes? Throughout my younger life, endless anglers made the pilgrimage to Lenwade, set up camp after Eric but nigh on always retired defeated. For 20 years, Eric was Norfolk’s great white whale, our very own Moby Dick.

There are several comments to be made about these fantastical angling quests, I believe. In the internet age, when knowledge is bandied about with lightning speed, there is less room for mystery in angling , as there is in life itself. The campaigns of the past were made great because the anglers involved had very little knowledge or information to work with. In the main, these fishermen and women were true pioneers, battling sometimes enormous odds.

I’d also say that the exponential rise of commercials and the saturating effect of stocked fish have dulled our sense of adventure, weakened our spirit and lulled us into the belief that success can come easy.

True success in angling NEVER comes easy in my mind. If a fish is that easy to catch, then why catch it all? No, the true pinnacle of fishing is only reached by blood, sweat and tears. But, when that pinnacle is achieved, the resulting euphoria simply sweeps you away. I caught my 3lb roach at long, long last on a Friday dusk in winter 1976. I didn’t sleep until Monday night so adrenalin blasted was I by the capture. Know what? I can still remember the exact moment that fish hit the net and the exultation when the Avon scales swung two ounces past the mark. It’s achievements like this that make angling the dynamic sport that it once was and should be into the future.