This man has been there and seen it all, worn the t-shirt, hoodie and hat and must have heard it all before. I thought he must get so bored with all these kinds of interviews and topics and will probably show only a small amount of enthusiasm towards me. How wrong I was.
When I pulled up in front of the garage Jules met me with a smile and a handshake and led me in to the kitchen where he put the kettle on and made us a coffee while I flicked through a copy of Carp Side of the Moon by Pete Springate, I only got to read a little but it certainly looks like a fantastic book.
We had a chat about music, festival mud and next years Download lineup. With Julian being a huge rock fan and myself loving everything from metal to heavy rock and beyond it was nice to break some ice and nerves over the subject.
We got on to the topic of earning a living from fishing and writing but the actual reality of it is not the dream people think it is. Julian himself had been writing articles and stories for almost 10 years before he was paid for one of them and that was in 1988 for Carpworld. I learnt that consultants only get paid quite a small amount, between £500 and £2000 a year which is certainly not enough to pay a mortgage. And unless you are employed full time by a tackle or bait company or own/manage/direct one then you will need to work full time and fish in your own time (which requires hard graft and dedication) to get noticed and make a name for yourself in the angling media world. One thing that Jules said as he pointed around his house was 'Fishing aint paid for this' and I think that showed me how Julian has worked extremely hard for what he has got and his place among carp fishing greats.
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| I asked Jules to sign this for me.... |
I would love to write for a living though. Not just about fishing but maybe one year I could be sat bank side while typing away at a novel or trying to meet a deadline for some publisher or another, ah the dream.
For a while now I have read Julians monthly column in Crafty Carper and one of the first things I wanted to ask him about it was how it all first started for him.
"I was never particularly any good at school and I was at a grammar school! The thing with a grammar school is, if you were really bright they looked after you but if you weren't that bright they would just let you carry on with it and not really take an interest in you.
I mean I'm talking four, five or six o'levels was classed as not overly bright and they would just let you get on with it. I never really excelled at anything, I wasn't rubbish at all but I was in the five c's or six c's or five d's sort of area and the only teacher that ever showed any interest in me was a bloke called Eric Taylor.
Now he was a writer and I love to read because I love books. I used to love war stories of Sven Hassel (A novelist of the wartime German army) and Leo Kesler (A pseudonym of Charles Whiting, A British military historian) and I remember he used to watch me as I used to always be reading and he came up to me one day and said
'You could write those stories,'
'I couldn't' I said
'Of course you could'
he told me 'All you have to do is come up with a conclusion for your story, write that down and then you start your story from there.'
So he taught me how to write and I thought this is the first time I'd done something at school that I liked. I wasn't really into Maths or Geography but English, yeah I like this. So I found something that I liked which was fishing and I used to read all the fishing magazines and now I could write properly too.
My mum was an author as well and one day I wrote a question to Ask Billy Lane, he answered and it was published. Then I would write little fishing stories for my English work at school. I find it a lot harder to study Law than I do to write a book about my life and fishing."
Obviously I was here to talk to Jules about his start in the sport and how he progressed. I found it really interesting that this carping legend had no real interest in fishing until a chance meeting when he was in his teens.
"I was never really interested in fishing as none of my family was interested in it, all I knew of fishing was off Whitby pier. I was quite lucky that me and a few mates went for a push bike ride near Drax power station and we happened to be riding around the pond on our push bikes, this was in 76 and I was 13. There was an old chap sat behind a tench screen with two rods and a pipe in his mouth and my mates rode past but I saw him lift his rod up and I thought 'what's he doing' so I stopped and watched him lift in to a fish and he played a tench in. And I thought 'that's really interesting.' I watched him and so he explained to me what he was doing and I thought it was absolutely brilliant and I had no interest in fishing at all until then and it was just one of those fluke things that I happened to see this bloke catch, I mean if he would have caught a 2oz fish then I probably would have rode on but it was a tench about 4lbs and I was like wow! And it just looked like he was at peace with the world. It was a really calm day, a little misty and warm and he looked happy and to me it just looked really good. So yeah that's how it all started for me."
I first thought that Julian must have been born with a carp rod in his hand! But as I learnt it was a very different story, who know's what might have happened if a 3oz bream had been on the end of that line? We might not have had the hard rocking carping machine we do today. The sight of that deep green flank and blood red eyes awoke the fisherman inside as he went on to tell me.
"When I saw him catch that tench for me it was really weird because I really love my rock music and motorbikes and all the loud stuff and the reality of it is we have this" he pointed around. "I live in the middle of nowhere and I love it quiet. To me I'm the worst social angler in the world because when I go fishing I just want to be me with the environment and what appealed to me with what he was doing was it was quiet, it was the middle of nowhere and he looked happy and I thought 'oh that's really good.'
I watched him a couple more times and then I went in to Woolworths and bought a Winfield 9ft Topaz rod which I have still got upstairs and a black Intrepid Boyo reel. You know I was a kid and had no money so what we used to do was use tic-tac boxes as floats, fill them up with a little water until they just sat.
In the olden days there used to be these proper little fishing shops where we used to go and spend our pocket money on A float or A packet of hooks or a bit of Bayer Perlon (line) and that's how it developed for me. I was just lucky though as the pond that I was fishing was a specimen pond, Drax, where I was catching lots of little roach and bream but every so often I would hook a specimen fish and it would power off and I would think it was a big tench or whatever. I was just lucky that I fished a good water."
We have all been there when that float has bobbed under and you've struck into something that was defiantly not the fish you were looking to catch. I have and that inspired me to up my gear and progress to the bigger specimen fishing. I asked Jules how he progressed to specimen fishing.
"I love reading and I used to read the magazines all the time and see the pictures of the big roach, bream, tench and pike and it got to where instead of putting one maggot on the hook I would but two or three and then you would hook in to say a 6oz roach that took some line off you! And then you progressed on to the bream. I started to fish for bigger fish but had no interest in fishing for carp then. But what is funny was that the bloke who I saw fishing and I was fishing with was Eric Hodson who founded the British Carp Study Group, BCSG, with Peter Mohan in the 60's and he had no interest in carp now at all, he used to call them steam pigs and preferred his tench fishing.
So we used to fish for tench in the summer and then pike in the winter so it went tench, pike to closed season, tench, pike to closed season and then from say 1980 for three or four years I was specimen fishing just for tench and pike. So by the time it got to 82/83 I had had a few little carp (up to about 8lb) but it didn't really do anything for me, I'd seen what I thought to be record tench in the shallows, these big dark shapes moving through the water I had no idea what they where I just thought they were big tench. So I was just a course fishing specimen hunter, I loved my Tench (up to 7lb in Yorkshire), my Bream (to 8lb), my Eels (up to 3.5lbs) double figure Pike they were all good fish to me as I was a specimen hunter. I was a member of the Ebor Specimen Group in York which had Jeff Crawford in it and a few other guys who were carp anglers and I was the young lad that fished for big tench."
It seems as though Julian loved every aspect of course fishing and with him fishing the Drax pond it was only a matter of time before he would get in to the bigger carp, wasn't it?
"Obviously there are a lot of big carp in Drax. Eric stocked it in the early 70s with young fish and I'd say by the time I was fishing it the biggest was certainly a good double figure fish and even though I had a few smaller fish it still did nothing for me. But I remember it must have been in 85 a couple of carp anglers turned up on the lake and I looked at their set up and thought 'wow that is completely different to my fishing.' They had the bedchairs, Cardinal 55 reels and Kevin Maddocks rods. They had Optonics (alarms) and big landing nets, one was reading a Hutchy book, the other a Maddock book. And just as I did with Eric I thought it looked really interesting but it still wasn't enough to pull me away from my tench fishing.
I was still fishing using sweetcorn threaded onto the hook and I remember catching a 12lb 12oz carp at Drax and that was it! There was something different between catching an 8lb fish and a 12lb one. It was just wow! All of a sudden I was starting to get more and more into my carp fishing and then I remember one of the guys showed me the hair-rig in the mid 80s. I thought 'no way is this going to work!' A huge boilie hanging under a size eight hook with a bit of matchstick as a boilie stop!
I remember I was fishing with a girlfriend at the time and I decided to cast the rig over to the edge of a weed bed still thinking it wont work but I'll give it ten minutes as you do but it literally roared off after a few minutes and that was when I thought woah! That was the first time the fish was self hooking as before that you would be sat up all night staring at a Drennan beta light waiting for it to twitch or sit watching a bobbing creeping up, and then when I caught that carp I thought 'I really like this.'
What interested me the most in Kevin Maddocks was the way he was technical about it all. I'm not particularly free thinking as in I'm very practical and theoretical and all of a sudden Kevin would say 'You want a size 8 hook of this type, you want this and that' and all of a sudden he explained it all rather than me just casting a boilie out or a link ledger and that's when I started to understand what I was doing and then it took hold of me and from then it just went forwards."
So from being shown a hair rig back in the 80s by an angler that inspired him, did Julian ever think that some day he would be such a well known figure in the carp fishing world?
"Funnily enough" he laughed "I don't really say this a lot but when I was growing up in school you probably wouldn't have recognised me. I used to be the little fat weird kid that liked Fishing and Kiss ( an 80s rock band) who lived in the country side and his mother is a vicar, now that isn't a great social outlet believe you me! And I remember my mum saying to me 'it doesn't matter what other people think about you, you like what you like, you don't have to like what other people like.'
So I was going fishing and enjoying it and listening to my rock music and enjoying it. Everyone else was 'I like Grease and I like the New Romantics and I like dancing' I would say 'Well I like Rock music and motorbikes' and that other stuff was not for me.
I have always been what I like is what I like and I wont bend it for other people. I remember going to a fishing meeting in 1986 before I had a car or anything and my dad took me. I watched Roger Smith and Bob Jones who were in the Savay book, I could recite their chapters. They were doing a slide show and I thought to myself, I could do that, I could do that talk. And they explained what they did. How they 'went down to the pond and cast out and caught a carp' and I looked at all the kids watching them as though they were superheroes and I thought to myself 'I want to make something of myself and whether its right or wrong I don't care what people think and one day I will be doing slideshows and people are going to know who I am.'
I literally thought that I was going to change myself. I looked at where I lived and realised I'm never going to catch bigger fish than what I have here or a greater number of fish so I created an image for myself to stand out from the crowd because all carp anglers were the same. They would all be slightly overweight and had combat gear on and never washed or looked after themselves on the bank. The only people that stood out to me were Kevin Maddocks and Ron Hutchinson. People that people gravitated to were ones that they could remember visually.
So I made it so that people would remember me visually. After that I started writing a lot and I got put down for that so many times for being un-famous from my area. People were saying 'Who are you to write for Carpworld? Who are you to be writing for Carp Fisher?' So I got a lot of slagging for it but I was determined that I was going to do it my way and on my terms and so I created me. My brand.
I took inspiration from Kevin Maddocks, I copied his analytical approach and the writing style of Tim Paisley. I used a few peoples ideas but I didn't want to be like them. I didn't want to be lets say the next Terry Hearn, or the next Danny Fairbrass or Ali Hamidi. I wanted to be me, the first Julian Cundiff.
It wasn't easy at all! It does not make you popular to try and stick your head above the parapet. So yeah I did think that I would be remembered but could never imagine what would happen. I always looked long term and thought about what I did today and how would it effect me tomorrow or next week or next year or in ten years on. Which is what a lot of people don't do now. They will look at what they are doing now and only what effects them now and then a year later when it comes to bite them on the bum and they haven't looked far enough in to the future and they think 'Ah crap, yeah I have caught a few fish but what do I do now?' I never wanted that, to be scraping a living on the bank catching big carp. I always looked long term with everything I did. I knew what I wanted and I knew what I had to do to get there and I did it my way rather than copying other people."
So that's the end of part one guys. It is quite a lengthy read so have a brew and then read part two where we cover the more up to date side of carp fishing, rigs and where he thinks the sport is headed.
Matt
Cracking read mate. If a non-angler can enjoy what you've written here, you're obviously doing something right!
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