JEAN PIERRE FOUGEAT FEATURE, 1982
Keith recalls the keen angling brain of a Continental master of early pole fishing
FROM the late 1970s to the mid-1980s I managed a tackle shop in south London. One of my customers was the late John Carding who, at the time, was probably Britain’s foremost expert on modern Continental – specifically French – match angling. He was a regular visitor to the famous Favry Peche store in Angers which, at the time, had five floors of predominantly match tackle.
He counted Robert and Jacques Tesse and Jean Desque among his friends, and considered Jean Pierre Fougeat to be the best angler he’d ever seen. He wasn’t far wrong!
I know ‘Sir’ Dick Clegg rated him very highly too.
Fougeat, at the time, fished exclusively with a pole and, with all domestic and international matches fished to virtually the same rules – points per fish and per gramme – his tactics were geared to victory.
Nowadays many match anglers here in the UK, especially on commercial fisheries, spend more time preparing their tackle than actually fishing, but back in the day I’ll bet most of my generation didn’t even have a hooklink tied up – we set up on the bank based on what we could see in front of us. This wasn’t the Continental way, and Fougeat, in particular, was a total perfectionist when it came to getting his kit right. No10 shot were a new thing here, whereas French ‘Styl’ weights went far smaller, a No7 Styl being the equivalent of a No13 shot. Try biting one of those on!
French anglers were mostly seen as speed merchants, basing their tactics on the ‘lowest common denominator’ principle – it’s more reliable to catch 500 ‘points’ of bleak than bream!
Fougeat had gold and bronz
