Many Sea Angler readers will have been lucky enough to have fished with Bob Cox when he and fellow pioneering skippers invented what became known as uptiding. His son, Sam, recalls what it was like to grow up in the heyday of charter fishing aboard his dad’s boat in the 1970s and 1980s
On the 15th May 1973 my father and John Rawle set off for an evening’s bass fishing at the mouth of the river Crouch in Essex. On his way out of the door he gave my mum the phone number of the nearest farm; she was nine months pregnant. That evening dad caught a 7lb 6oz bass; the next day I was born weighing 7lb 8oz, or was it 7lb 6oz? He can’t remember.
Almost a year to the day before I was born a young journalist stumbled across a method of angling that would revolutionise sea fishing here in the UK. This journalist was my father, Bob Cox, an enthusiastic photographer and keen angler.
On the evening of 2nd May 1972, he was on board Arthur Wietzle’s charter boat 'Providence' based at Bradwell Marina in Essex. Dad was there to photograph and document the night’s events for an article in the now long-gone Angling magazine. Along with his camera he took a light bass rod and perched himself on the bow of the boat so as not to get in the way of Arthur’s paying punters at the back. Little did he know that this would lead to the development of a method that would see some truly amazing catches of bass, cod, thornback rays, smoothhounds, stingrays and tope.
In the few years that led up to this dad and a hand full of friends regularly fished the beaches and creaks of Essex for smoothhounds and bass. That evening aboard Providence he employed the methods he had used for his shore fishing. He was beach casting from a boat using a standard running ledger with a 3–5oz Breakaway cast out and across the tide. At the end of the session he had caught nine thornback rays and two decent bass. The paying lads who were all just dropping over the side had only caught two thornbacks between them. Dad fished a few times a month from Arthur’s boat and it soon became apparent that what he was doing out fished the conventional over the side method.
By the winter of 1972 one of dad’s angling friends, John Rawle, had been given a boat to skipper, a 33ft Aqua Star called the Aquamanda. This gave them a chance to really develop the method and to try and understand why it worked so well. Other anglers had cast from a boat before, but not with the results that my father had achieved and, more importantly, John and my dad refined the method and came up with the answers to why it worked so well. It was thought by some to be a method only for shallow water, and this does hold some weight: uptiding works well up to depths of around 90ft, beyond that it becomes difficult and unnecessary.
