It’s a Bishop.
Please click on the image for more information.
A Chris Yates Bishop carp rod. It’s a particularly elegant, lissom one, this. The action is the stuff of dreams. Well, my dreams anyway. My own Bishop (I was raised an Anglican) is slightly earlier and made in the same style but this one is better. It has more than enough substance to handle strong carp to whatever size you might encounter in a largely Protestant country. Furthermore, due to its refined character, it’ll make a nice barbel rod and dare I say it -yes I do dare- a good rod for big chub.
There you have it. A rod that is even lovelier in the flesh than it appears to be in the perfectly nice pictures I’ve taken of it. Have a good look at them before you call me to buy this rod, just as things are warming up for the Glorious 16th of June, when honest anglers begin their carp fishing
Wave a magic wand.
Please click on the image for more information.
It’s a 1997 Chris Yates Merlin. When you put this rod together and give it the inevitable waggle, it makes you want to drop everything (not the rod!) and go fishing. If it wasn’t the closed season, I’d probably have done so. The Merlin in 1997 had reached its zenith, if this one is anything to go by. It has all the classic Merlin qualities and is in many ways very similar to the one we made for Chris Yates. Only the shape of the handle top is significantly different. Chris’s is a sort of shallot shape, this one’s a mushroom. We could make a pie!
Anyway, back to this Merlin and its irresistible loveliness. It’s very light and lively in the hand, absolutely perfectly balanced and not remotely top heavy. We designed all that old nonsense out of the rod, so the arm-straining quirkiness of the 1930s is absent, thank heavens.
I would dearly like this rod. I’d take it out in the punt later this summer with a centre pin, a colossal lunch and a choice of baits. I’d try to catch some perch, a chub or two, perhaps some dace and who knows these days, maybe even a terrapin. Overhead, the parakeets will fly. Flocks of them. It’ll be a like living in a JG Ballard novel, but with better fishing tackle.
You’d better buy this rod before I do. Save it from a surreal and unworthy existence. Terrapins indeed!
Nice weather isn’t it. Have a super Bank Holiday weekend.
Best wishes from Edward Barder & Colin Whitehouse.