Roach Project Presentation

 

 

 

We were recently delighted and indeed honoured to be asked to give our PowerPoint presentation to the Dorset Chalk Stream Club over in Dorchester. It turned out to be more ‘an evening with the Avon Roach Project’ rather than just a presentation, where we not only did our presentation for about an hour and a bit, but had a lovely informal question and answer session and even showed our film.

The Dorset Chalk Stream Club is a great little organisation run by all-round good bloke John Aplin, and it really hit the right note with us as it’s not all about who’s who or how big or how much or many; a little bit like our own Roach Club where you don’t need to have caught a two or even three pounder, or written a book or have your face in the press every other week to be considered for membership – in fact almost the exact opposite. It’s simply a celebration of our rivers and fishing of all kinds, our love for them and what it all means to us. Unlike ours, there is no official membership to the DCSC, you just turn up, enjoy and join in; take along a plate of food, get a drink from the pub over the road and help stack all the tables and chairs away at the end of the evening.

Gatherings occur every month in the village hall in West Stafford, which is a delightful building in a delightful village, and perfectly suited for the events.

Far too little of this kind of thing exists in this day and age of increasing speed, demands, digital simulation and decreasing enjoyment and awareness of what exists right under our noses that has an unimaginable power to enrich our lives if we just care to discover it.

It was very refreshing to go along and meet all the folks that turned up on the night.

It was also quite an eye-opener for us in terms of how far the Avon Roach Project has moved on since our last presentation, which really hit home as we sorted the pictures along with some words to accompany them. It is amazing how far off the starting blocks and the original concept we now are and how much genuine history, evolution and actual achievement we can now boast.

We always like to prepare thoroughly for these things and this one was no different. We select the pictures, put them in sequence that tells the story, then add the header captions; we then write bullet point prompts to help us remember what we want to say to accompany the image on the screen. We do a few pictures each in a kind of subject by subject fashion rather than simply take turns to speak. We print sheets of our notes and put the different speaker in different colours, so Trevor in black and Budgie in mid blue. We then carefully fan the sheets and staple them together. We always take a spare couple of copies just in case.

So, what could go wrong?

There we stood in front of a hall of people, John gave us a lovely introduction, then turned the bloody lights out. We could only just make out the odd word on our sheets in the glow of the large screen behind us; so we had to wing it. We got away with it though... after all, get us two talking roach and who needs notes?

The odd camera flash enabled us to see our next line..... Just kidding.



A welcome break for food before we showed our film. However, as you can see in the middle of the shot we are still talking roach in the main hall and nearly missed out.



Our great mate Hugh Miles came along and supported us and John got this nice shot at the end of the evening.



All in all we thoroughly enjoyed ourselves and received some lovely compliments from the folks there. We managed to have a few laughs along the way which we feel softens the whole deal of talking at people for hours.

Visit the Dorset Chalk Stream Club web site at www.dorsetchalkstreams.co.uk for more information.

As this now gets posted we are gearing ourselves up for the frantic time that is netting the stews and releasing fish into the river, which is happening on Wednesday 18^th March, Thursday 19^th and Friday 20^th.

There will be a fourth deposit on April 1^st which is being filmed by SKY telly as a follow up to the one shown last August on ‘Tight Lines.’

Then we'll be placing the spawning boards in the river ready for the roach to go for it this year.

We’ll be posting pictures and links to all this soon.