Welcome to Bob Roberts Online, my continually evolving presence on the worldwide web. Let’s hope you find the content entertaining and informative. The ‘new’ site is still in its infancy following a disastrous crash. It is my intention to upload new articles regularly. Feel free to ask questions or leave comments but above all, try and enjoy yourself, after all it’s only fishing…
Who The Hell Is Bob Roberts?
If you’re an angler then Bob Roberts is a name that should need little introduction. Bob has been one of the UK’s highest profile anglers for almost thirty years. The term all-rounder barely begins to describe his talents. He’s also living proof that a leopard can change its spots having been successful as a match angler, carp angler and all-round specialist angler.
Bob reluctantly published his first article way back in 1986 after much cajoling and encouragement from Colin Dyson, the then editor of Coarse Fisherman magazine. It was never Bob’s intention to become a writer, having left school aged 15, shy, self conscious and with precious few ambitions. “I was a lazy sod!” Said Bob. But Colin was quick to recognise a talent and with a little guidance and encouragement unleashed the angling phenomenon that is the Bob Roberts we know today.
“It’s funny. I never saw myself as a writer and dreaded seeing that first article being published. Colin had helped me with lots of information and he called in the favour asking me to write three articles, ‘just for him’ was the deal. He never actually told me he would be publishing them until I received a call telling me to watch out for the next issue of Coarse Angler magazine. I dreaded getting on the bus for our first club match after the debut article appeared. After all, a kid from a mining village pretending to be a writer? Boy would I have the Mickey taken out of me.
But it didn’t happen. Folk were quick to ask when the next one was coming out and what would it be about. Oh dear, that wasn’t in the script.
So I came up with another three articles thinking that would exhaust my experience and I could go back to my club matches and forget about writing altogether.
Whether Colin was a talent spotting genius, simply got lucky or I ran away with the idea that I could write, it’d hard to tell, but publishing that first article was like striking oil and ideas came gushing out. Suddenly I couldn’t stop writing and it was in danger of taking over my life. It’s strange to think that even as recent as twenty years ago we didn’t have computers. I didn’t even have a typewriter. The articles were written in longhand.
When Colin gave up the editor’s seat at Coarse Angler Bob’s loyalty to the title ended. “I found it very difficult to get on with the new editor and accepted an offer to write for David Hall. That was fortuitous because Coarse Angler, the UK’s largest selling magazine, the only one of that time to carry audited ABC circulation figures, went bust (without me!).
Life with Mr Hall was to prove both interesting and exciting. David loved the company of anglers and he also liked to party. It’s hard to imagine today that the DHP stable began life in David’s converted attic. Back then it was just a couple of magazines, Coarse Fishing and Match Fishing but luminaries like Des Taylor and the England manager Mark Downes both worked out of there with David, wife Cherry and Roger Mortimer.
David was equally inspirational in his own way. Very different to Colin mind. For David, Bob wrote a regular column in Coarse Fishing plus occasional contributions to Match Fishing.
When Coarse Fishing re-launched as Let’s Go Coarse Fishing one column became two. In between times he provided material for magazines like Carp World, Coarse Fisherman and Catchmore Carp. There were occasional forays into manufacturers’ catalogues, the odd Continental magazine and America beckoned briefly.
Major articles in In-Fisherman magazine plus appearing on In-Fisherman TV were real adrenaline rushes. And opportunities unfolded to appear on TV and radio back home, not to mention videos, more of which later.
Somewhere in between Bob was approached by Keith Higginbottom and invited to write a weekly column in Angling Times. Whey-hey, he was in the big time!
And there was David’s foray into the carp world, “Would I care to attend a meeting regarding the launch of a new magazine? I went along more out of intrigue and left as the founding editor of Advanced Carp Fishing. The next six years were going to be as demanding as life gets as I juggled a full-time day job with burning the midnight oil on Advanced Carp. I also managed to keep up my other writing commitments and did a fair bit of fishing, too.”
That kind of pace couldn’t last forever and eventually Bob had to make a decision as to whether he gave up the day job and become a full-time writer. Common sense prevailed and he gave David six months notice of his intention to quit. Advanced Carp had established itself as the UK’s largest selling carp magazine and is something he will always be proud of, but other challenges lay ahead. all this writing had eaten into his valuable fishing time.
As a club angler Bob was always ahead of the game and there comes a point where you have to say that as much as you enjoy the whole scene, you really should be competing at a higher level. So he moved onto the open circuit and to be honest, was found wanting at the outset.
Okay, he won his share of opens and one or two pretty big events, but the draw was ever more important at that level. At club level you could make something of a bad peg because less experienced anglers would waste a flier or two. At open level that simply didn’t happen. You had to endure the bad runs and the only way to end them was to fish more often, which was expensive both financially and time-wise and Bob was lacking in both departments.
Team fishing wasn’t for him, either. Okay, he was a founder member of the Goldthorpe team that won back-to-back National Championships but the testosterone fuelled environment and the need to bank run, to attend endless meetings, to practise on rubbish venues and then to top it all, to fish for points and follow a team plan when you drew a flier was not something he can honestly say he enjoyed.
Team match fishing had to go, but the competitive streak didn’t. It came in really handy when Bob received an invitation to compete in the inaugural UK Masters Angling Championships that would be televised on Sky. The format was ingenious, take a 300 acre estate, ten lakes, a mile and a half of river and then invite 50 of the UK’s most successful anglers. A competition was run to see who caught the biggest carp, tench, bream, roach, pike, etc, of the season. Take the winners of the National Championships, various river championships and a few big names besides, then let them go head-to-head and decide who was the UK’s top angler.
The result was a field of very experienced, successful anglers who were let loose on the estate for 38 hours straight from Friday evening until Sunday morning. At stake were points. If you landed the biggest roach you got 25 points, the second biggest was awarded 24 points and so on down to one point. Nine species were on the agenda. All you had to do was catch as many of them as possible in them in the allotted time.
Trouble was you had to do it on foot carrying all your gear.
At the end of 38 gruelling hours the leader board told its sorry tale and the field was then cut to the top 25 anglers who would then fish a four-hour match for another 25 points. Whoever finished the event with the most points would be crowned the UK Masters Angling Champion, on TV, and be presented with a cheque for £5,000, which back in 1996 was a fair old chunk of cash.
Well, suffice to say Bob cocked up the first year, won the match mind, and then came storming back to be crowned the UK Masters Angling Champion in 1997. He won the match in 1999 as well, which was fitting as it was to be his final competitive match.
By now he was a published author. The Complete Book Of Legering completely sold out its initial print run of 6,000 copies but alas the publisher decided to pull out of the angling book market leaving him with a dilemma, “The title was still in demand but I could do nothing. By now I had made several videos (mostly stinkers!) but one, on feeder fishing, was a big hit in Poland of all places. The Poles were truly taken with the ‘wiggle-tip’. They wanted to reprint the book but it would have cost me more to buy permission from the publisher than the total sum on offer so that one hit the buffers. It was a totally frustrating time.”
Fishing abroad took his fancy, too, and he’s been fortunate to make fairly regular trips to America, Canada, Africa, India, Asia and Europe, “For a while he was been bitten by the mahseer bug and four trips in four years to various parts of India and Nepal haven’t produced any monsters but it’s been an experience I would not have missed for the world…”
Back in the Nineties, seduced by the glare of lights and TV cameras, making videos seemed a great idea but mostly Bob was hopeless in front of a camera and it took a week with Keith Arthur, Mickey Sheppard and his crew to realise he could actually do it quite well. But you can’t turn the clock back and your mistakes will haunt you for many years to come in Poundland and other ignominious outlets. What’s more, you don’t earn so much as a penny from your tormentors. On the positive side he did make a series of six programmes for a Humberside cable TV company and they went down really well, even if it was to a limited audience.
In 1997 Bob also took on the role of angling columnist for a South Yorkshire sports newspaper, ‘The Green Un’.
“My first columns were penned under Colin Dyson’s byline when he took ill.” Said Bob. “I wasn’t to know that he had cancer or that it was terminal. Colin wasn’t the kind of bloke who made a fuss. He just asked if I’d write the column for a while until he got better. It was typical of the man I had come to respect so much.”
“The Green Un gave me a platform to inspire club match anglers and each year I run a competition to crown a champion. By 2008 the payouts topped £8,000 which is pretty amazing for an event of its kind. We had great sponsorship thanks to Tony Flint at Climax Tackle and then Daiwa Sports but Covid put paid to the columns I was writing and without publicity the sponsorship dried up. Such panic set in with Covid that all freelance contributors were released and the columns consigned to history but not before I had racked up 1,200 consecutive angling columns.
Bob’s writing has been recognised by the Angling Writers Association who named him The Local Newspaper Columnist Of The Year twice in three years .
Bob wrote a monthly diary for Improve Your Coarse Fishing magazine for almost two decades until it ceased publication in 2024 and was a regular guest on Sky TV’s Tight Lines angling programme.
Long may it all continue.
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