Andy Butler on Fishing

If you want to know how I started fishing, I had a little dingy and I took it … I was married then of course, got married in ’62. We took it down to Wheelers Bay and it had just sort of opened up for people to put their boats and the only other person down there was Dave Wheeler and we had … I got friendly with …

We had four sites between us and I think we were the only ones there weren’t we and Dave was driving buses and doing a bit of fishing and he said, “You ought to do a bit of fishing” so that’s how it started.

And then he and I built a boat in his shed ‘cos he lived at Wheelers Bay then and it sort of carried on from there really.

I said to my wife, “Do you fancy going fishing full time?” She said, “Yeah, lets do it” and that’s what we did.

And the two friends of mine who were full time commercial fishermen operated from a small Bay at St Lawrence called Battery Bay, and they had just decided to move from there to go to fish out of Bembridge.

They were known as ‘The Ventnor Pirates’ so if you talk to Bembridge people of the right age and they remember them. So, my wife and I took over the Bay and we stayed there and fished out of there for nearly 20 years, but we didn’t do anything else. We just fished, that was all we did. That was our only income.