ABSTRACT
This chapter examines the social and natural relationships between anglers and fish across the main UK freshwater-angling codes: coarse angling and game angling. In consequence, demarcating what are natural or social relations and practices in UK freshwater angling is difficult to fathom. Yet it is at the point of such nature–society cross-sections that it explores the knotted intimacies, relationalities and separations of angler–fish and angler–angler interactions across the two main UK freshwater-angling codes. In 2009, freshwater anglers' gross expenditure in England and Wales was £1.18 billion, generating 37,386 jobs. Despite such spending power, and the shear popularity of angling, it is relatively rarely researched, sitting 'uncomfortably' between the different policy and academic foci of sport, leisure, recreation and environment. All angling literature, whether it be coarse or game, proclaims a deeply held passion for the sport that drives anglers to leave their beds on cold mornings, to travel significant distances.
