The only disappointing thing was that I didn’t get a trophy. Only the winner of the 500cc class, the 350cc class and the 250cc class (all classes ran in the same race) got replicas. I just got a little finisher’s disc, which was a bit of a bummer. But I did get a trophy for my eleventh place in the 250cc event later that week which kind of made up for things even though the bike was a total nail – I could have kicked my bloody helmet round the course faster. But I had a great night at the presentation ceremony with Ian Lougher. We got totally legless and I remember pissing myself at him trying to dance to UB40’s song Red Red Wine, which was in the charts at the time. It was hilarious. Ian’s much better on a bike than he is on a dance floor!
When I got on the ferry and headed for home I started thinking about how much I had enjoyed myself over the last couple of weeks. The racing, the nights out, the atmosphere; it was just a great event and I decided there and then that I had to do it again the following year so I started saving for the 1984 event as soon as I got back home. I didn’t even consider racing a full season on short circuits because all I wanted to do was race on the Isle of Man again. Anyway, I couldn’t afford to do a full season with the money I was making.
Looking back now, I wish I could live my life over again. Those were good years when I was still young that I just pissed away, waiting for the Manx and the TT to come round again. What a bloody waste! Had I committed myself fully back then and somehow found some sponsors, who knows where I could be now? I certainly feel as if I should be sitting here with a couple of world titles under my belt, either in World Superbikes or Grand Prix but racing’s full of ‘ifs’ and ‘buts’, so I try not to dwell on it too much.
I did one more race at East Fortune at the end of 1983 and finished sixth on the 125 but that was it for the year. So I just plodded on with my job in the garage over winter, rode my Yamaha DT175MX trail bike to keep my hand in and daydreamed about racing in the TT.
I did, however, have one other way of getting an adrenalin buzz when I wasn’t racing – poaching! For years, my mate, Rod Heard, and I had been mastering the black art of illegally catching salmon and by this point, we were experts. My upbringing on the farm with all the fishing and sneaking up on crows to shoot them had made me a natural at poaching. I either used a shark hook for the job or sometimes I made my own hooks from an old pitchfork. I remember bending and forging specialized hooks in the garage just for poaching. We called them ‘cleeks’ where we came from and there’s a definite knack to using them but seeing as I started poaching when I was about 10 years old, I had mastered it. I even put motorbikes to good use when it came to poaching because I made a huge halogen floodlight which I powered with a bike battery!
I remember on one occasion, when I was about 13, I was hanging over the edge of a banking by the river and looking underneath the overhanging riverbank. There was a huge salmon in there just snoozing with its tail lightly swishing so I grabbed my cleek, held onto a tree and stretched out over the river as far as I could to get some leverage. I thrust the cleek into the ‘tail wrist’ of the fish (between the bones before the tail fin) and then all hell broke loose. Fuck me, the thing nearly pulled me right off the bank and into the water it was so strong. With a massive effort and not a lot of dignity, I managed to get it out of the water and onto the bank. When we finally got it home and weighed it, it was 11 pounds (or five kilos in today’s money) which is fairly big for a salmon.
Problem was, it was so big I couldn’t get it home on my pushbike so I had to conjure up another way of getting it onto the kitchen table. I hid the fish then walked into Bonchester village and rummaged through a few bins looking for empty lemonade bottles then took them to a shop, got about 20 pence back for them and used the money to call my dad from a phone box. ‘Dad, I’ve caught a fish but it’s a bit on the big side. Can you bring the car to take it home?’
So dad turned up, threw the salmon in the boot, and off he went with me peddling home after him. I sort of got into trouble that night because my mum and dad knew I had been poaching but at the same time, dad was chuckling a bit. After all, his son had proved his resourcefulness and there was a bloody great salmon for the whole family to eat, completely free of charge.
I only poached occasionally as a kid and it was mostly for laughs but by the time I was in my late teens, my mate Rod and I were poaching far more frequently. By then we had our own cars to transport the fish so we caught lots of them and started selling them to local pubs who would then serve them up as bar meals. It was a nice little earner.
We got chased many times over the years by water bailiffs, the police and various farmers but one night in particular stands out. We had caught about 16 salmon (which a top angler couldn’t even dream of doing on a two-week fishing holiday) and left each one hidden under a different tree while we caught more. That way, anyone turning up wouldn’t see a whole mound of fish, which would really have given the game away. Besides catching fish from under the overhanging riverbanks or ‘hags’ as we called them, we would wade into the river up to our waists with a torch because the fish were drawn to the light and stayed in it when you shone it on them. Then we’d simply hook them with our cleeks and throw them on the bank.
It was important to never wear Wellington boots because we soon learned we couldn’t run fast enough in them when we were being chased. Waterproof trousers were a no-no too because they were too heavy for running when they got wet and tracksuit trousers were just as bad. So it was jeans and training shoes only; after all, getting soaked was better than getting caught. We might have got away with it as kids but poaching is a serious offence when adults are involved.
Anyway, that night we were doing fine until we saw lots of spotlights heading straight for us. When that happened you forgot the fish and ran like buggery. We got as far as we could on our legs then dropped to our hands and knees and scrambled through ditches and bogs keeping as low as we could out of the spotlights. It was like a scene from The Great Escape! It was about nine o’clock and pitch black and I remember lying in a ditch watching all those cars and vans and all the commotion as the ‘lynch mob’ tried to find us. We were absolutely shitting ourselves.
Eventually, we made our escape down a railway line, crept into Rod’s house and got changed out of our wet clothes and sat about trying to look innocent in case there was a knock at the door. Rod’s mum thought it was all quite funny and she eventually took the dog for a walk to see if there was anyone still down by the riverside. When she said there was no one there we grabbed our torches and went back to try and find the fish that we’d hidden but every one of them was gone. Bastards! We had done all the hard work and they’d pissed off with our fish. How can you own fish swimming in a river anyway? I could never understand how taking fish could be a crime so I just took them. They’re as much mine as anyone else’s.
On most other nights though we did pretty well and managed to make some decent cash from selling our catch to local pubs. It’s fair to say that more than one customer has enjoyed a nice bar lunch of poached salmon (and I don’t mean the way it’s cooked) in a Borders pub without knowing it! Probably paid through the nose for it too.
Mostly, Rod and I used the extra cash to pay for petrol to arse around in our cars but I’m sure that sometimes the savings I had in my bank to go racing were boosted by my poaching activities. I guess I must be the only bike racer ever who poached salmon to help pay for racing! Just a shame I never managed to catch enough to fund a full World Superbike season.
‘The sport which took my brother’s life actually gave me a life.’
Many people, including fellow racers and team bosses, have criticized me over the years for not trying hard enough if my bike’s not set up properly, and that stems from my training as a mechanic when I was a young lad.
I’ve always prided myself on being meticulous when it comes to setting up or fixing bikes, whether they were mine or someone else’s; I suppose in that sense I’m a bit of a perfectionist. So if a team expects me to