Musings on fishmongers

One of most important aspects of Channel training is good nutrition. For the last few months I have been diligently eating a lot of fish in the hope that it will a) be healthy and b) make me swim a little quicker. I recently visited a fishmonger in Clapham and enquired which of his wares was the faster. Despite a further explanation of why I wanted ‘fast fish’ I received no satisfactory answer - indeed it became apparent that fish speed is completely omitted from the syllabus at fishmonger school.

Undeterred I have conducted my own (thankfully secondary) research and have been astounded to discover a whole wealth of literature on the subject. Happily the author of my favourite article, "The swimming energetics of trout: Thrust and power output at cruising speed ", P.W. Webb (1971), shares the same family name as the first man to swim the English Channel, Captain Matthew Webb. This can surely be no coincidence. If Mohammed al Fayed were involved in Channel swimming I imagine by now he would be instructing counsel in a bid to implicate the Duke of Edinburgh and MI6.

Further reading:

- Bainbridge, R. 1958. "The speed of swimming of fish as related to the size and to the frequency and amplitude of the tail beat" J. Exp. Biol. 35(1):109-133.

- Webb, P.W. 1971. "The swimming energetics of trout. Thrust and power output at cruising speed" J. Exp. Biol. 55:489-520.

- Videler, J.J. 1993. "Fish swimming" Chapman and Hall, London. 260 p.

Something else you didn't know:

In Shakespeare's Hamlet, some contend, the word ‘fishmonger’ was a euphemism for a pimp. Source: Wikipedia.