Many of you reading this, no doubt, are members of the Anglers’ Net On Facebook page. If not, you can CLICK HERE to view it. Hopefully, you’ll add your name to the list of members.
When I first set up the page, I wanted to recruit more members and offered to send a donation to the RNLI if we reached 2,500 members, rather than just give my money to one of the search engines in exchange for advertising. This happened quite quickly. So quickly, in fact, that I decided to set up a £100 per year membership in lieu of the fact.
Next, I said I’d donate £100 of my own money to Macmillan Cancer Support when we reached 5,000 ‘fans’. I’m happy to report that this happened over the weekend and I just made the call.
I’ve never been so happy to give away some money. Macmillan Cancer Support are a fantastic charity and I have fond memories of meeting one of my life heroes, Alan Taylor, at a fund raising carp fishing event for Macmillan organised by the superb Stoney And Friends.
Alan Taylor was one of life’s characters. He was full of enthusiasm and you couldn’t fail to smile when he was about. He even wrote a great skate-fishing piece for Anglers’ Net, which you can view here.
Alan had organised a load of his friends to attend this fish-in. This was no mean feat, when you consider that they came over from Holland just for this! Alan was so proud, and rightly so, of the fact that he’d raised so much money for Macmillan AND got to meet some of his friends that he’d made through the Anglers’ Net forums.
In a cruel twist of fate, Alan got diagnosed with lung cancer a while later and was taken from us at far too young an age. It says something about the man that I still think of him often, despite the fact that we only met in person a couple of times.
That is why I chose Macmillan as one of the causes to give to. I’m sure many of our forum members would support that choice of charity.
I’ve got another charity in mind for our next milestone, which will be 10,000 members. I won’t mention them yet, as I’ve just emailed them to check that they are happy for me to donate money (I couldn’t find a way on their website). Once they get back to me, I’ll let you know. This one is angling-related and another that many of you will have heard of.
Watch this space!
Elton
P.S. In the meantime, please join us on Facebook. Click here to see our page.
