The Water Wolf
It was as deep as England. It held
Pike too immense to stir, so immense and old
That past nightfall I dared not cast.Ted Hughes, ‘Pike’, (1960)
When I was around nine years old I owned one VHS tape that I kept specifically for Mum to record John Wilson’s Go Fishing series on direct from the TV. There was one episode in particular, filmed, I think, somewhere in the Norfolk Broads, that I had watched so many times that the tape itself had started to warp and go fuzzy.
I could recall that episode near verbatim. In fact, I’m pretty sure I still can.
The episode begins with a slightly awkward ‘Hello’ from a thick-rimmed-bespectacled gentleman who bore more than a passing resemblance to a giant land tortoise. I didn’t realize at the time that this was in fact the legendary Dick Walker, a true fishing icon.
In this film Mr Walker was playing the role of surrogate grandad to the thousands of young fisher folk tuning in across the nation; explaining the rudiments of pike angling and biology in a safe environment, before the hero, John Wilson, took over at the sharper end of the spear.
‘Pike are predators, and they’re scavengers too,’ he begins, with a grim-looking stuffed pike staring on blankly from the wall behind. ‘They are very well equipped indeed for both jobs,’ he continued, ‘they will eat practically anything, dead or alive, that will give them some nutriment.’
A pencil-drawn otter is framed over one of the old man’s great oaken shoulders and ancient-looking books surround him. Everything about this office, from the interior to Dick himself, looks like it has been dipped in sepia and warmed up with wood smoke. It was the sort of place where I wanted to be for all time and I poured my consciousness into its cosy security to such an extent that I could well believe Mr Walker was addressing me directly; from right across his well-worn hardwood table to the rug of my parents’ lounge, where I would sit cross-legged, inches from the TV screen.
‘Now, here you can see what I’ve been talking about,’ continues Mr Walker. He reaches down and produces the giant head of a stuffed pike. The warming atmosphere of Dick’s Den is extinguished in an instant, a brooding malevolence creeps into his office and my sense of longing quietly tiptoes back out.
Mr Walker works the head carefully around his fingers, gradually illuminating the business end in the dull light of his table lamp. He says it is from a 43lb giant caught in Ireland but all I can recall is its enormous jaws. Row upon row of razor-sharp fangs along the jaw-line backed up by hundreds more, pinned hard to the roof of the fish’s mouth.
Mr Walker notes how all the teeth angle slightly backwards towards its blackened throat. Whatever goes in there isn’t ever coming out, I thought. ‘Never put your hand in a pike’s mouth,’ says Mr Walker, while clearly running his own thumbs and fingers over the teeth. He was my kind of man.
The film cuts to the heroic Wilson rowing his way alongside a tall reed bed. There is a vast expanse of wild-looking fresh water opening out right behind him; it’s February, it’s bleak, and he even says it’s cold, so just what is he doing in that tiny wooden rowing boat with just a tweed hat for company? I grip the remote tightly and pray nothing bad happens to John.
Somewhere along the edge of the deep water he drops anchor and plucks a small live roach out of a bait tin. He says something nonchalant about only using ‘small’ live baits these days but I can’t help noticing that the roach he has selected is actually the same size as my personal best from the creek. A highly unpleasant sense of shame burns at my cheeks, a feeling I later learn to interpret as a sense of inferiority combined with instant emasculation. I remember how it felt to land that best-ever roach, the euphoric ‘championship-winning’ sensation carried me through the whole summer and the glow stayed with me every night I closed my eyes and thought of that fish. In one swift move by Wilson that feeling had been obliterated: my best was his bait. How, even after a few years of fishing, could it be that the gulf between Wilson and myself, between being a man or just a little boy, was actually widening? He had no idea what he was doing to me of course. Hooking up the roach, he simply swung it out into the water under a large bright-red float and confidently commented: ‘When that goes I’m in business.’
The final pike of the programme comes from ‘the middle of the hole’, which is how Wilson describes the slate-grey no man’s land where he has cast his bait. It is, of course, the beast we have all been waiting for, but incredibly, as Wilson battles it to the side of the boat, he describes it as ‘only a small one’.
The giant pike writhes on a foam mat after he’s got it into the net. It’s long – three or maybe even four feet – with a dark, muscular back leading on to a crocodilian head.
‘As fat as butter!’ exclaims Wilson jubilantly.
He holds his fish up for the camera and I get a good view of its mossy flanks. It is as if an artist had taken the time to delicately flick light-yellow paint along a green pike-shaped canvas, then decided to finish the job by scraping through the lot with a yard brush. The fish’s thick, olive sides may be interspersed with pretty blond flecks and subtle vertical stripes, yet the overall look and feel of the fish are of pure brute savagery.
At the rear of the fish a russet-red and black-striped dorsal fin stands erect and rounded. It is set so far back along the body it almost meets the tail fin. This intentional back-loading of the pike’s powerhouse affords it all the explosive forward motion it needs to intercept prey from a stationary position. Like the perch, they prefer to ambush their prey, but they can also take fish, frogs and even ducks, well out in open water, such is their confidence in their own turn of speed.
Somewhere towards the end of the programme, Wilson rotates his fish so it is head on to the camera lens. The skull is uniquely flattened in appearance, with large, predatory eyes set unusually high on the sides; perfect for peering up from the depths and selecting its next victim.
The grim jaw of Wilson’s fish hisses open like a trapdoor and I can’t help but imagine what it must be like to have that as your last view on earth. Horrid, I would expect. ‘Absolute magic!’ says John victoriously.
When the theme tune kicks in I am left alone with a feeling of raw inadequacy. I was nine, almost ten, and quite desperate for a pike of my own. It represented much more than just another fish. It symbolized growing up, doing something on my own, facing my fears – in short: being a man; but if the fish that Wilson caught in the film really was ‘only a small one’, and the bait he used as big as my personal best, then how could I ever expect to manage a pike for myself?
The beginning of the winter of ’92 saw me fish like I had never fished before. For three months straight I was out almost every single night, drawing a triangular-shaped piece of shiny metal through every inch of the Creek’s brown water, but trapped deep in a piker’s purgatory.
Spinning for pike was my first major new fishing skill after five years of float-fishing for the Creek’s roach and perch. Until that point I had been pretty much sat on my hands waiting for a bite, but spinning required constant movement of both myself and my hook: to animate the spinner – literally, to get it to spin, and make it flash through the water like an injured silverfish.
Winding the spinner in on my line would only last about twenty seconds in the narrow Creek, which meant I was now casting many more times in a day than ever before. Given my earlier problems with this most basic of fishing skills, I felt I was now risking my end tackle almost twice a minute. To make matters significantly worse, I also learnt the most likely pike-holding areas were right under the trees and along the reed beds: the very obstacles I had spent the previous half-decade trying to avoid casting towards. The arms of the trees and roots of the reeds might have been tackle thieves, but the shade and shelter they afforded the pike made them the perfect ambush points for any unsuspecting fish. To stand a chance of a pike I had to land my spinner perfectly: firmly in the pike’s lair and within an inch of the devastating grasp of the bankside bush.
Grandad wasn’t interested in helping at all. ‘Pike fishing is too easy,’ he would say dismissively. Perhaps he understood this was a fish I needed to meet by myself, but the effect of his words was to heap yet more pressure on my infantile shoulders. If it really was easy, then why couldn’t I just catch one?
Looking back, I know precisely what the problem was: my retrieve was always too fast and too uniform. I would never let the spinner drop beneath the top six inches of surface water, meaning any interested pike would have to come right up off the bottom to grab it; nor did I vary the speed of my draw to allow the lure vital space to flit and flutter along like a wounded fish, meaning, in the eyes of a predator, that my spinner was in fact a turbo-charged superfish with a full bill of health.
Zipping my spinner across the Creek’s surface merely served to give onlookers the impression I was a man out pike fishing, the man I wanted them to believe I was, while, in reality, I was never really giving myself a chance of hooking my quarry. Effectively, I was a rank boxing amateur dancing round the undefeated prizefighter without ever getting close enough to throw a meaningful punch, or get hit myself. I was simply too terrified of the potential consequences of hooking a pike, and too bloody-minded to just give up.
There is a unique existential crisis brought on by anyone seriously into pike fishing.
‘Why am I here?’ is a question that will inevitably pass the lips of this peculiar breed of angler.
Fish are as much a product of their environment as are the people who angle for them. Carp, with their fat scales, soft mouths and friendly curves, have the look and feel of summer, to be had from lily-strewn ponds and picture-perfect lakes. The typical carp angler prefers fairer weather and appears built for comfort, not speed; paradoxically, though, the fatter the carp, the slimmer and more pathological the bent of the carp fisherman, and no one should doubt that even the laziest-looking carp, and carper, has an extraordinary turn of pace when it is required. The barbel’s golden hue is classic autumn; its angular fins are shaped and coloured like an early leaf drop and the torpedo shape marks this fish out as a specimen of fast water. The barbel fisherman, like the fish, is a shrewd and romantic character, a lover of nature and hardy too – easily capable of withstanding stormy weather and early starts – but this angler can’t match the pike and pike angler for sheer durability. They are the embodiment of winter and both thrive on a rare form of neglect.
Of course, you can catch pike in the summer, and there are many anglers who fish for all fish species all year round, but the pike are at their largest in mid-winter, and it takes a very special breed of fisherman to convincingly morph their own character to match up to the deep cold their quarry prefers. As a child, I was a pretender, a mere sheep in wolf’s clothing, but, unbeknown to me at the time, my dad was about to give me a big helping hand.
On the Creek you know spring is around the corner as soon as the daffodils outnumber the snowdrops. Time was running out for my first pike and me. Soon the water would warm and the river-fishing season would close till 16 June. I lay in my bed near wild with frustration.
I couldn’t sleep that particular night for two distinct reasons: firstly, I had discovered Dad had taped over Flash Gordon at the precise moment he begins to turn things around in his fight to the death with Barin, and ‘Flash! I love you! But we only have fourteen hours to save the Earth!’ was now for ever jump-cut with Geoff Hamilton talking about manure on Gardeners’ World. Naturally I was furious, but the second reason I was counting sheep was considerably more devastating.
Just as Mum and Dad had been going to bed I had overheard them have the following conversation right outside my room:
‘Will is spending a lot of his time fishing at the moment, even more than normal,’ said Mum, standing on the landing as Dad came up the stairs.
‘He’s trying to catch a pike,’ replied Dad.
‘Really?’ answered Mum, with audible concern in her voice. ‘Isn’t that dangerous?’
‘Not really,’ said Dad, ‘but don’t worry, he won’t get one in. He’s not strong enough.’
The words slapped my eardrum and tore straight into my heart. Instantly, I could feel hot tears filling up my face and bee-lining for my tear ducts. It was the first time I had ever heard Dad doubt I could do anything. We had always been brought up on the principle that you can succeed at anything if you just try your best, yet here he was saying that, despite everything I was putting into it, I was never going to be good enough.
I tried to cover my ears with the pillow and will his words to leave my brain. Every fear I had suppressed to that point had been realized in full; the shadow of self-doubt reared up and smothered me in my bedsheets.
Hours later I was still very much awake. I gritted my teeth and thumped my fists on the duvet. Why would he say that? How dare he say that?
I got up and looked at myself in the mirror; my sense of my own shortcomings was quickly being replaced with a wild rage. That was a total betrayal from Dad. I glowered back at myself. I would show him; I would prove I did have the strength.
In its elemental form pike fishing necessitates in an individual a curious brand of madness: crumbling docklands, isolated rivers and windswept reservoirs – the last places your average anglers would choose to spend their time; but the purist piker casts into these locations with a sort of masochistic thrill, fearlessly fishing a fearful landscape for a fish seemingly without fear.
In my late twenties I fished a handful of times for pike in a long, narrow fenland dyke called the Cuckoo Drain. You could probably spend a lifetime searching through the names of waterways and not find one as ill-fitting as the ‘cuckoo’ moniker given to this place. The cuckoo throws up more than simply the iconic bird sound of spring; it is the vision of renewal: a glade filled with fresh-sprung wild flowers, an oaken woodland rousing itself after a week of rain, the resurgence and resilience of life – a clarion call to heat the soul, reminding us that winter has passed and the good times are here once more. The Cuckoo Drain in winter was miles of pure brutality. Its near unrelenting misery placed it well among the hardest places I have ever fished. Thus it was near perfect for big pike.
It took some time simply to find the place, tucked, as it was, tight between a pumping station and a dip between two brown fields that stretched ad infinitum. As all fenland drains contain pike of some measure, and with Cuckoo both being deep and sporting a good head of shoaling roach and bream, it seemed fair to assume there might well be some decent-sized resident fish. This assumption was backed up by the only person I ever saw down there besides me: a typical piker, tall and grizzled with a rugged ginger beard and slightly gaunt appearance; he strongly resembled a starving Viking.
Few words were wasted between him and me. ‘Anythin’ doin’?’ he would mumble. I would answer in the negative, and repeat his question back to him. ‘Nuffin’ doin’,’ he would respond with a sniff. I was really quite intimidated.
I decided to take a small spinning rod and had huge early success with a trio of fine averagely sized fish on my first outing; but from that moment forward I really struggled. It was as if the drain itself had lured me in with the promise of pike, only so it could then enjoy watching me endure an endlessly barren ice-cold search along its desolate banks.
After a dozen or so visits I began to seriously question whether those early pike had been a mirage. Pike-shaped sprites, kelpies, spirits or sirens? Even the Viking was nowhere to be seen by the bitter end of that bitterest of seasons. A barn owl would usually emerge when there was an hour of daylight remaining. It offered cold comfort, haunting the banks and circling my position like a ghostly vulture, just waiting for me to drop so it could pick apart my frozen carcass.
It would take until my final visit for the drain to yield me another pike. A slamming take and dogged fight marked it out as a decent fish, a good double for sure, but, as I reached down to slip my fingers into its gills, a hard headshake left only the tip of one hook in its stiff upper lip.
I had been fishing with two treble hooks on a wire trace specifically designed for the bony mouth of the pike. The extra hook points (six in this case) should give you a greater chance of landing this hard-mouthed fish, but with just one hook-hold left I now stood a very slim chance of success unless I acted quickly.
I tried to get a solid grip on the fish once more, but another violent headshake brought a tearing sound and the warming feel of fresh blood spilling across my hands. The numbing cold had dampened my pain receptors to such an extent that it took several seconds more than it should for me to realize that all the blood was my own; and several more still to discern that it was not my fingers that had been sliced on the pike’s teeth, but that one of the higher treble hooks had torn right through my trouser leg and embedded itself deep within my shin.
Pike fishing leaves scars both real and imagined. I have two you can see: one livid white on my shin, the other, right across the cornea of my right eye, where I almost lost my sight to the hooks of a spinner while pike fishing as a teenager; but these are a small price to pay in the mind of the truly serious piker. I needed to be made of sterner stuff if I was ever to land a monster.
I drew a curtain over my last serious attempt at pike fishing that evening: bum shuffling and whimpering my way back up the bankside of Cuckoo Drain, a hook impaled in my leg, and a 10lb pike dangling around my ankles.
I’ve heard the pike once described as a ‘Gothic’ fish, and although I get where this reference is coming from, what with the pike’s shadowy behaviour and angular appearance, I think ‘prehistoric’ is a far fairer depiction of this truly primeval creature.
The earliest British fossils of Esox lucius, to give the pike its Latin name, are dated at half a million years old. It is believed the fish first made its way to British shores via the North Sea land bridge, way back when the River Thames was connected to the River Rhine in the Netherlands, but the latest fossil dating of the Esox genus far predates even this, placing the pike in northern America some 80 million years earlier.
The pike’s evolutionary masterstroke came sometime during the Cretaceous period when the early Esox developed jaws capable of swallowing far greater-sized prey than the other species within the herring–salmon order. From that moment forward the pike had set itself on an extraordinarily durable pathway that would see it survive several Ice Ages and spread its presence from America and right across Europe, eventually spanning almost the entire boreal forest region of the northern hemisphere.
With its elongated body, sharpened head and penchant for aggression, the ‘pike’ name stuck with the fish from the Middle Ages, aptly chosen for its resemblance to the tall thrusting spear favoured by the infantrymen of the time, and used for taking down knights on horseback with ruthless efficiency and maximum bloodshed; much like the fish might, given the chance among a shoal of roach.
The Wilson Encyclopedia describes an average size of between 5 and 12lb, with a mega-specimen topping out at over 30lb. When I was still stuck angling for my first, Roy Lewis shocked the pike-angling world with a whopping 46lb 13oz beast from Llandegfedd Reservoir in South Wales. That record still stands today, taken on little more than a small and humble-looking wooden lure called the ‘creek chub pikie’.
There is no other fish species on these shores to have sprung quite the same degree of myth and legend as the pike. The Yorkshire terrier that didn’t make it home from its paddle in the park pond, the toothy beast that supposedly went for the ankles of a small swimming boy, the bleached bones of the 90lb fish washed up on the banks of some far-flung Irish loch – all unreliably witnessed, yet all somehow difficult to debunk completely. Just look at that image of the pike caught by Roy Lewis. It is an enormous spawn-filled female fish that appears almost as long as Roy himself. Is it such a leap in imagination to make real the violent water monsters of our childhood then?
The answer is probably ‘Yes, it is.’ The genuinely big fish have nearly always fallen from the drains and lakes that have seen very little pike-angling pressure or human presence; the pike certainly would not attack a human without any prior provocation. In this day and age the real specimens are to be found lurking safely within trout-fishing-only reservoirs, or concealed somewhere within mile upon mile of undisturbed lake or drain. They prefer the forgotten edges of our nation, you see, the sorts of places where you could still quite easily fish for a lifetime without even laying eyes on a Wilson mega-specimen, and the big old pike can while away their lives well away from our disturbing habits.
Big pike need food though, and lots of it – that’s why, I’m told, many of those stocked trout lakes tend to do so well in sustaining monsters – but more than that they require a healthy ecosystem and a relative lack of competition. You should never consider culling pike in order to produce a bigger, better stamp of fish, though, or to protect the other fish in the water, for that matter. Many a world-class pike venue has been destroyed by the unwise attempt to remove its resident predators, and, unless you get them all (and, really, why would you want to do that?), there will inevitably be an explosion of smaller pike that would have otherwise been controlled by the larger, cannibalistic fish. In a pike’s world, the only fish that truly controls the pike is the pike.
I first began looking for a big pike for this book in January, but it took until the middle of the month before a sudden break in the rain seemed to offer a true chance of a catch. Overcast, grey, a slight rise in temperature from single to double digits – it wasn’t consistent with the forecast at all. I rushed from my desk and straight out to the garden pond to find my goldfish milling around the surface and even feeding. Potentially the biggest catch of the season was on.
Pike feed at ill-defined times. You can convince yourself there are no pike at all in a place and then a small change in atmospherics brings them onto the feed and suddenly you’re in. I’ve heard of anglers catching nearly a hundred pike in just a few hours of ferocious action, then, as quickly as they are turned on, they’re all off again, often for hours, sometimes even for days. Of course, the pikers are left scratching their heads and wondering where they’re all hiding, but there is a widely held belief that these small rises in temperature can bring the pike out of their stupor. With even the goldfish showing some signs of life this morning, it was all looking very good indeed.
The problem I faced was that it was now far too late to grab a ticket at any one of the certified big pike venues; and with all the rivers still flooded I needed to think out of the box. John Ellis. The canals, of course.
I flicked the laptop on and used Google Maps to zoom right in on the small network of drains and canals that ran around Cardiff. The one area I was particularly interested in stumbled off a giant space of disused industrial-era docks called the Atlantic Wharf. If big pike thrived on neglect, then this place surely hid a giant. It is only about half a mile from a glitzy shopping centre but it may as well have been on Mars. The blackened remains of rusting high-tower cranes hang over this place, looming large and lifeless over the water like Jurassic-era herons. An unattractive busy main road runs right along one side of the water too, but there were big fish to be had here if you only knew where to look.
I had already started my quest for a big pike there at the year’s turn, but I hadn’t yet had much luck. I did have some definite follows, though, predatory swirls at the surface, as my lure came back under my rod tip, and, on one occasion, a savage take tore my rubber lure clean in two, narrowly missing the hook, and leaving me with little more than the grinning head of my replica eel.
The other people who fished there tended to be a special breed, but they were friendly enough as long as you didn’t ask too many questions about permits or carry on like a member of the Cardiff City Council.
The first time I ventured down there I met an enormous shaven-headed man in a state of some despair: ‘Fuckers nicked all my meat and my rods in the night,’ he raged – eyes popping from their sockets and his mobile clutched firmly to his ear – I presumed to the police. ‘I was a bit pissed up last night to be fair, but they could at least have not cooked up all my fucking meat on my fucking BBQ not ten fucking metres from my fucking tent …’ He was near apoplectic with rage, which was understandable given he’d just woken to discover nearly everything he owned had been stolen.
There was no fishing club looking after Atlantic Wharf back then, so the fishing was effectively free; but there is always some price to pay.
Some of the local pike fishermen here had an uneasy relationship with both the law and the rules. A few openly admitted to fishing illegally in nature reserves and one even told me he was banned from the local Glamorgan Anglers Club for using live ducklings as bait. Grim, almost beyond belief. Eventually I was trusted enough to be shown the pictures of the pike they had caught: blurry pictures of half-cut anglers with what were quite clearly significantly large fish in their hands. Some of the pike looked to be over 25lb, perhaps one was even pushing the magic 30lb mark. ‘Just beware fishing too long alone after dark …’ I was warned, ‘… and keep an eye out for the poachers and prostitutes.’
The Royalty stretch of the Hampshire Avon this was not.
Poaching is a growing problem in Britain, particularly in these little-visited urban hinterlands that kiss up against large populations of people. For years I had disregarded those who talked of ‘poachers taking all the fish’ as just having fishermen’s excuses, but John Ellis had been quick to point the finger too, claiming all it takes is a replica lock key to drain an entire stretch of canal in the middle of the night and make off with fish worth upwards of £2,000. In recent times I’d encountered more less-than-formal approaches: gill nets and long-lines dumped on the banks, tragically emptied of their quarry when no one else was around.
Many of my non-fishing friends don’t really see the point of the sport if all you are ever doing is catching fish only to put them back. I know plenty of anglers who also believe there is no harm in taking the occasional sample, but the hard reality is that our inland fish stocks would simply collapse if everyone started to take their catches home. The few places where you can do it – trout and salmon fisheries, for example – have very carefully managed and monitored restocking programmes, strict limits on your catch and fastidious attention to the paperwork every angler must complete if he or she intends to take a fish home. Our island nation is too small and too over-populated to expect our recovering fresh water to handle anything other than catch and release, and when it comes to removing pike, the top fish predator, the resultant effect on an ecosystem can be devastating. It was one of the many reasons why predator anglers are so secretive about their catches.
I felt the canals feeding the wharf were easily my best bet for lure-fishing. The wharf was deep enough to take giant coal tankers and industrial container ships in its heyday, so this little spike in temperature wouldn’t have even registered in those depths; however, in the relative shallows of the canals, the water would be responding almost instantaneously. I hoped to find the shoals of over-wintering silverfish holed up somewhere in there, which would, in turn, be drawing the big pike up off the wharf and deep into the canal system to feed; like great white sharks on the trail of a great chum-slick of African sardines.
I parked up with just an hour of light remaining in the day, the ‘witching hour’ for predators the world over, and headed over to a small bridge overlooking a canal. It’s hemmed in on all sides by a housing estate; a small ribbon of gently flowing water no more than ten metres in width and a few feet deep. From this point it’s only a short walk to where it spills into the vast basin of water that forms the wharf, but upstream from here the canal disappears under the ground, cutting a subterranean path until it pops up behind a posh hotel and meets its maker: the River Taff.
I’d looked into entering those underground canal workings while researching stories for a BBC series on the river, even going so far as to find a local artist who had worked out a plan to sail them on the inflated inner tube of a tractor tyre, but the council had thwarted our plans. The king rats and giant eels of the perpetual dark would have to wait. Still, I peered hopefully off the bridge and into the water below, willing a daylight giant to materialize somewhere in the void below.
Superficially, it couldn’t be less welcoming. Hard slabs of concrete encase this narrow patch, and the water is clogged hard with storm-swept branches that reach to the heavens with their long skeletal fingers.
The litter here is far worse than the stuff on the Grand Union Canal, and there’s certainly no caring edge or quirky canal culture to be found in this forgotten space. The slack water teems with beer bottles, cans and plastics, and as the streetlights flickered into life, a grimy orange hue was cast right across the scene, lighting up the canal like some bargain basement red-light district.
A series of gently expanding rings appear suddenly on the water’s surface. Even here, there are signs of wildlife. It is a shoal of feeding fish, moving around in the upper layers of water, just as I’d hoped; basking in the relative warmth, and snatching the very occasional fly or grub ensnared in the surface film. Perhaps I can dare to dream?
Removing the four-inch rubber lure from the end of my line, I quickly switch to a tiny spinner. These topping fish are small; I don’t want to stand out too much from the crowd. I make my first cast and the water stirs with mass movement. Clearly there are a lot more silverfish here than I’d first thought. Seconds later a pluck on the line is converted into a jarring take. It feels small and awkward, possibly a perch, but more likely just a foul-hooked fish.
Yes. I’ve accidentally punctured a pristine roach right through its silvery side. I’ve massively underestimated this place – there are quite literally thousands of fish holed up in here; there’s barely room in the water to work my spinner without risking hooking one in error.
Another cast sees me lodged into something solid and inanimate on the canal bottom. I yank hard in an attempt to free the hooks and spook something very large to the left of my tightened line. It sends a V-shaped bow wave down the water and scatters hundreds of frightened roach across the surface in its wake.
It just has to be a pike.
A man with a pram filled with plastic bags wanders past, eyes down, followed by a jogger whose music is cranked up so loud I can almost hear the lyrics of the R&B song blasting from his headphones. I re-cast and immediately hook into a tiny pike. It writhes on the line as I ease it in to the canal’s side, splashing the surface and disturbing the water. That was a very bad move on this little pike’s part: with little warning the V-shaped wave is back; but this time it’s coming straight for us.
Time slows and my heart rolls up towards my gullet. A monstrous pike emerges right beneath its victim. The little pike, the big pike and I, we all know what is coming next. In a flash the larger has ingested the smaller, spinner and all, without any of it needing to touch the sides.
As my line is still attached to the small pike, we both now have quite a problem. Realizing it is tethered the monster projects itself clean out of the water in fright, using the power of its tail alone to skip impressively along the surface before crashing back into the pool with a thunderclap. I receive a full view of its extraordinary length during these acrobatics; it is in excess of 10lb, perhaps not a big fish in terms of big pike, but a true giant for such a tiny canal.
I try to keep tension on the line but a microsecond of slack sees the hook dislodged and, as the fish belly-flops its way back into the water, I realize we are sadly no longer in contact.
A steady rain blisters the water as night falls hard and cold. The supreme power of the pike’s re-entry has sent shock waves slapping into the canal’s concrete sides. Briefly, a single tennis ball is projected up onto the walkway. It rolls a wet trail for a few feet before landing back into the murk with a ‘plop’.
I walk downstream towards the wharf breathing heavily. I need to pull myself together, fast. There is still a chance that the fish hasn’t yet felt the steel of my hooks – it might just take another bait, but I know I must rest the swim before attempting anything else. Both the pike and I need time to consider our next moves.
Clearly, I’m on edge. A grey heron explodes from a thicket at my ankles and I momentarily leave my body in fright. Come on, Will, it’s only a fish. Except it wasn’t, that fish was a miracle out in that squash-court-sized patch of water, and right now, in this very moment, I’m probably the only person in the world that even knows it exists.
In the desolate car park just before the wharf, a fight between two drug dealers breaks out. I try not to catch their eye as they scream each other down about some aborted deal. With their identical enamel-white parka jackets and fur-lined hoods they look like a pair of duelling swans, puffing out their chests and jostling for territory. I duck down and take a couple of speculative casts into the darkness of the wharf, snagging some weed and finding a sense of calm just in the process of removing the soft green matting from the trio of hooks at the end of my spinner. It’s soon time to go back and try again.
I underhand-cast the spinner back into the same spot and get an instant slamming response from the monster. He’s ready, and this time so am I. I heave hard against its bulk, in my mind setting the hooks securely into its fang-filled mouth, but, again, I feel the gut-wrenching give of a slack, fish-free line.
I don’t understand. Under a downstream bridge a pair of boys smoke marijuana from a roll-up they’re sharing. Its sweet smell drifts on the night air right down to my latest disaster. Edgily, they flick their lighter on and off. They haven’t noticed my fish, my crisis or me. I reel up and to my surprise discover that yet another small roach has found its way onto the hooks.
This roach is in a truly sorry state: heavily lacerated with a severed spinal cord and a frozen expression. It has been thoroughly mangled by the pike. Stone dead on arrival. Gently, I place a hook through its lower lip and flick it back in. This is now my last chance.
Almost imperceptibly the line starts to shudder and slide. Unbelievable luck. I wait, imagining the giant pike first taking the roach sideways in its mouth before turning it slowly towards its final journey on this earth. I take a deep, deep breath, wind down, and lift into the fish as hard as I dare.
Massive resistance gives way to a thunderous charge towards the bridge. The pot-smokers have gone now and my reel screams as line escapes the spool at speed. There’s no acrobatics to be had this time around: just dour, dogged confrontation.
The pike steams right through the bridge and out the other side. I didn’t think I was going to be able to stop it from rounding a bend in the canal at first, but, at last, it starts to yield to pressure.
As the great pike inches to the surface I drop to my knees. Here she comes, like a thick, green submarine. I steady myself as the head presents itself. There is only one spot on a pike where you can grasp it by hand without lacerating your fingers or hurting the fish: it’s inside the mouth, right underneath the lower jaw by way of its hardened gill plates. With no time to put on a glove I slide my hand into the cavity and lift.
She’s beautiful. A spawn-filled female, thick and so darkly marked that you could easily be staring right at her without ever realizing she’s there; a metaphor for this canal system if ever there was one.
I roll out a soft mat to safely remove the hooks without causing any more disruption to her day, and spend a few moments on my knees simply gazing at this precious sword from the stone.
A man in a suit walks right past me without even acknowledging our presence. Even with the fish out of water the canal’s secrets remain invisible to those incapable of belief.
I lie down on my chest and attempt to self-take a photo at arm’s length, but I’m interrupted. ‘Jesus Christ, mate!’ It’s one of the boys from beneath the bridge, back with the remains of his spliff hanging at a comedic angle from his trembling lower lip. ‘What dafuk is that!?’
He pulls down the hood on his black Adidas tracksuit to reveal a tightly dreadlocked scalp. He attempts to take a photo with his phone, but his hands are shaking uncontrollably.
‘Oh my days,’ said the lad, wiping his brow at the sheer intensity of the experience, ‘I’m not going to lie, I’ve seen some crazy shit down here but I ain’t never seen anything like that.’
Together, we sat down next to the great fish. Paying gentle homage as I showed him its mouthparts, fins and armour, before sliding her carefully back into the canal.
Momentarily the pike just sat on the shallow bottom glowering right back up at us.
‘That’s crazy,’ he said.
‘I know,’ I replied.
It really was.
A waft of her tail eventually sent her back to a life of obscurity beneath a floating mat of litter, and my partner decided it was also time to make his own way back into darkness.
I watched him as he went, pulling his hood back over his head and sparking up the biggest spliff this side of Jamaica.
If Grandad had been around today we would’ve talked about that capture for weeks, but all I had was the Wilson Encyclopedia to pour my experience into, and all that came back was the cold hard fact that my fish wasn’t a record breaker. In fact, it wasn’t even anywhere close to being a Wilson mega-specimen.
A 30lb pike is a very rare beast in itself, but a forty-pounder capable of threatening Roy Lewis’s 46lb 13oz record is almost beyond the realms of possibility. Scanning the list of the fifty biggest pike ever caught, and immediately discounting the sketchy records, repeat captures or those that are likely to now be deceased, I felt it was probably realistic to say there were fewer than twenty known 40lb pike alive in Britain today; most of which were highly nomadic individuals living within immense expanses of water.
Llandegfedd, the water that provided Roy with his record back in 1992, would have seemed the obvious place to start, but by the turn of the century the water had headed into such a state of pike-fishing decline that a five-year hiatus on predator angling was called in 2010.
By the time it reopened in 2015 there was already a new contender firmly on the block. Fifty kilometres to the south-east, Somerset’s Chew Valley Lake, or ‘Chew’ as it is affectionately known by pike anglers, was crushing all comers. 2015 saw an astonishing trio of pike over 40lb grace Chew’s banks, and with a further seventeen fish of over 30lb falling in just the first week of the pike season, it was no longer a question of whether Chew was the No. 1 pike water in the UK, but whether it could actually be one of the greatest of all time.
From the moment Chew’s super-sized pike started hitting the angling press I was quite literally desperate to fish there. If I was going to stand any realistic chance of catching a record-breaking pike, then clearly Chew was the place to go, but simply getting tickets to pike fish the place represented an immense challenge of will and patience.
There are only two periods in a year you can actually fish for pike on Chew: one two-week spell in February, and a second, longer spell, running through October and November. These are known as the ‘pike trials’, and the only way of getting tickets is to call the Lodge landline on the first Saturday after the Christmas and New Year holidays. With every serious pike angler in Britain jamming up the line, for the strict limit of twenty-five boats and twenty bank tickets, the odds of getting a result are extremely slim. No one could say it wasn’t fair: everyone is equally unlikely to win this lottery.
It endeared Chew to me no end. Predominately it was a trout-fishing water that happened to contain monstrous pike. No one wanted to outright deny pike anglers the opportunity to catch the fish of a lifetime, but equally the owners felt they had a duty of care to their bread-and-butter trout anglers, and, as we already know, big pike hate attention.
As if the odds weren’t already stacked against me, the great Chew phone-in landed on 9 January: the morning after the World Darts quarter-finals at the Lakeside. It took the most almighty effort just to find my phone that morning, but I was present and correct at 9 a.m., albeit barefoot and surrounded by pizza boxes and screwed-up tickets from the night before (our hero, ‘Scotty-Dog’ Mitchell, had been knocked out). I took a deep, fortifying breath, and began punching in the number.
An hour passed as I notched up my first hundred unsuccessful calls. I was then joined by my bleary-eyed mate Stuart, who deployed both his landline and his mobile phone, effectively tripling my chances, but it was all to be in vain.
We ceremoniously called it a day once we had heard the engaged tone for the 1,000th time. ‘I guess that’s why they call it the pike “trials”, mate,’ said Stuart while looking for his van keys. He could see how much it meant to me, I appreciated that. We sloped off to the semi-finals and I tried my best to thoroughly drown my sorrows.
I eventually got through three days later. The polite West Country man on the phone told me all the spots for 2016 were long since gone. The horse had not only bolted before the stable door was closed, he was in the next town and midway through a national lecture tour on farm security. The man told me there were now a raffle and an auction to try for. I failed in the former and the latter topped out at an extraordinary £880 for a single day on a boat. There was nothing more I could do. I was just going to have to look elsewhere for my chance.
With Chew gone and Llandegfedd out of the running, I had to find another big trout water fast. Closer to my childhood home there were the Graffham and Rutland reservoirs, but the really big pike had been curiously absent there for the last few seasons; over in the Brecon Beacons there was Llangorse Lake, famously referenced in The Domesday Book of Mammoth Pike for producing the world’s biggest-ever pike (in 1846 to the rod of a Mr Owen, a giant fish weighing an alleged 68lb), but that was unsubstantiated, and would have been dead for well over a hundred years. I called up the kindly owner anyway, and he readily admitted that, although the lake certainly had potential, it realistically couldn’t ever compete with Chew for the sheer size of pike. The last big fish there was a thirty-two-pounder in 2007. It wasn’t looking good. I had one last avenue to try, but I knew this was an even longer shot than Chew.
Scarborough’s Wykeham Lakes had a lot going for them on paper. Currently the biggest known living pike in Britain, a giant 46lb 11oz fish, was resident in their waters, and at only seven acres (to Chew’s 1,000-plus) the odds of a record-breaking hook-up were dramatically reduced. However, access to pike fish the water was strictly restricted to members of an exclusive syndicate. I fired off a hopeful email and was extremely surprised to get a quick response inviting me to speak to Jake Finnigan, the fisheries manager.
Jake was a politely spoken and articulate northerner who clearly cared deeply about the fish in his lake. I wanted to get a feeling of what it must be like to look after a water with such a legendary fish, a real-life Loch Ness monster, a proper, tangible lake beast; and then I wanted to nonchalantly request special permission to have a crack at it.
I was going to have to play my cards very carefully indeed, but Jake tripped me up within moments of answering my call.
‘She’s been out on six occasions over the last five years,’ he began. ‘First she was thirty-nine pounds, fifteen ounces back in November 2010 …’ He paused. ‘It was me that caught her then actually.’
‘Sorry, Jake, can I stop you there?’ I presumed I’d misheard. ‘You just said you caught the pike first?’
This was an absolute bombshell. I stammered on but my carefully loaded questions on fish care, leading up to a request to fish the lake, had just flown clean out of the window.
‘Tell me exactly how it happened.’ I leant into the phone and tore a fresh sheet of paper from my notebook.
‘It was just a trout lake back then and this fish was a total unknown. People aren’t totally sure how she even got in there. Some think she was placed in, but I reckon she most likely travelled up the becks and streams that flow to the River Derwent; right back when this whole place was flooded some years ago. From that point, she’s obviously just gotten bigger and bigger.’
It was more than plausible that a small pike had made its way into this trout lake, and with rich pickings and freshly stocked trout, she would have piled on the poundage: up to 4lb a year for the best weight-gaining predators.
‘The water here is deep,’ Jake continued, ‘twenty-eight foot in places, and has been stocked with trout for some thirty-odd years. It wasn’t hard for it to hide, I guess, but the occasional trout angler talked of seeing a really big fish chasing their trout on the retrieve.’ He took a deep breath. ‘Honestly though, Will, we all thought the most it could be was thirty pounds.’
I had seen a few photos of this pike from its most recent captures. It was incomprehensibly enormous: a long, fat, female fish, with a back so wide you could fit it with a saddle.
My personal best pike was a 22lb fish caught from the depths of the Fens when I was twenty-five years old. I couldn’t reasonably imagine tackling a pike nearly twice that size, and nor, it turned out, could Jake.
‘A couple of trout anglers had returned their boat early one evening, so I just hopped in for nothing more than a twenty-minute mess about.’ I liked that: a ‘mess about’ that led to the biggest single pike discovery since the turn of the century. ‘I went out in the boat around the edge of the lake. It was right at the end of the day and I was on my last couple of casts, making my way back to where the boats were all kept, when suddenly the big girl took my spinner.
‘At first I thought it was just a trout of a couple of pounds; she didn’t really do that much, just headed straight in towards me. Then I saw it for the first time. That’s where the fight truly began. I couldn’t believe it.’
I couldn’t believe it either. What a story. He went on to say that by the time he had the fish under control he realized the net he had with him wasn’t anywhere near large enough to fit her in, and that he had then been forced to use the electric motor on board to get within shouting range of the shore. By a supreme stroke of good fortune a colleague eventually managed to net her tail first before the fish could free itself from the tether.
He had just landed the fish that would go on to become both the English record and the largest known living pike in the United Kingdom today. His previous personal best was just 14lb. It was, and still is, a fishing miracle.
‘You just don’t know how to feel when it happens. You’re gobsmacked.’
That was where the good times ended for Jake and the pike. News of the giant fish travelled fast and Wykeham had to immediately limit the number of pike anglers allowed on the water. She next came out just four months after Jake had first caught her, but, astonishingly, the fish was some 6lb heavier. Now, with her just one meal away from being the next British record, interest in the fishery reached fever pitch. Jake was soon bombarded with requests to fish the lake for the pike.
‘Look, it’s a trout lake at the end of the day,’ he said, with more than a touch of exasperation. ‘Trout fishing was getting compromised. I had guys ringing up to enquire about trout fishing that couldn’t get through because of all the interest from pike anglers. The syndicate seemed the best way to go then: limit it to ten anglers with a maximum of four a day on the water. I know it’s very exclusive, but I prefer this run as a trout lake with the pike as something of a bonus. The amount of pressure she’ll get is overwhelming if I don’t do something. At least on Chew they’ve got more than one forty-pound fish and over a thousand acres for them to disappear into: here she’s on her own with just seven.’
That last comment struck me hard. I started to feel a sense of real guilt. This wasn’t what fishing should be about.
‘Pike groups are getting more and more abrasive, just like the carp groups in fact,’ continued Jake, ‘you can’t post a photo anywhere without someone tearing into someone over something. Every time our fish gets caught you’ve got one big group of people saying we’re running it like an exclusive club and then another big group of people saying it’s going to be a dead fish within a year. We’ve had one guy who said this time around: “I know I said last time it’ll be a dead fish next year, but this time I really mean it: next year it will be dead.” What are we supposed to do? We just can’t win.’
Clearly Jake had a point: you’ve got to really look after these big individual fish. I started to wonder if this pike was more of a curse than a blessing.
‘If only I could turn back the clock, I would make this lake invitation only for pike fishing and that’s it,’ he said, with finality.
For the first time in my entire fishing life I didn’t want to catch a fish. Jake was right, pike fishing was going the same way as carp fishing and chasing named and known fish into potential oblivion on small waters was not cool at all. It was actually quite disturbing.
By the end of our conversation I no longer wanted to ask him for permission to fish; in fact, I was quite embarrassed at myself. I wondered what Grandad would make of it all. I knew what he would think actually: he’d laugh at me and question why anyone would ever place value on such a shortsighted pursuit.
Without me needing to say, Jake offered to set me up with a couple of the guys on the syndicate, and potentially, with their permission, have a little fish for the big one.
I told him how grateful I was for the offer, and really meant it, but there was no real mystery around this pike any more. It was still a challenge of sorts, but Jake’s original discovery and capture were the real purist piece of angling. That’s what was really impressive. That’s what I wanted for myself.
Barring a miracle, any hopes I now had of angling for a record pike were fundamentally over. There wasn’t much more I could do. Jake was spot on for trying to keep his fish safe in a small water and Chew were doing the same by massively limiting their numbers and restricting the pike-fishing windows.
The start of Chew’s February pike trials saw bad weather and a few blowouts. The £880 angler didn’t get his day out due to high winds and I managed a couple more sessions down the wharf and canals, but returned empty-handed.
One afternoon I went to Garry Evans Tackle, my local Cardiff shop and a tackle enthusiast’s haven, and chatted to my friends Rich and Andrew about pike. ‘I reckon there’s a chance of a big one in the bay,’ suggested Andrew, ‘we’ve all been catching big perch down there all year.’
I told them about the fishing I’d been doing on the canal and down the wharf, and Andrew showed me a picture of a young bloke with a huge 16lb sea trout from one of the feeder streams. ‘Yeah, the docklands are doing really well,’ continued Andrew, stowing his phone back in his pocket, ‘I’ve had loads of small pike down there, but the carp fishermen reckon they keep seeing really big pike battling it out with the rats.’
That sounded pretty much in keeping with that particular set of docks. It’s a pike-eat-rat world down there. ‘I’ve had a really big pike, and I mean a really big one, chasing my floating frog lures down there on several occasions,’ Andrew continued, ‘but there is something about that lure that the big pike really doesn’t like. He keeps turning away right at the last minute …’ He looked to his fingernails with a touch of embarrassment. ‘… So I’ve bought a lure shaped like a rat.’
I didn’t even know there was such a thing, but Andrew knew everything that was worth knowing about lure-fishing, and, besides, it wasn’t like I didn’t get it; I’d once spent an entire afternoon fishing with a Pot Noodle on a whim.
‘I’m going to be trying that soon,’ he said, suddenly far surer of himself, before a ringing phone took him back to his work.
I left the tackle shop wondering about making a proper effort on the wider docks, as well as the wharf, or at least buying myself a rat lure and joining Andrew. In my heart, though, I couldn’t help but think that this was feeling very much like needle-in-a-haystack time, or at least floating-rat-in-giant-rat-infested-dock time.
I went home feeling a little defeated, but on the journey back my phone pinged to life with an email. It was from a man named John Horsey, a legendary fishing guide who led trips to Chew during the pike trials, if you had already been lucky enough to snare a ticket of course.
I had contacted him a few weeks before the great phone-in but there didn’t seem any point following up, given I hadn’t managed to get a ticket. The email read:
Hi Will
Just to let you know there are guided boats available on 5, 7 and 16 Feb with me as the guide. This is a new initiative by Bristol Water.
If you want one of these boats then ring Chew ASAP.
Kind regards
John Horsey
Frantically, I hammered the now very familiar number for the Lodge. No answer. I left a voicemail, wrote an email, and tried to get through four more times, before finally, mercifully, I heard that glorious West Country accent once more: ‘Hello, Chew Lakes.’
The words of my request spilled from my mouth at such a pace I was surprised the man on the end of the receiver could even figure out what I was trying to say.
‘Ooh, I’m not sure.’ I could hear some riffling of papers in the background. ‘Possibly they are all booked out, possibly there is one left.’
I tried to sound cool, but it was pretty difficult given how badly I wanted this to work out. My heart was firmly in my mouth as the riffling continued, back-dropped with the occasional ‘hmm’.
Eventually he answered.
‘Yep, one left.’
16 February 2016. My date with pike-fishing destiny.
It was more money than I’d spent on a single day’s fishing in my entire life, but I was over the moon. I had my ticket and I was absolutely determined to make the very most of it. All my ethics about chasing pounds and ounces and being part of a pike-fishing circus were firmly buried; I was boarding the clown car with a front-row seat for the big top and the undisputed ringmaster for hire. I just prayed we had a run of good weather.
The days quickly passed and I started to feel increasingly nervous. A feeling of inadequacy I hadn’t felt since I was listening to Dad in the stairwell started to creep into the back of my mind. Am I actually up to these fish? I opted to spend yet more of my dwindling savings on tackle: bigger lures and a beefy braided line that felt like woven rope.
Extraordinary reports from Chew began to filter in. By all accounts this was shaping up to be one of the best February pike trials of all time. By the time my big day eventually came around, twenty pike over the 30lb barrier had already been snared, with two truly enormous fish topping out the scales at 41lb. To give that some sort of perspective, Martin Bowler, one of the best all-round anglers in Britain (who also just happens to be John Wilson’s nephew), landed a 34lb 12oz fish and commented to the Angling Times: ‘If I’d caught that fish at any other venue it would be a safe bet that it would be the best of the day, but I think the day I was fishing it was only third-biggest.’ One man even commented on Chew’s pike-fishing Facebook group that he wasn’t sure it was even worth him posting a picture of his fish as ‘it was only 28lb’.
Twenty-eight pounds. Six pounds bigger than my biggest all-time pike. Not even worth posting. I spooled up my strongest reel with my all-new braided line and selected the three most powerful rods I owned from the garden shed.
‘I remember a fisheries scientist saying to me, “A pike doesn’t know how big he is.” I thought that was a silly thing to say, but actually it isn’t, is it? It’s not like they’ve got a mirror to look in, is it?’
I liked John Horsey immediately. He was a bright, liberal man, with an exceptional knowledge and enthusiasm for his sport. His heart lay with fly-fishing, particularly in competitions where he had captained England at world and European levels, and had even won the World Championships back in 2009; however, unlike many professional fly-fishermen, he wasn’t the sort of person who would turn his nose up at coarse fishermen purely on principle. Plus he had a 40lb pike to his boat, caught, remarkably, on a fly. For all of that, I was extremely grateful.
His point, regarding the pike and the mirror, was that big fish don’t necessarily change their feeding habits just because they are big fish. They are able to take bigger baits of course, but it is prudent not to assume their diet exclusively matches their size. Almost every animal is still partial to the food it grew up on, and therefore you shouldn’t be surprised if, every once in a while, you encounter a fish of far greater size than your diminutive bait would expect; the biggest carp I’ve ever caught simply swallowed a single kernel of sweetcorn.
‘Everyone always says it has to be a heavily stocked trout water to break a record, where there’s plenty of big trout for the big pike to eat, but I don’t believe that’s strictly true,’ explained John.
With his shock of white hair hidden beneath a baseball cap and neatly trimmed goatee beard, he had an air of the ‘rock star’ about him. ‘Chew is the best pike fishery in Britain today because the levels of biodiversity here are exceptional. It’s not just the pike; everything in this water is big: big trout, big tench, big eels, big roach; it’s all thanks to the rich aquatic insect life that lives and breeds here’ – he cast out an arm across the water in front of us – ‘especially the black chironomids. The pike here are full of them.’
I had to look up ‘chironomid’ later. Essentially they are a variety of midge and closely resemble small mosquitoes, but don’t let that put you off; this species is non-biting and, according to the Natural History Museum, they are a vitally important indicator species of the health of any water. They are extremely sensitive to any kind of pollutant or acidity in water, so their presence in numbers is a good sign of a first-rate environment; fantastic news to fish of all sizes, from giant pike to minute stickleback, which readily gorge on the flies and their larvae. John mentioned an autopsy on a mid-sized dead pike that revealed a stomach literally crammed with these small, jet-black insects, and my friends, who had fly-fished Chew in the past, claimed to have actually seen the pike scooping the insects right out of the lake, breaching the surface like packs of dolphins.
Chew is just that sort of place – where accepted logic is warped to such a degree that you genuinely start to believe in miracles. The lake looked truly serene at first light and sight. A clear, deep-blue morning had left a light ripple, and a blanket of wispy fog was playing on the water’s surface. Chew dwarfed the Cardiff docks, of course. It appeared oceanic in comparison, but it wasn’t as intimidating as I’d thought it might be.
As I perused the map on the back of my fishing permit I noted it resembled a hen’s chick in profile, albeit with a slightly oversized head. There were a few attractive-looking bays, a pair of trench-like ‘legs’, and a large island, placed somewhere around the eye of the bird: lots of potential fish-holding areas that broke up the immensity of the venue then.
With John I was far from fishing blind at any rate. He purposefully hung back to see where all the other boats would go. ‘Pike fishermen can be a bit like sheep,’ he declared, placing his tackle in the bottom of the boat, ‘they all tend to go where big fish have been caught that week and will follow each other around throughout the day. It’s always best to give them all a wide berth and find your own place to start. There’s no rush anyway; the best time on this lake is often the late afternoon to the sunset.’
John elected to start just left of Wick Green Point, a slight protrusion on the far bank from the Lodge, somewhere around the centre of the chick’s back. It was lined with a thick growth of reeds that had been bleached a starchy white in the winter air. Instinctively, I would have taken our boat right in among those reeds, looking for a take from a pike hidden up against the beds. This, I learnt, would not have found me a record.
‘These are big open-water fish,’ explained John, ‘they don’t even know the meaning of the word ambush. The average depth here is only about thirteen feet, so quite shallow, but you’ve got to get the bait down there to catch the really big ones. They won’t come up to get it, especially not when it is cold like this. They are immensely fat, and immensely lazy.’
I picked up the pair of lures that I’d bought brand new for this trip and handed them over to John for inspection. They felt sticky, like they were fresh out of the mould, and were utterly free of blemishes or experience; I was like a young boy on his first day at secondary school, conscious that my sparkling-new pencil case was missing the requisite band insignias, amorous messages or pictures of cocks, which all the older, far cooler boys seemed to have.
One of the lures was the perfect replica of a small trout. I thought, given this was a trout lake, that was a fair choice. The second was a luminescent-looking perch, like the fish had spent its days swimming around nuclear fallout before finally making its way to my tackle box. I couldn’t imagine what had drawn me towards that one; it looked hideous.
John eyed them both up before giving something of a damning verdict: ‘Well, I wouldn’t go with that perch, Will, not right away anyway, and the pike won’t recognize that as a rainbow trout either. They’ve never seen a rainbow trout under two pounds in this place.’
I hadn’t even made my first cast and I was already on the back foot. John, perhaps sensing I felt a little downcast, revisited the trout. ‘They might just take it thinking it’s a roach though; it is very white and, after all, all you need in this lake is just one take.’
That was good enough for me. I hooked it up to a strong wire trace and took a deep breath. It had taken an awful lot just to get to this point. I cast out well away from the reeds, watched my braided line snake out a little before feeling the lure strike the lake’s bottom. John was right; it really was shallow. I began my retrieve, keeping it slow, steady and tight to the bed, as instructed. This was it. I was finally fishing Chew.
Five minutes later I felt the telltale thump and headshake of a predator. A brief but solid fight brought an impeccable little pike of about 4lb to the edge of the boat. It was a nerve settler, the piscatorial equivalent of a pre-match pep talk, and there was even a small, but satisfactory, tear in the side of my new trout now. Perhaps I was worthy after all?
Soon afterwards a spiteful wind picked up off the Mendip Hills, rocking our boat and biting sharply into my bare hands. Of course, Chew wasn’t going to let me have it all my own way. We pulled up our anchor and headed for shelter behind a large, semi-flooded island. ‘Blimey, John, there’s plenty of boats down here.’ A quick head count revealed well over half of all the boats on the lake were also taking refuge, strung out in a long line like the floating buoys of a giant gill net.
I blew some hot air into my hands. ‘Don’t be fooled. They’re not down here just to stay warm,’ said John, with a quiet intensity, ‘this was where that forty-one-pound giant was caught last week.’ He selected a very, very large, fresh-looking mackerel from his bait box and fixed it firmly to a treble hook. ‘I know, because I was here.’ He cast the mackerel right out into the middle of the channel and tightened down his line till his fat, red-topped float could be seen bouncing happily along the surface.
I settled into a trance-like state: casting my lure, retrieving, focusing in on the play of the line through the water, and arching my neck occasionally to check our floats were still in place. A curious sensation came over me. It was a feeling that comes along with such infrequency that it feels like a sort of temporary psychosis, yet it strikes with such undeniable force that it is impossible to ignore.
As sure as King Canute knew he could not really turn the tides, I became convinced the pike were coming on to feed.
‘We’re going to get a fish here, John,’ I said, venturing to vocalize my forecast, in spite of the lack of any discernible evidence. It was a gut instinct, a primeval intuition long since buried beneath several thousand generations of comfortable living and comfort eating, but I was utterly convinced I was right.
One of the men on the string of boats suddenly stood bolt upright with a rod buckling in his hand. I knew it.
We watched as his boat partner threw a massive black net from port to starboard, like a man wrestling with some giant sail on an ocean-going clipper. The angler started to pump the fish towards him; the tide was turning against this pike; soon it was subdued somewhere down by the engine block. They shook hands. It was a good one, at least 20lb in weight.
‘My float is doing something funny.’ Instantly, I snapped my gaze from the drama unfolding in the other boat. John was staring out at his float, which was now beginning to wheel.
When I was sixteen I learnt how big pike can often feed in spells. I remember that day clearly, my legs whirring as I ran away from the riverbank and back towards Grandad’s bungalow. Behind me, submerged in a net, I had left a pike. A proper one, not a small jack or an emaciated summer fish, but a fat female that almost tore my rod into the deep alongside my smelt dead bait. The fish in itself was remarkable, but of far greater significance was the other, even bigger, pike that lay in the net right beside it.
In just ten minutes I had smashed my personal best, twice. I was in pike-fishing nirvana and I prayed Grandma had film in her camera as I exploded into the kitchen.
Grandma took my photo with both fish. ‘Well done, boy!’ shouted Grandad, giving me the thumbs-up I’d hoped for. He was off to play carpet bowls, he said; fishing in the bleak mid-winter wasn’t really his thing.
I knew that was a special day. Over 30lb of pike in just two casts. Sometimes I feel I’ve been paying for that piece of good fortune ever since.
John’s float started kiting hard to the left. This really was it.
‘You take it …’ John pulled the rod from its rest and handed it down to me in an act of extraordinary generosity. ‘Really, are you sure?’ I stuttered, and we had a brief and ridiculously British standoff, at the absolutely critical moment.
‘Yes! Go for it, Will!’ he eventually shouted, imploring me to take up the rod.
I didn’t need to be asked for a third time. I reeled up the slack line, sank the tip and swept the rod upwards.
But there was nothing. No riposte. No bone-churning heavyweight thump. Just air and slack. I reeled down once more and gave it another slam, but it was useless. The pike had already let go.
‘That was the big mackerel bait, wasn’t it?’ I asked, half hoping John might answer in the negative, or just assure me it was possible a trout could have chewed the bait from the hook. ‘Yes, Will.’
My chance had been and gone. As plausible as it is that a 40lb pike might feed on a tiny chironomid, there was no way a small fish was ever squeezing a 1lb mackerel bait down its gullet. As quickly as the feeding spell had been triggered, the big pike turned themselves off once more.
There was excited chatter among the boats as we pulled into the docks that sunset. A Chew employee placed a thick boot on the side of our boat as we drifted into the melee. ‘There were seven thirties out today, lads!’ he revealed gleefully. ‘How did you guys get on?’
The van’s windscreen wipers squealed as I fought with the drizzle on the drive back home. I wonder how big that fish really was? I’ll never know now of course, but I felt oddly calm.
When I was a boy I recall Grandad telling me a story about a great fish he once hooked that ran with an unstoppable force until it emptied his reel of a hundred metres of line and eventually broke free, leaving his rod hanging limp like a washing line cracked in a storm.
I asked him to recall this anecdote many times, both because I loved the idea of the mysterious giant in our waters, but also because I was unable to process how he could recall such a tale of calamity and yet appear so at peace. Perhaps in the retelling his demeanour would one day buckle, betraying his true feelings of raw hurt and resentment; but, of course, it never did.
Grandad, I realize now, was simply enriched by the experience of angling. His inner tranquillity came from a confidence emboldened by the knowledge that when it comes to hooking a big fish, a degree of loss is simply inevitable. It was not something to resent or regret; it was simply an acceptable part of what it meant to be a true fisherman, and a better person.
I would return to Chew if I ever get the chance again, but for all the ticketing process, the beefed-up tackle, circumstance and ceremony, could I reasonably say my day today had brought me more pleasure than the pike I had caught in the canal? Perhaps anglers’ success is not determined only by the sheer size of the fish they catch, but the manner of, and pleasure to be had from, the pursuit and chase.
It had taken me over twenty years to learn the wisdom Grandad was once trying to impart, but I’d understood in the end. I would turn my attentions to fish of smaller proportions for the rest of this fishing year, and leave the giants for another time and place.
It was almost the close of the winter of ’92 before I caught my first pike. As is often the way with these things, the fight of my fears was over before it began.
My spinner approached a hole within a cluster of reeds and a small pike materialized hot on its heels. I hastened my retrieve, and the fish, believing its meal was about to escape, near launched itself out of the water to engulf the lure.
Of all the pike I have caught, it was by far the easiest to land. I hooked it less than a foot from the bank and simply sprinted backwards, tearing the fish clean from the water and almost getting run over by a passing car in the process.
Unfortunately, behind the wheel was my Year Four primary school teacher, Mrs Hills. I could tell I was in for a massive rollicking by the steam coming from her brakes and ears, so I quickly scooped up my pike and sprinted off before she could even lay a hand on her car door handle.
It didn’t occur to me then that this fish was merely a juvenile, or that I had been extremely lucky not to lose it or snap my line with my terrible antics. As far as I was concerned I now had living, breathing proof that Dad and Grandad were not always right. Pike were extremely hard to catch but I did have the strength to do it on my own.
In a quiet, teacher-free corner of the Creek I slipped my little pike back into the shallows. I couldn’t possibly have realized it at the time, but, as it kicked its tail to disappear once and for all, it was taking a vital piece of my childhood down into the murk with it.