There is a pike on the edge of the reeds, when everything
settles it lunges scattering the fry that hold up in the shade. I have been
through every lure in my bag casting and retrieving them as close the stems as
I dare but none so far have sparked any interest. Paul a fellow angler spots me
and comes over for a chat, eyeing up his brace of rods and bite indicators set
up a little way down the bank I ask if he has gone over to the carp side. He
tells me he has always been a carp guy and only fishes the float for roach and
bream when he has not had much luck with the big fellas, which he says is more
often than he would like.
The carp here can get to just under the thirty pound mark
but they have seen it all, every rig, bait and trick in the book and while
getting fat they have learnt to avoid spending any time out of the water. So we talk about baits and he tells me about
one of his friends who used a chicken Macnugget to land a twenty pounder and
the next day Paul had been through the drive-in hoping to repeat his friend’s
success. Talking weird baits and strange catches is a vast subject, I throw in
a couple of tales including the story of the terrapin catch I had made on
pellets; the non-native terrapin had probably been released after the Ninja
Turtle craze had subsided. Then I tell him about Dave taking a pike on a mussel
while float fishing for tench; a fish so ugly it would not be considered pretty
if it was amphibian.
It is a little over ten minutes later when Dave arrives as
if summoned by the mere discussion of his fishing exploits. To say Dave is an
unorthodox fisherman would not quiet convey the distance he has travelled
either by design or folly from the main practices of the modern coarse angler. This
evening he has two rods, the first is a fly rod fitted with a fixed spool reel
to which is attached an unspecified monofilament line, a cage feeder, a hook
length of 1.5lb and a size twenty hook, with this set up he hopes to land
something. His other rod as if to balance things out is a straight piking, dead
bait set up with a bubble float. As he has carried both rods from his house,
broken down with the rigs attached and has not brought his glasses the task is
given to me to untangle the treble hooks from the feeder and the rod rings;
Dave helps by holding his can of beer steady.
I tell him about the topic of our earlier discussion which
encourages him to share his own little gems including his story about catching
the same catfish in a Thai lake as Jeremy Wade of River Monsters fame. He has lived probably a little longer than the
biggest carp in the lake and has seen almost as much but listening can be a bit
of guessing game. Dave’s ability to communicate is based largely on the powers
of his audience to fill in the bits of his sentence’s that are missing or edit
out the bits that have been added by mistake. Sometimes if my concentration
dips or Dave breaks his monologue by swigging from the can that he has been
using as a microphone I am left with the feeling that I have been eating pasta
without the sauce.
The light is falling and Paul asks me if I am still selling
lures, and I tell him about the videos and people making them themselves. I tell him about the guys who have made lures from my designs
and send me pictures from Australia, and South America of fish and places to
fish, we talk for while as the drunks on the far side of the lake laugh into
the darkness and the rats scuttle.
A Baramundi on a Phox Minnow made in Australia by Roy Priestley, thanks for sending the image Roy
