5:30am and the alarm clock sounds. No time for breakfast, I get into my fishing clothes, clean my teeth, pop a spinning rod, small rucksack and landing net into the car and I'm off. The car radio, set to Radio 4, informs me that this coming Sunday is "international dawn birdsong day" (there seems to be a day to commemorate everything nowadays), but by winding the car window down I enjoy the dawn chorus two days earlier than the designated day.
There's a chill in the air, but the sun is out, and yesterday's rain doesn't seem to have had much effect on the colour of the canal. It's 6:15 when I make my first cast.
Despite the early hour I'm not the only one fishing on the canal, but the three herons all seem unconcerned by my presence (look very carefully in front of the far bank tree and slightly to your right of it and you'll see one of them in the photo above), and I opt to fish with a size 3 gold ondex spinner.
After about a dozen casts under my favourite bridge there's an explosion of water and an aggressive pike begins a splashy and determined attempt to rid itself of its error. After a very determined fight of two or three minutes the pike squeezes into the net, where it continues to exhibit a bad attitude while I unhook it, before a quick snapshot and return to the water.
I move swims and try a few other likely spots, along reed beds and close to structure, but with only one follow in the gin clear shallows from a vividly striped but minute little perch that probably wasn't yet "man enough" to cope with even a small spinner.
I returned to the bridge for a final few casts, figuring that by now the pike would have probably moved on, enabling the perch who semi-permanently reside under it to come out from cover, and half a dozen casts produced a brace of almost identical small perch, beautifully coloured, all bristles, spikes and stripes.
On my final cast I snagged (and lost) the Ondex, proving that even good days always have their shadow side. By 7:40am I was in the car and driving contentedly home- less than an hour and three quarter's fishing, a glorious morning in sunny solitude, the dawn chorus, seeing three herons and catching a pike and two perch represents pretty much the best way to start the day as far as I'm concerned.
By 8 o'clock I was at my desk, and ready to start work.
"Smash and grab" fishing- with a busy life it's sometimes the only option, but when it works it's great.
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