Visions of pike ...

 

Christmas Eve, the "night before Christmas" and tonight, according to one well known poem, children will go to bed with "visions of sugar plums" dancing in their heads, but I suspect that when my head hits the pillow after my return from Midnight Communion a prehistoric looking fish will be inhabiting my sleeping thoughts. The reason? My next planned fishing session is a January piking pilgrimage to Norfolk, to be shared with fishing companions Pete and David.

 

While pike are not my favourite species (perch claim that epithet), they exert a strange fascination over me, and have done so ever since I caught my first of their kind, a lively jack of about three pounds, back in January of 1982. There's something special about a fish that exhibits such ferocity and oozes malevolence in its watery home, while being so fragile and vulnerable on the bank. Add to that the myths and far fetched stories that surround old esox and you have the stuff of which angling dreams are made.

 

 

Pike are also the fish, more than any other, whose size, for me at least, is one of the least relevant factors in terms of my appreciation of them. Because many of the places from which I've caught pike have been relatively wild or natural waters, catching any pike is an achievement, and the pounds and ounces merely a bonus. I have also found that small pike, such as the one caught by my son in this picture, are often more exquisitely marked than their older and larger counterparts, and these predators in miniature are as appreciated for their beauty as others are for their weight.

 

 

In addition to the imagination capturing qualities of the fish themselves, there is an attractiveness caused by the differing styles of fishing for them, all of which I enjoy. There are days when pike will chase a lure in the manner of a kitten chasing a toy, and seeing the water erupt as a pike aggressively turns with a lure in its mouth is one of the heart stopping thrills of angling. Lure fishing is an active, intuitive approach to fishing, maximising the primeval hunting aspect of the sport that links us to previous generations of our ancestors. Live baiting has always been the most reliable method for me, and although dead baiting has been responsible for the downfall of a number of my pike, it is the method in which I have the least confidence, and at which, in the words of many of my boyhood school reports, I must "try harder".
 

 

Pike and perch share my winter fishing attention, and the tail end of this calendar year has been disappointing in terms of pike captures, although my perch obsession has meant I've only twice fished for them since October, resulting in the capture of just one miniscule jack. However, last January and February yielded a bountiful supply of pike for me and Pete, and our hope as we look towards January is of recent history choosing to repeat itself. My first pike of 2015 was this 14 pounder pictured below, if its grandmother swims in a Norfolk river whose name I'm unwilling to divulge, is twice the size and has a mind to take my bait next month, then my Christmas wish really will have come true. Santa, I really have been a good boy .............

 

 

A good ending

 

 

Novels, films, sermons and lives are all in want of a good ending. So too, fishing seasons. For those of us who fish ponds, lakes and canals as well as rivers, seasons these days are defined by calendar years, not by the once glorious 16th of June. When I was a teenager the countdown to "Opening Day" caused me more excitement than the countdown to Christmas, but as LP Hartley observed "the past is a foreign country; they do things differently there", and times have changed.

 

After an indifferent last couple of month's fishing, and knowing that this would be my final chance to wet a line before church life goes into Christmas overdrive, I was desperate for a good ending to my season, and- despite the absence of monsters landed- this morning's session gave me the good ending I desired.

 

 

It had been hoped that Greg would join us on the canal for our "last hurrah", but unfortunately work commitments prevented him from doing what he would rather have done, and so it was just Pete and I who braved the early morning chill. We headed for a spot that we thought had the potential to be good for perch and set about mixing some groundbait laced with chopped worms and prawns. We started off on float-fished maggots, which saw me catch three micro-roach within 5 minutes of commencing to fish, but it was only after switching to worms that the perch really started to turn on. Initially we fished tight to the spots we had baited, feeding and casting accurately in true "textbook style", but it turns out that perch don't read text books, and more speculative casting around the swim and "chasing bites" proved to be far more effective.

 

 

Any session should be about more than just the fish, and this is particularly so of a "last session", and so a bankside cooked breakfast to celebrate the end of a highly enjoyable season was in order. The sun occasionally broke through, but the weather was mostly cold, although mercifully dry. Pete was using a pole float on running line using a 14 foot match rod and his "pride and joy" small Greys fixed spool reel, I opted for a shorter, 10 foot, match rod, and used one of Ian Lewis' handmade "crucian mini dart" floats. We also picked up the odd fish on the quivertip, with a worm presented on a running ledger with a 3/8 ounce bomb.

 

By the time we packed up at lunchtime a goodly number of perch had made their way to the keepnet, and in the lulls between perch catching activity (which tended to come in short, sharp bursts of several fish), the conversation was varied and convivial. In honour of the season, we changed hats for some final photographs, and ended the season resplendent in headgear that might have been borrowed from Santa.

Another season now consigned to the "drawer" in my head labelled "happy memories", and new adventures to look forward to in 2016. I can't see me ever getting bored of this game .........

 

 

 

 





Walton: Anoraks, Anglicans and angling.

Wikipedia, the modern source of all knowledge defines an "anorak" in British slang as "a person who has a very strong interest, perhaps obsessive, in a niche subject. This subject may be unacknowledged and not understood by the general public. The term is often used synonymously with geek or nerd." I am a Walton anorak.

 

Most anglers have heard  of Izaak Walton, many have a copy of his Compleat Angler on their bookshelves, but few have read it. I have. Of those who have read it, opinion is divided- his book (the third most reprinted literary work in the English language, after the Bible and the works of Shakespeare) is either loved or loathed .... the "Marmite" of literary tomes. Jeremy Paxman and the late Sir Michael Horden both disliked it, while others have been charmed by it. I'm happy to declare myself a fan of Walton's.

 

The details of Walton's life are well known- his unusual longevity, his humble beginnings as a publican's son, his successful business life, his introduction into literary society, his friendships with prominent churchmen, his two marriages, his unlikely friendship with Charles Cotton, and his love of fishing and the pastoral life. He lived through the plague, the fire of London, the English Civil War, the Commonwealth and the Restoration of the Monarchy, and quipped that in writing about fishing he had "made a recreation of a recreation."

 

 

 

That Walton was a religious man, and a devout Christian, is well known. "The Compleat Angler" often references his faith, or deviates into praise of the Almighty before returning to descriptions of fishing days, of rural idylls and tactics and techniques, and as a clergyman it's no surprise that this aspect of Walton interests me. He quaintly argues for the purity of angling as a pastime on the basis of Jesus' propensity for choosing fishermen to be key amongst his followers, and often transports the reader from the riverbank to loftier themes of eternal consequence. However, what is less well known is that most literary critics and experts see "The Compleat Angler" as being a book that- intentionally- works simultaneously on two levels, and that has a deliberate religious sub-text ... a religious allegory, if you will.

 

 



 

The thinking is, that the "Compleat Angler" is not only an angling manual, but also an Anglican apologia. A coded defence of Anglicanism against the more extreme forms of Puritanism. There is a myth that, in the English Civil War, the Parliamentarians were Protestant and the Royalists Catholic-leaning, but such an oversimplification misunderstands the complexities of the political and religious affiliations of the day. Walton was very much a Protestant, with theology, from what we can tell, that was nothing more or less than credally orthodox Protestantism, but he was also a man who believed in order in society, had a high view of the place of the Monarchy, was a committed Anglican and a lover of the Prayer Book, and as such was a known Royalist sympathiser - it was for this reason that he left London for the relative safety of the countryside.

 

 

 

The attributes that Walton expects to find in the angler are also those that he believes to characterise the true Anglican. The angler, in Walton's book, is contrasted with the hunter, a belligerent, contentious character, quite unlike the moderate, peace-loving angler who Walton describes as one who (borrowing a phrase from 1 Thessalonians Chapter 4:11) "studies to be quiet." The hunter, of course, is the extreme Puritan in allegorical form. Walton's eagerness to link angling as an art beloved of the original Apostles is a theological attempt to decry congregational Puritanism as being in some sense less an expression of the apostolic faith than Anglicanism. Walton saw Anglicanism as a "via media" between the "top-down" authoritarian magisterium of Roman Catholicism and what was, to his tidy mind, the anarchic and aggressive tendencies of some in the Puritan movement.

And this- to me- is part of the fascination of Walton; a book which informs us that the chub is "the fearfullest of fishes" and can recommend that when fishing for perch we keep our worms in a bait tin on a bed of fennel along with other observations and angling instructions, while also being  acknowledged as the greatest example of pastoral literature in the English language and simultaneously functioning as a work of theological polemic can only be, in anyone's estimation, a work of genius.

 

What Walton would have made of modern angling with its obsession with ruthless and unromantic pseudo-scientific efficiency, or modern Anglicanism with its large-scale capitulation to theological "wooliness" can only be speculated upon ........ I suspect he would have been disappointed in both, and if he was, I for one, would wholeheartedly concur.