Three men and a bait

The "Indian Summer" that had been September was well and truly broken as October came around. The rain hammered down in sheets, as if somewhere in the firmament a high pressure hose had been turned on and three middle aged men, old enough to know better, huddled under their large green mushroom-shaped umbrellas focussing their attention on the small tips of bright orange or yellow that protruded above the rain lashed surface of the pond. Three brothers whose angling journey had begun in the school summer holiday forty years ago and who now make an annual trip and travel from their respective corners of the UK to renew the sibling bond and fish together.

It was my turn to host the annual piscatorial get together of the brothers Barrett, and that could only mean one thing: perch.

We each chose a perchy looking pitch and set out our stall to try and fool the hump backed specimen perch that swim within the pond's murky depths. The first hour was mercifully dry (although the diluvian downpour that was to follow more than made up for the benign beginning) and it was during those opening sixty minutes that I connected with the first perch of the day, not a monster by this lake's standards, but a plucky fish of about a pound in weight that fought gamely before conceding victory to me and allowing itself to be slid over the rim of the waiting landing net.

Things were soon to go from "good" to "even better" when Andy connected with a solid fish that gave him a merry run around before joining us on the bank. Weighed, admired and returned it tipped the trusty Avon scales to register a weight of 2lb 7 ounces - a fish whose size and magnificence would have been beyond our wildest dreams when it all began and we were just three schoolboys walking to our local club lake in the summer of 1981.

Andy rapidly followed up the 2 pounder with a second fish, just shy of 2 pounds, and it was following the capture his second fish that the weather decided to bare its teeth and show its malevolent side, and from that moment onward the rain was unrelenting, falling fast and furious and accompanied by a chill (or should that be "ill"?) wind.

We fished on in grimly determined manner, continuing to loose feed red maggots along with chopped prawn and worms, refusing to cede victory to the elements, willing the perch to come on the feed but the fishing was proving challenging, with the fish seeming to take their sullen cue from the moodiness of the weather.

Tim managed a brace of perch, one of about a pound and another of a pound and a half but bites were sporadic and few and far between. 

Worms, maggots, prawns and even tiny deadbaits were all tried on the hook as we rang the changes more in desperation than inspired by any serious hope of provoking the perch. I landed a bonus ide that looked to be somewhere around the 2 pound mark, Tim lost a feisty carp as he tried to turn it as it raced with clear intent towards the reeds, and I completed the day's perch captures with a handsome fish of about a pound and three quarters.

It had, in truth, been a trying session, with our patience, fortitude and angling ability all put to the test but persistence had resulted in us each claiming a nice brace of perch, and our annual get together is always about so much more than just the fishing. Jane Austen claimed that brothers are "strange creatures" and that may well be how three men who by any metrics qualify as "middle aged" running the risk of pneumonia by attempting to catch fish in the pouring rain only to return them immediately to the water from whence they came might appear to any dispassionate observer. In fact, it may not just be how we appear, there may even be some truth in the assertion, but I'm happy to be counted a "strange creature" if it entails a lifelong sibling friendship and a bond of loyalty that includes our commonly owned love of fishing (and football) but is built on the stronger foundations of shared experience and whole life stories that began as children together in a small house on an estate in Reading and that, through all the divergencies of our individual journeys through life still has connection and moments of convergence, the best of which often take place beside rivers, lakes and ponds. To the extent that any of us have grown up (a point which each of our wives might wish to debate!) much of that growing up was done while fishing. We learned far more than just how to fish in those early 80's days on the club lake; we learned to succeed and to fail and to respond to both with stoicism and grace, we learned that fishing is different from  catching, smoked our first under age cigarettes, navigated encounters with other gangs of young boys (sometimes friendly, sometimes hostile)  in the last days of a passing era in which children were allowed to roam wild and   benefit from a "benign neglect" model of parenting, and generally did much of our growing up with a fishing rod in hand.

We were made to work hard for our fish, the weather was miserable, the results in terms of fish landed only modest, but I suspect it may come as no surprise to you to discover that, God willing,  plans are already afoot for more of the same in 2022, and the three of us can hardly wait.