A perch before lunchtime

Many of the best things to happen to me have been unscheduled, unplanned and unexpected. Sadly, the passage of time and busyness of adult life often mitigate against the spontaneous, to the detriment of wellbeing, as life becomes increasingly squeezed into Google calendars, spreadsheets and diary commitments. However, my life has not yet quite become entirely devoid of the pleasure of "last minute decisions", and as the days drew towards the weekend a previously unforeseen opportunity to spend Saturday morning fishing opened up, resulting in me on a whim contacting David and Roger and planning to spend a few hours in pursuit of perch at the club lake.

The sky was an insipid shade of grey, misty, overcast and mildly threatening as I threaded the line through the rings of the old glass fibre rod, enjoying the distinctive noise of the line being pulled from the ratchet of the centrepin, the only sound to rival that of the avian melody being struck up the birds who were busy welcoming the new day in song.

With the depth plumbed and all of the preliminaries sorted, I dropped my hook, baited with double red maggot, into the lake less than a rod length out and settled down to watch my float, while regularly introducing small handfuls of maggots into the swim. After half an hour of staring at a motionless float, the 3BB sarkandas reed waggler wobbled twice, dipped and submerged. A swift upward motion of the rod found me attached to my intended quarry and  after a short tussle a reasonable perch was being drawn over the rim of the net. A handsome fish, bristling with all the usual bravado and swagger common to its species but at around a pound in weight it was by no means a monster and so after an admiring glance and a quick photo it was time to return the fish to its watery home and recast in hopes of a larger specimen.

As the morning drew on the wind gained strength, at times whipping the lake's surface into waves which lapped against the bank and caused the float's orange tip to rhythmically rise and fall as it rode the peaks and troughs. Bites were proving hard to come by with only the occasional roach or small carp gate-crashing the party intended for perch before David found himself playing a better quality striped protagonist to the net. In terms of size his fish might very well have been the twin of my earlier capture and restored our belief that, just possibly, for one of us the hoped for two pounder might yet make an appearance.

 

Roger had been persevering with prawn as his hook bait in the hope of avoiding small fish and tempting a specimen, but while the prawns had succeeded in his avoiding the small fish they had similarly been ignored by their larger brethren, prompting Roger to change his bait to red maggot which resulted in him catching the smallest perch of the day, a wriggly little juvenile which would have been dwarfed had it been placed in a tea strainer let alone a landing net!

Eventually patience and persistence in the face of hostile weather were rewarded when David found himself tangling with what was clearly a much more substantial adversary which turned out to be a fine perch that pleasingly took the scales past the magic 2 pound mark to rest at a satisfying 2 pounds and 2 ounces.

The wind continued its onslaught on the three anglers, as we hunched our shoulders against its wrath, and bites continued to be at a premium. The last word of the day was had by another rogue carp which took a liking to the maggots presented on my final cast, putting a good bend in the vintage glass fibre avon rod I was deploying and ploughing around the swim with dogged determination before finally succumbing and stoically resigning itself to the net.

By midday we were all three of us packed up and bidding farewell to one another and to the lake until the next time. It had been a gruelling morning's fishing in grim conditions, but three decent perch felt like a good result, and the larger of David's brace a minor triumph. To date, my own record since Christmas is four sessions fished and six perch over a pound landed, two of which broke the 2 pound mark, but every one of those fish has been hard earned in the face of adversity and less than clement conditions. Fishing in the winter months brings its own challenges and has an attritional quality, but for all that I'd rather be by a lakeside, nose and eyes streaming in response to the cold than anywhere else. Cold weather angling is for me both an affliction and an addiction, but one from which I seek no refuge nor wish to be rehabilitated from. After all, there are worse things....