I know from observation (my wife by paid profession and leisure-time choice is a gardener) that gardening is, above all, an object lesson in faith and hope. Seeds or bulbs are planted with the expectation and desire, although not the certainty, that something living, lustrous and beautiful will in time emerge from the soil. Fishing, similarly, trades on optimism, the dreaming, plotting, planning and, eventually, the execution of a fishing session being undertaken in the hope that a float will disappear, a centre pin sing or a buzzer bleep resulting in the capture of a living creature fooled by the fisherman's cunning into thinking that the bait presented was there as a result of nature's whim not an angler's artifice.
The feeling of hope known by every angler is accentuated when visiting a new venue for the first time, and so it was that Greg and I, with just a few Friday afternoon hours to spare parked and unloaded our tackle beside a new lake, nerves jangling with optimistic anticipation.
The lake was a classic small pond, rarely fished (we had to telephone the owner for him to delegate his wife to drive from their cottage to the lake's gate to let us in), verdant, green, and overgrown, with no proper swims cut into the bank or wooden platforms- a slightly wild and natural look, as if attempts to maintain the lakeside environment and a desire to leave it as natural looking as possible were being held in a pleasing state of creative tension.
The weather was summer's afternoon sultry, and Greg and I set up a few yards from each other on a small promontory that almost served to split the lake in two, and dropped our floatfished sweetcorn into the margins along with a scattering of hand fed sweetcorn.
Bites were soon forthcoming, although until I had played around with my shotting pattern and depth setting they proved hard to connect with, the ultimate solution being (counter intuitively) to stop fishing on the bottom with just a number 8 close to the hook and the rest of the shot bulked around the float and rather to present the bait in midwater and move a BB shot three quarters of the way down the line to provide deliberate resistance as a fish took the bait.
The sun continued to shine unabated as we landed a succession of small but plucky carp, evenly split between commons and some particularly pretty mini mirrors. The fishing was leisurely and the action frequent, as befits piscatorial activity in the summer months.
By the end of three hours we had probably landed somewhere in the region of three score of fish between us, and the convivial conversation, sunshine, peaceful surroundings and eager to please carp had worked their magic. The pressures of work and life had receded, internal equanimity had been restored and a new lake had been added to our list of places worth revisiting. Expectation, hope and faith had been repaid and as we drove out of the soon to be relocked gates our minds were already turning to future trips and other as yet still to be discovered lakes. "Intrepid" would be stretching a point, but "exploration" it certainly is.
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