Mediocrity is my middle name

The title of this piece is somewhat misleading. My actual middle name is Murray (which isn't much better!), but my angling results at the moment hover perilously between the categories of mediocre and disappointing. After several years of relative success, especially with specimen sized perch, 2024 saw a downturn in my fortunes with no fish of noteable size of any species banked, and so far 2025 seems determined to prolong the run of piscatorial underacheivement. The irony, though, is that last year was one of my most enjoyable seasons for quite some time, largely because almost all of my sessions were fished in the company of my son, or with some of the good friends who I've collected over the course of my angling years, or both. 

Today's expedition, a few snatched hours on an early April morning, saw me once again fail to set the angling world ablaze with my escapades, as my friend David and I visited a local lake. I arrived before David and had my first carp on the bank just twenty minutes after making my first cast and before his arrival. I had decided, on a whim, to eschew my normal centre pin and quill float approach, in favour of a Method feeder, with a 2 pound test curve rod, freespool reel and bite alarm. Some regular readers may now be throwing their hands up in horror and recoiling at such wanton backsliding into "traditional angling" heresy, but there are times when a solid screaming tone on the alarms and a rod jerking and bending as the fish tears off feels like exactly what I need, besides which I consider laziness, in moderation, as much a virtue as a flaw. 

Shortly after landing that first carp, a second tore off with my hair rigged Robin Red pellet in its mouth, only for the hook to pull as I drew it towards the net. However, with one fish banked and another hooked and almost landed and less than half an hour gone, I felt confident that the morning would go on to provide a steady procession of fish to the unhooking mat. It didn't. 

David arrived and set up in the swim next to me, which enabled us to pass the time chatting and catching up with each other's news and lives, which in the event was no bad thing in light of the absence of anything much in the way of angling action!

I added a second fish, a surprise barbel, before David eventually got off the mark with an F1. I am no fan of barbel, coarse fishing's monarch of moving water, being stocked in lakes and ponds but the fish gave a spirited fight and was a welcome diversion  from inactivity.

Although the Spring sun was bright in the sky, a chill Easterly wind kept the temperature down and the  other anglers around the lake (of which there were more than is normal for this pond) were similarly struggling with only the odd fish being landed. My final fish of the morning was a bream, enabling me to console myself with the fact that what I'd lacked in numbers had been compensated for by variety. David was less fortunate, his second and final fish completing for him a brace of F1s. 

By lunchtime I was back home with my net drying in the garden and my tackle neatly and safely enconsed in the garage. Perhaps it's an age thing - I am, after all, now a grandfather and rapidly approaching my seventh decade - but these days I find myself measuring success less in relation to size or numbers ("just as well", I hear you say) but, rather, in terms of enjoyment and, fortunately for me, I've enjoyed both of my, mostly fishless, excursions of 2025 to date. As many a bankside sage has informed me: "it's called fishing, not catching" and from such a truism I draw comfort!

All Quiet on the Eastern Fen

 

The big wide world beyond the Fenland scene in which I'd inserted myself was going more than a little bit crazy. The established order of things was rapidly being turned upside down, and between the two of them a narcissistic US President with an over-inflated ego and no real understanding of international diplomacy and a Russian dictator with aggressive imperialistic designs were making a mess of things and bringing us closer to a global war than at any time since the Cuban missile crisis. But on the Sixteen Foot drain as I screwed my eyes up against the wind and stared at my pike float, for a few hours the world shrunk, its problems temporarily forgotten, and I was happy to surrender the totality of my concentration to the, ultimately unsuccesful, attempt to add to my (admittedly meager) tally of Fenland pike. 

I make an annual pilgrimage (an apt description considering the company with whom I make it) to the Fens with a small bunch of fellow members of the Christian Anglers group, a club that now numbers around 120 fisherfolk whose common bonds are fishing and faith, and on this occasion the group included both my son and one of my brothers. 

To say that the Fenland drains can be inhospitable and less than easy to fish is to dabble in understatement, but this yearly event is one that proves all of the cliches and truisms of angling to be accurate: there really is more to fishing than catching fish, and while we descend on the drain knowing that only a few of us will catch we make the journey equally confident that such knowledge doesn't bother us. 

It was probably slightly less than an hour after setting up that the first pike of the day was landed, a jack of perhaps five pounds making its way angrily into my brother Andy's landing net. We all took this to be an encouraging sign, although experience told us that the Sixteen Foot drain was likely to be capricious and (as with swallows and summers) one pike is no guarantee of whatever may or may not ensue.

The morning wore on, and as lunchtime (bacon rolls, cooked by one of our number and shared by all,  always form a part of this particular get-together) grew closer, Matt struck into a pike which it soon became clear was significantly bigger than the day's first fish. A short tussle resulted in him displaying what would be the best fish of the day, a mean and magnificent looking female of fourteen pounds and six ounces. 

Morning gave way to afternoon and as the sky turned cloudier and the wind grew colder, Ray, who runs this stretch of water, appeared with warm sausage rolls to keep morale and spirits high. John, fishing at the far end of the row of anglers managed a brace of early afternoon jacks to complete the day's catching. 

Most of those fishing had travelled reasonable distances to do so, and with a darkening sky taking on a more threatening demeanour, we gathered to present Matt with the trophy for the day's largest specimen, to say our goodbyes, and to offer a brief prayer of thanks for what had been a thoroughly enjoyable day and another one for our friend and club member Roy, in advance of his imminent surgery.

Maybe next year will see me renew my own personal bankside acquaintance with the gloriously green and mottled pike of the Fens but, while I have only limited confidence that this may prove to be the case, I have no such hesitation in my certainty that next year's event will be as rich and full of pleasure as all its predecessors have been. As our friends in the Flyfishers Club would have it: "Piscator non solum piscatur."