Green without envy

 

To some, green is the colour of envy. Today it was the colour of the lake. Not the lake itself, you understand, but the trees, bushes and grasses that surround and enfold it, along with the lilly pads that speckle its surface. As I arrived at the lake I paused to admire and to wonder how its environs could still look so lush and verdant despite a heatwave and no recent rain.

It was 6am when I drove through the rusty farm gate to the pool, but already it was T-shirt weather. I  made my usual underarm cast, placed the rod on the bite alarm and settled back to see what the morning held in store. On my last visit the lake had seemed in a state of slumber and although I'd managed a brace of nice tench they had done little to alter the feeling of apathetic torpor that the pond had exuded on that occasion. This morning the contrast couldn't have been greater. The lake seemed alive, for the first time since I've been visiting the lake I saw a tench roll, small fish dimpled the surface, and from time to time small patches of tench bubbles could be observed. 

An hour after making my first cast I found myself attached to a tench, which turned out to be one of the lake's smaller examples of the species, weighing in at 3 lb 7oz. Despite its modest size it was blessed with an enormous paintbrush-shaped tail that perhaps accounted for the power with which it attempted to resist being brought to the net.

An hour and a half later and the rod was once again bent into its fighting curve and it was quickly apparent that this was a larger specimen, and so it proved to be as the scales displayed a weight of 6lb 6oz. The fish had the appearance of a wiley old warrior, and a small chunk missing from its tail indicated that it had at some time in the past had a lucky escape from the claws and jaws of an otter. 

The bite alarm sounded for the third and final time at about a quarter to ten, resulting in another fine fish which registered a weight of exactly 4lb. I was aware that if I stayed for another couple of hours I would most likely have caught another tench or two, but something inside me told me that I'd had enough, and that there's more to fishing than accumulating aggregations of numbers. Instead, I slipped the last tench back into the water and went for a walk around the lake to better get to know the place, and  look for potential future swims to try.

 

As I loaded the car to leave, I paused to look at the scene behind the lake, where a slope covered with field of barley gently descends to the distant resevoir that sits at the foot of the hill. A green foreground and a golden background and nestled in between a little known horseshoe shaped pond full of hard fighting tench. Could anything be more perfect?

A brace before lunchtime

 

It's the early bird, according to sagely widom, that catches the worm and what's true of avian eating habits is often also true of angling. To bend the proverb slightly, in my experience it's often the "early angler that catches the tench" and so, with thoughts of tench never currently far from my mind I set the alarm for 5am. In the event, I woke up before 5, crept out of the house and had completed the dog walk and loaded the car by 5:30 and was at the lake for 6:00am and twenty minutes later my line was in the water. 

The pool, unlike me, seemed loathe to awake from its slumber and was giving little away in terms of visual clues. No tench were bubling, no crucians fizzing, small rudd were neither topping for fun or jumping in fear, and even the moorhens who can usually be counted on to amuse with their noisy and distracting antics seemed to have fallen prey to the lake's apathetic vibe.

I underarmed a hair-rigged Robin Red pellet and method feeder rig out into the channel, poured a coffee and settled in for what I suspected might prove to be a long wait in light of the pool's apparent soporofic disposition.

Pete and Eric, two of the lake's regulars, turned up and settled themselves in neighbouring swims, and with their arrival came a change in fortune. My bite alarm sounded its alert and I found myself playing a spirited fish. Gratefully received, the "blank saver" tipped the scales at 4lb 6oz. 

I recast, hopeful that the metaphorical tide was turning and that this first capture would preempt a feeding spell, but the lake reverted to its somnolent stupour. Time seemed to pleasingly slow and "collect" rather than pass in the normal manner, and I leant back in my chair content just to be there, in a world of suspended animation. Normally when fishing my mind is active, hatching plans, ruminating about tactics to outsmart my piscene protagonists, but today my thought processes had taken on a passivity that was in keeping with the surroundings.

A couple of hours went by before a second tench decided to make an appearance, a fish which in size was almost the twin of the first fish, being just a couple of ounces lighter at 4lb 4oz. This concluded the fish catching activity for the day, although I fished on for another couple of hours. 

Dave, who lives on the same street as me and  has recently joined the syndicate popped by for an hour to chat and watch, but I was unable to conjure up any action for him to spectate, my bobbin remaining stubbornly motionless. By half past eleven my tackle was packed away in the car, and after brief chats with Eric and Pete who were fishing on for a while longer I took my leave of the lake. 

On the early morning drive to the pool I had been treated to a wonderfully eccentric and very "British" run of items on Radio 4 as I drove through the lanes of England's "green and pleasant land." (no Satanic mills in the Leicestershire coutryside!). The Shipping Forecast, with its wonderfully evocative names, was followed by "Prayer for the Day" (which I didn't even know was a thing, up until yesterday only knowing "Thought for the Day" which follows a couple of hours later), with the triad being completed by "Farmer's World." The prayer in the second of three progams was a prayer for "peace." With my morning consisting of long periods of pleasant and peaceful inactivity punctuated by a couple of brief interludes of tench catching activity, I think it was answered for me as I found my peace at the pool.