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?