Fine margins

 

Elbert Hubbard, the American writer and philosophist who died, along with his wife, when the RMS Lusitania was sunk by a German torpedo in 1915 wrote that "the line betwen failure and success is so fine that we scarcely know when we pass it; so fine that we are often on the line and do not know it." He wasn't, but he may as well have been, writing about tench fishing on the Syndicate Lake. The rewards are there to be had in the form of top quality tench and crucians, but easy fishing it isn't, and those of us fortunate enough to fish the lake constantly "walk the line", to borrow a phrase from Johnny Cash.

I had set my alarm for 5:30am but, as is usually the case when fishing beckons, I was up before it could sound its alert and, once the dog had been walked and fed, I made the pleasant 20 minute drive to the lake. 

The first surprise of the morning was to find four other anglers fishing the lake. Usually one either has the pond to oneself or shares it with at most a couple of other fishermen, and shortly after choosing a swim and setting up, a further two anglers arrived. With the Syndicate boasting a membership of only 25, this meant that almost a third of the membership had chosen this particular Friday morning to fish! Fortunately, because the lake is set among trees, none of us were visible to the others, and apart from the occasional muted splash as a bait was cast into the depths, the sensation of peacefulness and illusion of  solitariness was maintained. 

I cast out two rods, one baited with a boilie was dropped tight to a bed of lily pads, the other, a hair-rigged pellet fished in conjunction with a Method Feeder, was gently underarmed into the deeper channel about two and a half rod lengths out. The lily pad swim was treated to three bait-scoops of loose-fed pellets and boilies before I settled down to watch and wait. An hour and a half passed. Nothing happened. Until it did. A single, continuous tone on the bite alarm and line tearing off the reel's baitrunner function indicated that a tench had succombed to the temptation of the bait cast into the channel. The rod took on its fighting curve, and an enjoyable but relatively brief tussle between angler and tench ensued. 

As the fish was drawn over the net it was clear that this was a decent fish, and the scales recorded a pleasing weight of 6lb 3oz. 

Colin, a fellow Syndicate member, was doing some strimming and tidying up in readiness for the following day's annual Syndicate Barbecue, and was on hand to photograph the fish. Having been unhooked and subjected to the camera and scales, the fish was returned gently to her watery home to continue foraging among the weedbeds, no worse for wear as a result of the ignomony of being caught.

I fished on for a further hour and a half, but to no avail. The tench on the Syndicate Lake tend to feed in concentrated (and predictable) time slots with the "early morning bite" being most productive, with a less productive but equally well defined period in the evening when they are susceptible to capture. With the majority of the day still ahead of me (and the ubiquitous day-off list of chores to be completed) I packed the car to head for home. The morning had provided me with just the one run. Elbert Hubbard was right- it really is a fine line.

"All the fun of the share"

Some things in life come naturally. Others have to be learned. Sharing is a skill that belongs firmly to the latter category. Back in the 1970's when I was a kid, Quality Street chocolates ran the advertising slogan "all the fun of the share", which made absolutely no sense to my childhood brain. As children, every Christmas, after a year of cashflow enforced scarcity, my siblings and I would look forward to a big tin of Quality Street (one of those old-style purple tins decorated with a painting of a red-coated soldier and his beau on the front), and the prospect of sharing said chocolates with my siblings was the last thing on my mind. 

Thankfully now, half a century later, I've learnt that there's pleasure to be gained from sharing, and so it was a delight to be able, for the first time, to travel to the Syndicate Lake and share the experience with my son who had just been promoted from the top of the waiting list to actually gaining a coverted place on the Syndicate. With only a couple hours ahead of us, and the lake so far proving itself to be more challenging than was the case last year, our expectations were modest and our aspirations for the afternoon didn't extend beyond the hope that just one of us might land just one of the pond's hard fighting tench.

We sat and talked, enjoying the blazing late afternoon heat, knowing that the odds were stacked against us, just pleased to be there, listening to the soothing tones of birdsong, soaking up the sun's rays and allowing the environment's ambience to lift from us the cares of another working week. The lake was the weediest I've ever known it to be with perhaps in excess of 80% of the lake's area entirely surrendered to large beds of weeds of the potamogeton crispus variety, whose fronds extended to the lake's surface, and our thoughts and conversation were focused less on the afternoon's session, which predictably ended with a blank, and more on what tactics we would enploy to combat the extensive weed growth on future visits. Not only did we have a lake to share, we now had a shared puzzle to solve. Predictably, the session resulted in the capture of no fish but the absence of olive flanked tench and the presence of bright green weed was now stimulating our combined grey matter.

A full three weeks passed before we were able to return to the lake, this time arriving on a Thursday evening encumbered by all the necessities required for an overnight session. The plan was to fish the evening, draw the rods in during the hours of darkness before recasting at first light and fishing through until a mid-morning pack up and departure. This time our expectations were somewhat raised, with us figuring that the number of hours that we would have baits in the water, coupled with the fact that we'd be in position during the peak dawn and dusk feeding times, gave us a pretty good chance of hooking a fish or two. 

I was first to arrive and after a quick walk around the lake and a brief chat with George who was fishing on the opposite bank, began the task of setting up camp for the night. 

We made the decision to step up our tackle from the usual light specimen rods that I favour or Avon style rod that James would normally employ for tench and to fish with (albeit relatively soft-actioned) carp rods and heavier line in order to maximise our chances of avoiding being weeded by hooked tench. I put two rods out into the channel on Method Feeders and small hair-rigged hookable pellets, while James fished just one rod utilising a boilie and PVA bag set-up just a few feet from the bank on the edge of a bed of pads. The margin swim was subjected to a liberal helping of mixed pellet and boilie free offerings and, traps set, we sat back and waited.

A pleasant evening of conversation, bacon rolls, coffee, and silent bite alarms ensued. Well, not entirely silent as I somehow contrived to catch a rudd that must have weighed all of 4 ounces which was hooked fair and square in the mouth. I had only wound the rod in to check that the hookbait was still intact, as I was convinced I'd just suffered a series of line bites, but the sensation of feeble splashing as I retrieved told me otherwise!

Around ten o'clock we wound the rods in and settled down to sleep as dusk turned to night. A busy rodent (from now on to be referred to as Roland!) busily scuttled around just feet from where we lay on our bedchairs. The sky was clear, the stars twinkled, and we dropped off to sleep with dreams of paintbrush-tailed, olive-brown sided, and red eyed tench.

I woke at first light and recast all three rods, as James was fast asleep, impervious to the new day's dawning. Roland had ceased his nocturnal activity and gone to wherever rats sleep in the daytime, but his slumber was unmatched by the lake's population of small rudd who were frisking, frolicking and dimpling the surface (when not leaping clear of it, presumably to escape the attentions of maraudering shoals of perch.) Half an hour elapsed before my bite alarm burst into life and I finally found myself attached to an indignant tench. I shouted for James to wake up, which he did in time to act as ghillie and adroitly wield the net.

The hook was swiftly removed, the scales reached for, but inexplicably the digital scales refused to switch on. I popped the fish back in the net and placed the net carefully into the water while we tried to sort out the recalcitrant scales but when, after a few seconds, it became clear that they were not going to "play ball" I returned the tench to the water, thanking her for the fun she'd given me and knowing that I would never know how much she weighed. The fish looked a definite five pounder but the pleasure of catching her would never be accompanied by the process of reducing her to an accurate set of numbers.

Shortly after 8:00am we packed up, said our goodbyes, and departed for our respective homes. Despite the challenging fishing it had been a lovely few hours of "father and son" time in the glorious surroundings of our favourite lake, and as I stood by my car surveying the already harvested field behind the lake, no more than a couple of yards from where I was standing a pair of long-legged, long-eared, hares bounded past me. I almost thought I heard them say "top of the morning to you." Now, that really would have made for a good fisherman's tale!