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.