Plan B for perch

The ominously dark sky was moody, malevolent and full of watery threat and menace as the clouds scudded across the firmament at breakneck speed. A bitingly cold wind swept and swirled, venting its anger at the lakeside trees distorting their shape and forcing them to bend and bow to its power. Pete and I hunched our shoulders against the elements and began tackling up, fortified only by the possibility of specimen perch at our favourite perch pond.

Until 48 hours earlier the plan had been that we would be pursuing pike on the Fifteen Foot Drain in Cambridgeshire, but our Fenland friends Ray and John with whom we had been due to fish counselled against the trip, their considered local opinion being that fishing would be close to impossible, unpleasant in the extreme and downright dangerous with a severe storm warning for the area having been issued by the Met Office. If things looked rough on our normally serene Leicestershire perch pond, one can only imagine how things would have appeared on the permanently bleak and wind-swept tree-barren Fenland flatlands. 

An hour into the session and the weather began to brighten. The sky transformed itself from grey to blue, the sun dislodged the clouds and the wind dropped. The prospects similarly began to take a turn for the better as we each caught a small roach and perch before Pete's float-fished prawn was engulfed by a fish that was clearly of significantly bigger proportions. The short fight resulted in a fine perch that weighed in at exactly 2 pounds nestling in the net.

Half an hour later it was my turn to find myself attached to an angry perch, which turned out to be the twin of Pete's fish, also registering a weight of exactly 2 pounds.

Despite having a brace of specimen perch to our credit, the fishing was proving a challenge and every bite was the result of hard work. Switching occasionally to red maggots resulted in the odd much smaller fish, but even they were hard to come by. However, we were both enjoying ourselves accepting gratefully the opportunity to lay aside the pressures of work and to receive the peace of the lakeside as a gift. 

Two further perch made the trip to the bankside, and on a day of pleasing symmetry, there was one for each of us and both were of similar size, Pete's weighing 1lb 12oz and mine looking to be about a pound and a half.

After four and a half hours of staring intently at our floats, and with the sky once again beginning to recast itself in more threatening tone we packed our tackle away, delighted  with our hard won success and pleased to have cheated the worst of the predicted storm.

Minutes after pulling out of the car park, and safely ensconced in the warmth of the car, the rain began to fall. I allowed myself a smile - Plan B it may have been, but the alternative plan had come together nicely and sometimes you can't say fairer than that. 

Getting back on the perch

The kids these days have a word for it: "meh." One dictionary definition of this rather unattractive sounding modern word proposes that "Meh is an interjection used as an expression of indifference or boredom. It is often regarded as a verbal equivalent of a shrug of the shoulders." It's a word much less associated with relaxed nonchalance and far more suggestive of the descent into lethargy. The early days of the New Year were ones in which I was visited by an overwhelming feeling of "meh." Work was busy but after the Christmas break (and an outbreak of Covid in the family, which led to a few days of us largely living in separate parts of the same house) I was struggling to find my usual enthusiasm for anything, and with the Diocesan offices once again closed in response to the latest national outbreak of the now too familiar plague, I was beginning to feel the cumulative effects of two years of living a more solitary life than is my norm. The extrovert side of my personality was suffering as a result of the frustrations of so much of what would form my normal human contact now being mediated through the unsatisfactory medium of screen time on Zoom. Even more worrying, was that I was struggling to summon the energy to engage in the activities that I usually find life-giving and energising. Several times I contemplated fishing but each time I failed to summon the requisite enthusiasm. Eventually, as the first month of 2022 drew to a close, realising that something had to give, I roused myself from my emotional stupour and contacted Roger, who agreed with my diagnosis that the only cure for my sense of ennui was for me to get off my backside and for us to spend a few hours together chasing perch at the Club Lake.

It was the last day of January when our diaries and work and family commitments gave us the first opportunity to fish together, providing a welcome window of a few hours from lunchtime into the afternoon for angling activity. We set up in adjacent swims, both employing a simple float and red maggot approach and predictably both choosing to indulge our preference for utilising vintage tackle and were joined by our friend David who, now retired, fishes at least once a week every week, much to the envy of Roger and I. 

In the event, from a fishing perspective the afternoon proved to be a struggle. David started off on prawns, while Roger and I opted for a float fished red maggot approach. The wind swirled and howled, the air was cold and the fish uncompliant. In time, David also switched to maggots and we all picked up roach, tiny perch and the odd rogue carp, but the larger perch we sought remained elusive, until inside the last hour I connected with a fish whose fight was instantly recognisable as that of a decently sized perch. My striped adversary gave a commendable account of itself before surrendering to the net and turned out to be a venerable old warrior complete with a hole in it's spikey dorsal which registered a weight of 2 pounds and 3 ounces, the only notable fish to fall to any of us on what had been an engrossing but exacting afternoon's piscatorial activity.

Despite the challenging nature of the fishing it had been a good afternoon beside the lake with Roger and David, the enjoyment not diminished by the cold or the perch's general unwillingness to please, and yet another reminder of how fine the line sometimes is between success and failure- even on the hardest of days it only requires one fish to momentarily drop its guard to turn defeat into a future treasured memory. The triumvirate of place, people, and memory has always been an intrinsic part of how I make sense of my own story, and the Club Lake is rapidly joining other lakes from my angling history as a place in which I feel comfortably rooted and where memories are being made that will give birth to the stories of tomorrow, and the best of those stories will include within them the company of friends. My tackle packed away, I looked around the lake for one last time and recalled that the earliest Christians contended that God had given us two books of revelation: the book of Scripture, and the book of creation. They weren't wrong. There is much unnecessary beauty in the natural world, and for it I am grateful. The secret is to make time to pay attention to it, to listen to what is says and to respond with thankfulness. It doesn't take much to make me happy- sometimes it's as simple as just one fish.

New Year's Eve perching.

Often it's the poets who say it best. Here's what I mean:

When despair for the world grows in me

and I wake in the night at the least sound

in fear of what my life and my children's lives may be

I go and lie down where the wood drake rests in his beauty on the water and the great heron feeds.

I come into the presence of wild things

who do not tax their lives with forethought of grief.

I come into the presence of still water

and I feel above me the day-blind stars waiting with their light.

For a time I rest in the grace of the world

and am free.

All that I was feeling as I trudged through the wet grass and cloying mud to the Club Lake for my final session of 2021 on the year's final day, put eloquently into words by the American poet Wendell Berry, someone who has never met me, much less knows of me. Such is the power of the poet's pen.

It had been a pleasant family Christmas, restful and happy, but I was still feeling the weight of the year that had preceded it, the Lockdowns and restrictions, the isolation and shrunk-small world that working from home brings, the various waves of Covid, pressures at work and so much more sitting on my shoulders, but in the five minutes that it takes to tramp from the car park to the lake I felt the weight begin to lift. As I tackled up, I admired the winter trees that fringe the lake, the gnarled and twisted fingers of their denuded branches clawing at the unseasonably mild air as they dream of once more being adorned with the pastel colours of their springtime livery.

The target fish were perch, the bait red maggots, and the realistic ambition a nice mixed bag of fish, with the chance but no guarantee of a good sized perch amongst the mix.

I had elected an old ET Barlow's Vortex glass fibre Avon as my weapon of choice, paired with an even more ancient Allcocks Aerial centre pin and chose a swim with some sparse wintry bushes overhanging the water at the margin's edge. Three red maggots underneath a Norfolk reed waggler and impaled on a size 16 hook were lowered next to the bushes' branches, loose maggots were fed and the waiting game began. In truth, the wait was neither long nor onerous and after a few minutes and a couple of missed bites a tiny perch was being swung unceremoniously to hand, the first of a procession of small perch, roach and rudd that obliged me as the swim began to build.

Unusually for me, I was fishing alone, the session being an impromptu post-breakfast decision, but having failed to persuade any friends to accompany me, I managed to bribe a robin to keep me company at the cost of a few red maggots every so often, the chubby red breasted compatriot perching sentinel-like on the branches behind me for the entire duration of my stay. Once more the float quivered and submerged and this time the resistance was more sustained, and after a spirited tussle a decent perch was being drawn over the net. The fish wasn't of sufficient size to justify subjecting it to the indignity of the scales and weigh sling, but looked to be about a pound and a half, a pleasing perch in any angler's estimation.

A few more small perch, roach and rudd followed, along with four carp, each of which ploughed up and down the swim before being landed, and all of which were probably a couple of pounds or so in weight, before I once again found myself connected to a reasonable perch, which proved to be a little smaller than the first fish, but certainly a fish in excess of a pound and possessed of all the bravura swagger and bristling bully boy tendencies associated with this most beautiful of freshwater fish species.

This was to be the last fish of note, and after a couple more perch of insubstantial size I packed up in an unhurried manner, the two hours spent by still waters having had the necessary calming effect, drawing me into the grace of the world and its Creator, and rendering my spirit free.

Whatever unknowns 2022 may throw at me (and for sure there will be some), of this I remain convinced: angling in pleasing environs will be, as it has been to me for over four decades, a balm to heal the soul. I really must go more often next year.

Angling Anemoia

 

I suffer from anemoia. This confession need spread no alarm- the condition is neither contagious nor life threatening. In fact, you've probably never heard of it. "Anemoia" is one of those words that exists and has an established meaning, but is rarely to be found in common vernacular usage. The Dictionary defines it as "nostalgia for a time you've never known", which pretty much describes my approach to angling. I was converted to the gentle art in 1981, and so my formative angling years were in the twighlight of the glass fibre era and the early days of carbon as the mass produced norm for fishing rods. Very occasionally one would see an old chap sat atop a willow basket wielding a cane rod, but such sightings were rare.

These days, I choose to fish almost exclusively with rods of cane or older examples of glass fibre, most of which predate my earliest forays into the world of fishing. The reason is, in part, aesthetic. There is something intrinsically alluring about a craftsman-built cane rod, whether restored to a lustrous varnish finish or bearing the noble scars and patina of over half a century's use, something attractive about handmade floats crafted from quill or reed, and something reassuring about the solidity of an ancient fixed spool reel or the machined perfection of a venerable old centre pin.

Occasionally I question why I have elected to pursue this particular fork in the angling road, but the conclusion I always return to is that the answer to the question goes beyond (although includes) the aesthetic considerations, and is largely accounted for by anemoia. Put simply, I long for a simpler time. I am not blind to the fact that the "simpler time" I yearn for was a time when healthcare was less developed, life expectancy shorter, life for minority groups harder, and we were still slowly uncoupling ourselves from a morally dubious exploitative Empire, but notwithstanding all of that, there's a simplicity in the England of Mr Crabtree and Peter which enchants and calls to me with siren voice. An England less detached from its rural roots than its 21st Century counterpart, an England in which children still roamed wild (but not feral), climbing trees, collecting newts from ponds, chasing hoops down hills, playing football in the street, and not imprisoned in their bedrooms oppressed by screens, phones, social media and existential doubts about their self -worth.

Sir Isaac Newton wrote that "Truth is ever to be found in the simplicity, and not in the multiplicity and confusion of things", and he was a man who knew a thing or two about things. Born in the late 1960's, I am aware that I'm (to quote Marc Bolan) a "20th Century boy" in a 21st Century world, and my heart at times yearns curiously for the years before I was, but when wielding a cane rod and centre pin reel both of which are older than I am, I find myself in some small way transported back in time to a time before me, a time when I suspect time itself seemed to move more slowly, as indeed it does while fishing.

I may be a deluded romantic and my anemoia an affliction, it may even be that I'm guilty of remembering the past as it never really was, but the best of it is that, as far as I can tell, the only cure for said affliction is to go fishing, and such a prescription can only be a good thing.

When perch aren't the main thing

I hesitate to deal in cliche, but in this instance I have little choice. We've all heard (and oftentimes trotted out) the tired sayings and aphorisms that declare "fishing to be about more than catching fish" but a thing doesn't cease to be true simply because it's become a truism, and today  the veracity of the statement was incontrovertible. Ostensibly we were fishing for perch and to win our club's annual Perch Trophy, but in reality we were fishing in memory of a friend and to raise money for charity.

We're an unusual bunch, a collection of just shy of 100 anglers with not only a commonly  held passion for angling, but also in the case of  most of our members a strong commitment to the Christian faith. (the clue is in the group's name: Christian Anglers). With a membership that traverses the whole of the UK, much of our contact is via a Facebook group, but we also hold fish-ins and an annual weekend camping retreat, and since our friend John Rellie (pictured below) died in 2018 we have held an annual perch match at the conclusion of which the captor of the biggest perch wins the shield for a year and has his name engraved on the trophy.

The match is far more an exercise in socialising, remembering  John's life with thanks, and raising money than it is a serious pursuit of perch, but our membership contains among its number some seriously proficient anglers (including no less than one of the vice-presidents of The Perchfishers)  and prior to today the match had never been won by a fish of less than 2lb 7 oz despite the rather casual nature of the event. 

As might reasonably be expected from a day in early November, there was a slight chill in the air when the 9 anglers who had booked to fish the event gathered in the car park to draw for choice of swims. Each angler, on their name being drawn from a hat, had the right to go and plant a bankstick in the swim of their choice, and once all of the swims were allocated, the fun could begin in earnest (or something approaching earnestness, while never quite possessing the requisite seriousness to accurately fit the designation!). Draw completed and Pete cooked up some bacon and sausage sandwiches and after an al fresco breakfast the suitably fortified anglers set to work in pursuit of stripe-sided monsters.

As it transpired, the weather was kinder to us than the fish proved to be. The day was overcast yet mild, but the fish in general, and the perch in particular, proved to be in a less generous mood. The occasional small fish was swung in by those electing to fish with maggots, but for those of us who persisted with bigger baits the fishing was an  arduous and attritional affair. 

Roy managed a hat-trick of small barbel, which tested the elastic in his pole and Pete landed a broad backed common that fought hard on his light float set up. Dave and Garry also both lost decent carp at the net, but  rods pleasingly bent in their battle curve were few and far between.

My small perch bob, which had been made for me by Roy, had done no meaningful bobbing for nearly three biteless hours, but eventually it trembled, moved jerkily across the water's surface and then submerged with purpose. The strike met with firm resistance  and after a tussle of two or three minutes a handsome perch was engulfed in the folds of the net. The scales registered a weight of 1 lb 10 ounces, and it turned out to be the only perch of noteworthy size to be caught on the day, which resulted in me retaining the trophy I had first won the previous year.

At the prearranged hour of three o'clock the match was declared completed, and I made a reasonable job of feigning humility on being presented with the trophy. The fishing had been hard, and for only one decent perch to have been landed over a six hour period by nine anglers with more aggregated years of fishing experience than we'd care to admit to was disappointing, but the main aims of the day had been more than accomplished. We had celebrated John's life, enjoyed each other's company, and raised over £200 for a charity that looks to demonstrate God's love to people who are often overlooked, looked down on or judged, yet who are created in His image and, like all of us, are deserving of a new start and another chance in life. As I drove out of the car park I almost thought I could hear John's raucous laugh- after all, on his last visit to the lake he caught a perch of a pound and a half and he wasn't even fishing for perch. "What's wrong with you guys? I can catch them on luncheon meat and you can't catch them on worms and prawns" he'd have boomed in his voluble South African accent. Gone but not forgotten, and today remembered in a way that he'd have thoroughly approved of. 

We'll do it all over again next year, and hopefully 2022's perch will have read the memo.

Three men and a bait

The "Indian Summer" that had been September was well and truly broken as October came around. The rain hammered down in sheets, as if somewhere in the firmament a high pressure hose had been turned on and three middle aged men, old enough to know better, huddled under their large green mushroom-shaped umbrellas focussing their attention on the small tips of bright orange or yellow that protruded above the rain lashed surface of the pond. Three brothers whose angling journey had begun in the school summer holiday forty years ago and who now make an annual trip and travel from their respective corners of the UK to renew the sibling bond and fish together.

It was my turn to host the annual piscatorial get together of the brothers Barrett, and that could only mean one thing: perch.

We each chose a perchy looking pitch and set out our stall to try and fool the hump backed specimen perch that swim within the pond's murky depths. The first hour was mercifully dry (although the diluvian downpour that was to follow more than made up for the benign beginning) and it was during those opening sixty minutes that I connected with the first perch of the day, not a monster by this lake's standards, but a plucky fish of about a pound in weight that fought gamely before conceding victory to me and allowing itself to be slid over the rim of the waiting landing net.

Things were soon to go from "good" to "even better" when Andy connected with a solid fish that gave him a merry run around before joining us on the bank. Weighed, admired and returned it tipped the trusty Avon scales to register a weight of 2lb 7 ounces - a fish whose size and magnificence would have been beyond our wildest dreams when it all began and we were just three schoolboys walking to our local club lake in the summer of 1981.

Andy rapidly followed up the 2 pounder with a second fish, just shy of 2 pounds, and it was following the capture his second fish that the weather decided to bare its teeth and show its malevolent side, and from that moment onward the rain was unrelenting, falling fast and furious and accompanied by a chill (or should that be "ill"?) wind.

We fished on in grimly determined manner, continuing to loose feed red maggots along with chopped prawn and worms, refusing to cede victory to the elements, willing the perch to come on the feed but the fishing was proving challenging, with the fish seeming to take their sullen cue from the moodiness of the weather.

Tim managed a brace of perch, one of about a pound and another of a pound and a half but bites were sporadic and few and far between. 

Worms, maggots, prawns and even tiny deadbaits were all tried on the hook as we rang the changes more in desperation than inspired by any serious hope of provoking the perch. I landed a bonus ide that looked to be somewhere around the 2 pound mark, Tim lost a feisty carp as he tried to turn it as it raced with clear intent towards the reeds, and I completed the day's perch captures with a handsome fish of about a pound and three quarters.

It had, in truth, been a trying session, with our patience, fortitude and angling ability all put to the test but persistence had resulted in us each claiming a nice brace of perch, and our annual get together is always about so much more than just the fishing. Jane Austen claimed that brothers are "strange creatures" and that may well be how three men who by any metrics qualify as "middle aged" running the risk of pneumonia by attempting to catch fish in the pouring rain only to return them immediately to the water from whence they came might appear to any dispassionate observer. In fact, it may not just be how we appear, there may even be some truth in the assertion, but I'm happy to be counted a "strange creature" if it entails a lifelong sibling friendship and a bond of loyalty that includes our commonly owned love of fishing (and football) but is built on the stronger foundations of shared experience and whole life stories that began as children together in a small house on an estate in Reading and that, through all the divergencies of our individual journeys through life still has connection and moments of convergence, the best of which often take place beside rivers, lakes and ponds. To the extent that any of us have grown up (a point which each of our wives might wish to debate!) much of that growing up was done while fishing. We learned far more than just how to fish in those early 80's days on the club lake; we learned to succeed and to fail and to respond to both with stoicism and grace, we learned that fishing is different from  catching, smoked our first under age cigarettes, navigated encounters with other gangs of young boys (sometimes friendly, sometimes hostile)  in the last days of a passing era in which children were allowed to roam wild and   benefit from a "benign neglect" model of parenting, and generally did much of our growing up with a fishing rod in hand.

We were made to work hard for our fish, the weather was miserable, the results in terms of fish landed only modest, but I suspect it may come as no surprise to you to discover that, God willing,  plans are already afoot for more of the same in 2022, and the three of us can hardly wait.

Perching in earnest

A whole month had passed since the session that marked the start of my perch campaign,  the usual combination of work and domestic commitments preventing an earlier return to the bank to resume the quest. I have never previously started my stripy chasing activities as early as late August, but this year impatience got the better of me and my desire for perch caused me to take early leave of the more traditional species of summer and turn my attention to the fish that are never far from my dreams. The intervening weeks had seen a change in the scenery, with some of the green leaves of August beginning their metamorphosis into the russets, golds and scarlets of Autumn on the trees that stand sentinel-like behind the lake, but most still retained their summer livery. The sun burned only slightly weaker in the sky than on my last visit, and despite being the last week of September the temperature was also yet to properly adjust in line with the seasonal transition. Barely Autumn, but no longer summer, a liminal moment in the inexorable cycle of the seasons. It was shortly after midday that I arrived at the pond with my friend Dave and began the necessary process of plumbing the depth at the edge of the reeds less than a rod's length from the bank. There are big perch in this small lake, and they cruise its margins, making use of the available cover and feasting on small fish and the American Signal crayfish population that has colonised the lake's bed. 

I delicately dropped my small perch bob next to some reeds just feet from where I was sat, slightly repositioning the bait every quarter of an hour, each relocation of just a few inches pregnant with possibility. Eyes fixed on the float, whole body alert to its every trembling, the waiting game had begun. Non angling friends who suppose that I fish to "pass the time of day" have failed to understand that I have no wish for the time to pass, but rather wish that I had more time, and if such a thing were possible  I could quite happily spend an entire eternity by the side of a pond squinting at a float and wishing into into submersion. 

I didn't have to wait long for the first few perch to make the trip to the bank, with a brief flurry of small perch who didn't allow their modest size to get in the way of their eating ambitions, each greedily engulfing the whole prawn hookbait. After a handful of pugnacious hand-sized perch had surrendered themselves to me things quitened down, and it was about an hour before my first respectably sized fish made an appearance, a rather splendid hard fighting specimen of about a pound and a quarter.

Dave, fishing to my left, had yet to catch a fish (although by now we had both landed several unwelcome crayfish who had displayed a penchant for prawns), but when the first fish succumbed to the allure of his bait it turned out to be a magnificent striped beast that tipped the scales to 2lb 2oz after a tenacious tussle.

As is frequently the case the pond was in one of its awkward sulky moods, with the fish feeding in short bursts between lengthy periods of inactivity. I and my small bunch of angling companions have enjoyed a pleasing level of success over the last three years, with some fine perch landed, but these fish demand to be worked for and don't give themselves up easily. Matt, fishing the opposite bank had been fishing since 8am, catching three nice perch around the pound and a half mark during the morning (pictures of which he'd gleefully WhatsApped to my phone while I was slaving away at my laptop) but he was enduring a quiet afternoon untroubled by the perch he was seeking. My next perch was my biggest of the day, just an ounce lighter than Dave's fish, registering a creditable 2lb 1oz on my digital scales. At one stage the fish had me snagged in the reeds for a few seconds (which felt like an age), but easing off the pressure and then changing the angle of attack saw the fish free itself as the split cane rod tip bounced and bucked, transmitting the sensation through its length so that the corks in my hand felt alive. 

Dave had added a few more very small perch with "eyes bigger than their bellies" and Matt had landed a fine bonus carp, a handsome linear mirror just shy of double figures, when my small perch bob disappeared for the final time. Another spirited tussle resulted in a perch that I estimated to be about a pound and three quarters gracing my net and bringing to a close a challenging but ultimately successful afternoon's perching.

Of all the fish that swim in British waters, the perch is my favourite by far and any time spent in their pursuit is a pleasure. The first fish I ever caught was a perch, and I have been fortunate in recent years to capture a good number of them to a size that my boyhood self would have thought impossible, but for me the act of fishing for them is just as satisfying as their actual capture, as are the methods I choose to employ while chasing them. I love the iconic shape of the brightly painted round bodied perch bob floats under which my baits are suspended, the vintage rods and reels that are my weapons of choice, and the ambience and sense of mystery that surrounds a good perch lake. For as long as I'm fit and able and for as many years as the good Lord spares me, I strongly suspect that perch will remain my number one quarry and will continue to be the inspiration for much of my idle dreaming.