Fishing in a time of pestilence

As a fishing mad teenager my obsession knew no bounds and on discovery that it held a reasonably sized angling section even extended to me taking out membership of the local library (these were the heady, now long since gone, days of the early 1980's when local councils still thought it a worthy enterprise to fund public reading), and so it was that one day I marched euphorically out of the municipal doors with a copy of Dick Walker's "Stillwater Angling" tucked under my arm, mine to have and to hold for a fortnight. At the time Dick had a weekly column in the Angling Times, and even as a youngster I was savvy enough to know that the book I was clutching was viewed as something of a "classic."

However, Dick Walker, onetime carp record holder and pioneer of modern specimen hunting, was wrong on one count: water never is still. Not really still. I'm aware that he was only borrowing a well used phrase intended to distinguish the bodies of water found in lakes, ponds and pits from the flowing water of rivers, but stand by a lake and you'll see that it is never entirely devoid of movement, always exhibiting (however slight) a mesmeric pattern of fluctuating ripples that disrupt the reflections peering back at the observer.

After the enforced break of a few weeks it was good to be back. I stood for a moment and paused, deliberately savouring the sight, enjoying watching the ripples disturbing the water's surface, before setting about the serious business of tackling up. It wasn't long before my float was being flicked into the water with a satisfying "plop", itself momentarily setting off a ripple pattern of its own, before settling to perform the more serious task of bite indication.

From time to time my attention drifted from the float to take in the bigger picture, a cornucopia of delights: clouds scudding across a bright blue sky, the dancing reflections, and the incessantly busy birds, always on the move, never still. Coronavirus may have shaken the world and for a season changed it, but it was powerless to destroy the beauty and majesty of nature.

As my angling fast was being broken only by a brief session ( I had spent the morning working from home, a practice  which now seems to be ubiquitously described as "the new normal"), I brought with me only the bare minimum of tackle: my venerable and lovingly restored Allcocks Wizard, vintage Mitchell 304 reel, a net, and a satchel containing just the absolute essentials.

The afternoon passed slowly. Not in a bad way, but in the happy languorous manner that time moves in when diaries, meetings, schedules and timescales no longer apply. Despite the pleasing way that time seemed not so much to pass, but rather to collect, the fishing activity itself was brisk. Fishing in the margins, the float was continuously dancing, dipping, and disappearing and a steady stream of fish of no great size but  all possessing admirable looks was soon being brought to the bank to be unhooked, admired and returned. The majority of bankside visitors were plump, buttery coloured crucians, although in all I garnered half a dozen species, with the crucians being augmented by the mildly exotic ide, the flamboyantly exotic golden orfe, a handful of gloriously silky small tench, a couple of perch and a solitary bream.

Dave, a frequent fishing partner of mine, was ensconced in the next door swim, and also catching with regularity, similarly bringing a catholic selection of species to the bank, including a lively fully scaled mirror carp which stretched the elastic in his pole admirably and gave a good account of itself before succumbing to the folds of the net.

Among my (if my wife is to be believed, many!) faults, is that I count the fish I catch. I dislike myself for it, because I appreciate each fish for its own merits, and the number of fish caught (or not) is always incidental to my enjoyment of the day, but it's a habit I acquired as a child and have never been able to shake off. This irritating compulsion is compounded by my always trying to end the day with a number divisible by five, not for reasons of superstition but because there seems to my mind something neat about a total ending in ether a zero or a five, and so it was that after four hours of fishing, upon reaching the total of 45 (the largest of which was this bream of only very modest proportions) I "drew stumps", gave the lake another admiring look and packed my tackle back into the car.

It had been a wonderful afternoon, and for now, my need to fish is sated, but not, I suspect for long. The call of the lake is as irresistible as the song of the Sirens, and like  the poet I am duty bound to heed it.

Come when the leaf comes, angle with me,
Come when the bee hums over the lea,
Come with the wild flowers,
Come with the wild showers,
Come when the singing bird calleth for thee.

I'll be back.

Bob, bob, bobbing along ...

My favourite fish are perch.

My favourite style of fishing is float fishing.

My favourite float for fishing for perch is a brightly coloured perch bob.

To me the perch is a totemic fish, and the perch bob an iconic float. It's a float which, when tucked in close to an overhanging tree or tight to reeds or vertical structure (such as the "camp sheathing" beloved of Mr Crabtree) screams imminent promise, but even as the angler's intense concentration is focused on a future disappearance, the presence in the water of a perch bob also spirits the fisherman back in time to his boyhood and to the age of his angling innocence. Every schoolboy had a few perch bobs in his tackle box, as do today those adult anglers for whom the romance of the perch has not diminished or been replaced by the hunt for gargantuan, fat bellied, boilie-guzzling beasts of the deep.

I have more perch bobs than I could reasonably justify the need for, but less than I would like. All of mine are handmade, crafted for me either by professional floatmakers Ian Lewis or Paul Duffield, or by my good friend Roy, a true gentleman and former Yorkshire miner with whom I've shared many a pleasant bankside moment.

I have a range that encompasses large (and rarely used) ones that take a couple of swan shot, all the way down to the small ones I most frequently deploy which take just one or two BB. All are made from natural materials, balsa, cork and even oak galls, some are painted to replicate the Harcork classics of yore, others feature spiral whipping, and each is a thing of beauty in its own right.

If using maggots (red, of course) to pursue my beloved stripy quarry I favour the use of a simple waggler of either Norfolk or Sarkandas reed, as the increased buoyancy of the perch bob runs the risk of decreasing sensitivity and alerting the perch to my deceptive intent, but whenever a lobworm or prawn (and very occasionally a minnow) is employed, it will be to the perch bob that I turn as a matter of course.

Recently, I put a few of my perch bob collection in a dedicated float box (handy to chuck in a satchel for impromptu last minute trips), and even, rather indulgently,  took delivery from the United States of a brightly coloured decal featuring a shoal of perch to decorate the box's lid.

It may be a while before we fish again in this year disrupted by pandemic, but I hope that by the time we reach Keats's "season of mists and mellow fruitfulness" a time when the angler's mind naturally turns to thoughts of perch, that I will be found, crouched by a pond, cane rod in hand, finger on the spool of the centre pin, poised to strike at the disappearance  of a brightly tipped, bulbous bodied perch bob. In its simplicity and serenity, my happiness, consists of such moments.

(Fishing) lines around my father

Social isolation does strange things to a man.

Coronavirus, or Covid19 to employ the inappropriately jaunty sounding moniker beloved of journalists and media types, had put paid to a long planned and much anticipated fishing weekend that my brothers and I had arranged, and on what should have been the second evening of our fraternal fishing adventure I found myself lounging prone on the sofa, glass of wine in hand, with my mind meandering like a slow paced river, and improvising around philosophical themes with an angling root.
I have recently reread "For all those left behind", written by John Andrews of "Andrews of Arcadia" fame, a hauntingly beautiful account of his adult re-conversion to fishing, a pastime that he'd earlier shared in his childhood and youth with his father, a book which above all else is a deeply personal exploration of bereavement and loss, and of how we hold people and events in our memories. Perhaps it was a consequence of his exquisitely penned recollections of his father, that caused a long-lost memory to reactivate itself in my brain; the memory of stream caught brown trout, cooked in the kitchen of a small suburban town house in Reading.

My father is not an angler. Fishing began for me and my two brothers in the summer of 1981, a summer of scorching hot weather and an ill fated royal wedding, and was entirely a decision of our own volition. There was no family history of angling (although I suspect that some of the gypsy forbears on my father's side of the family - my father is rightly proud of his Romany roots - knew a thing or two about poaching), but we lived five minutes walk away from a tree and rhododendron fringed lake of about 8-10 acres, which was gloriously and incongruously set in the middle of a housing estate, and the three of us had long been drawn to the lake as a place of beauty, excitement and adventure. There was, I now realise, an inevitability that the siren appeal of angling would eventually call out and ensnare us.


We fished almost every day of that summer holiday, our first as fishermen, and by the end of six weeks of solid fishing, I had caught one perch, Andy half a dozen and Tim was yet to catch. To label such a catch rate as "abysmal" would be to deal in understatement, but we were happy; self-taught and constantly learning we devoured fishing books and magazines and were canny enough to realise that there would come a time when the theory we were imbibing would be caught up by our practice and results, as indeed proved to be the case. We fished all through the winter, protected against the chill by inadequate thin anoraks, knitted gloves and Dunlop wellies, and by the following summer had made enough progress for all three of us to be selected to fish for a junior team in a match fishing league.

Our father sometimes accompanied us to "the Lake" (it had a name but to us brothers it was only ever referred to, and still is, as "the Lake"), and although he didn't fish he took a keen interest. Possibly it was a result of his being a science teacher who had always been fascinated by what he would term "pond life", or maybe just a father spotting an opportunity to spend some time with sons whose passions differed from his own. As our obsession grew, so did the desire to try new venues and sometimes he'd not only play the role of taxi driver, but he (and sometimes our mother, too) would pack a folding chair and sit and watch us fish, he often accompanied by a book (almost always on some theological theme), our mother with a ball of wool and a couple of knitting needles, as we (by now competent anglers) swung roach and rudd to hand or landed tench. Even without the sentimentalising effect of nostalgic reminiscence  these were happy days.

The family idyll was ended by the onset in earnest of adolescence. As hormones careered around our teenage bodies boundaries were pushed, new urges and experiences explored and our youthful drinking, smoking, pierced ears and late night scrapes erected barriers in what had previously been a harmonious existence. There were arguments, tears, acts of rebellion and a sense of mutual incomprehension between generations. We remained under the same roof, but often at a distance. But there were moments of affection and rapprochement, one of which brings me back to the memory of stream caught brown trout, cooked in the kitchen of our small suburban town house in Reading.

I have no particular fondness for trout. I concede to the native brown trout its natural beauty, I detest the artificial beauty of the American import rainbow (the piscene equivalent of a plain girl wearing too much make-up), and although as a species they have drawn sublime poetry from Rupert Brook and witty, eliptical observations from John Gierach, I find it hard to respect a quarry so easy to catch that it necessitated the invention of fly fishing to make their capture a challenge. However, my prejudices in respect of trout are incidental to this tale.

One of my best friends throughout my teenage period had a father more emotionally equipped to deal with the maelstrom that is adolescence than my own, and I spent most of my weekends for several years staying over at this friend's house. We chased the same girls (he usually won, and in fact is now married to one of our mutual pursuits!), went to the same parties and I rode pillion on his motorbike. His father was a businessman, endlessly pursuing new opportunities- a builder, a retailer, always restlessly searching for a new project, and so it was that he took an interest in a farming, camping and livery business in Cornwall, and I was invited to join the family for a weekend staying at the potential new business opportunity. Through the farm ran a stream, narrow enough to leap across, its banks tree lined and festooned with vegetation. The die was cast, and my friend and I took telescopic rods, bait boxes of maggots and worms and a handful of floats, split shot and hooks and spent a couple of hours each day trotting the stream. Our reward was a plentiful supply of small brown trout, resplendent in their spotted beauty, the largest of which we summarily knocked on the head and popped in a cooler to take back up with us to Reading.

Which brings the story full circle to my relationship, then strained, with my father and a brief moment of  shared mutual affection.
"I'll cook those for you, Jon" my father offered, and he set to work in the kitchen, coating the trout with flour and egg yolk, seasoning them with herbs and popping them into a frying pan. We ate them together, reminding ourselves of what it was like to enjoy each other's company, for a while forgetting the ongoing conflict between teenage hedonism and my father's more conservative worldview. A moment of communion and re-connection.

Many years have past since that day, I am older today than my father was then, our father/son relationship has long since been repaired, and I too have been a father of teenagers. My father never became an angler, and my own son now fishes with me just a couple of times a year. Despite catching his first fish at the age of just three, his relationship with fishing has been sporadic, and although a competent fisherman who enjoys using a centre pin, the bug has never bitten hard with him and I know that he accompanies me primarily to humour his old dad, rather than out of any irresistible urge to fish, and I in turn am grateful for his gracious condescension.

Whether it's Cat Stevens dispensing seemingly dispassionate life lessons to a son, Mike Rutherford wishing that he and his father had connected on a deeper level in "the living years", or Bruce Springstein recalling sitting on his father's lap in a "big old Buick" and being told "son, this is your home town", the relationship between fathers and sons is a staple for melancholic reflection.
For me, those reflections require recovering the memory of a dated looking 1980's kitchen and a plate of small brown trout, and resolving, as I move through my middle years and he his twilight ones,  to phone my father more often for a chat while we both still inhabit the living years.

Fenlandia - a piker's symphony.

"The horizon stooping smiles,

Oer treeless fens of many miles,

Spring comes and goes and comes again,

and all is nakedness and fen." 

John Clare (1793-1864)

Spring hides itself just around the corner, an inevitability of the changing seasons and the turning on its axis of the globe, but it remains as yet unsprung, although  for the small group of anglers huddled on the Sixteen Foot drain there were the very first signs of winter preparing to retreat and give way to the promise of new beginnings, as we watched our rods, pointed machine gun nest style towards the middle of the drain.  The stark beauty of the flat, agricultural landscape of the big-sky Fens is there to be enjoyed and admired, but while often a gift not for those of faint heart or delicate constitution, today the weather was in uncharacteristically benign mood.

Four of us had made the journey from Leicester to join up with local "Fen Tigers" Ray (who leases the stretch of drain we were fishing), John and Peter, and soon pike boxes were being opened and floats, stop knots and snap tackles assembled as anticipation levels rose. We knew the fishing would be unlikely to be easy, but if just some of us got to tangle with esox all of us would reckon it a good day's sport- it pays not to be greedy on the Fens, and these days I only choose to keep company with anglers big-hearted enough to enjoy another angler's triumphs as well as they enjoy their own.

Our host, Ray, was the first to catch, his fish falling to a float fished sardine deadbait. His pike was followed by a sustained period of watching and waiting, before John's perch livebait was the next to attract the attention of a marauding water wolf. A brief tussle between fish and angling protagonist resulted in the net being swept under John's prize, and soon a lovely mottled green pike was being unhooked and returned to the water, with the only harm done to the fish being the dent to its pride. The pike sulked in typical fashion in the margins before, with a flick of its tail it was gone.

Sport could hardly be described as fast and furious, but occasional pike related activity interrupted the bankside conversation and reverie, Loz losing a pike which flared its gills and shook its head belligerently before throwing the hooks, and me failing to connect with an "unmissable"run as the smelt in the margins at my feet was grabbed by a pike which ran off with its prize in determined fashion, my wind down and strike routine somehow leaving me retrieving nothing other than an eviscerated bait.

We wound the rods in and gathered for lunch, with bacon rolls cooked and provided by John, cream cakes by Ray, homemade cheese scones by Peter, and hot cross buns by Pete. Our Fenland trips are always as much about the enjoyment of each other's company and of the local landscape as they are occasions to catch fish, and lunch was enjoyed at an appropriately leisurely pace.

Pete decided to go for a postprandial wander with a short lure rod and baitcasting reel, and his enterprise resulted in him landing a brace of pike in short order, the largest of which is pictured above.
This proved to be the last of the day's fish catching activity, and stumps were drawn at around half past three in the afternoon, with four pike having been caught, admired and returned.

As ever, our thanks goes to Ray, who not only fulfills the role of host on our annual Fenland pilgrimage, but has become a friend and is always generous with his time and advice- a proper gentleman, and a man whose pike emblazoned van we all look on with a degree of envy.

To complete a near perfect day, just as we squeezed the last bit of tackle into the boot of Pete's car the skies, which had been darkening in hue and growing in threat as the afternoon wore on, opened and began discharging their watery content. We drove home with smiles on our faces.

Stepping back in (angling) time

I cannot lay claim to having fished in the halcyon past that Bernard Venables enjoyed, but despite beginning my angling journey in the age of carbon, my early teenage experiences of fishing were not dissimilar in feel to the pleasures recalled by BV in the opening chapter of his Memoirs, in which he writes: "our fishing was quiet; it lay in sweet meadows; its peace was untouched ... about that long-gone fishing there was ease ... a day was considered perfect in which, all day, we had been watching a red-topped float that occasionally dipped to a moderately sized fish."

For me, those old simplicities that characterised Bernard's recollection of his angling adventures in the early years of the 20th Century, and echoed in my own adolescent discovery of the joys of fishing in the early 1980's, have been rediscovered in middle age, in part as a result of the welcome loss of the size and results driven urge that typifies the competitiveness of the angler in early adulthood, and enhanced by my recently discovered love of collecting and putting to use antique and vintage tackle.

There are some who are suspicious of the "traditional angler", feeling that they detect in the traditionalist an air of assumed superiority  and self-professed moral virtue, but - for me at least- this is far from the truth of the matter. My preference for using vintage tackle (much of which predates my arrival into the world in 1968) is driven not by the cult-like zeal of split cane fundamentalism, but purely from the joy of using equipment that bears the stamp not of mass production, but of craftsmanship, and which is often intrinsically aesthetically pleasing. A modern fishing rod, like a modern sports car, doubtless has qualities in terms of efficiency that the older equivalent lacks, but given the choice I'd take an E-type jaguar in pristine condition over a modern car any day, and a vintage rod over a generic modern one. Any shortfall in efficiency is more than amply compensated for by the artistry employed in the construction of the older model.

It's not only the choice of tackle utilised that has changed in line with my altered angling priorities, but also my choice of venues and definition of what constitutes a "good day's fishing." My preference these days is either for the simple, unspoiled farm pond or small lake that has been beloved of anglers since time immemorial (preferably tree-lined, set in a wooded copse or with views of rolling patchwork fields), rivers whose origins themselves are from time immemorial, and places of wild beauty, the ultimate example of which for me are the windswept "big sky" panoramas of the Fens.

Running in parallel with my adoption of vintage tackle and eschewing of big fish venues in favour of settings that are more pleasing on the eye and calming for the spirit, has been a change in my appreciation of the fish I catch. With the exception of perch (where my quest for my first three pound fish borders on obsession), I am almost entirely unconcerned by weights, reluctant to reduce a beautiful creature's worth to a mere recording of pounds and ounces.  Ironically, although my preoccupation is no longer with size, the last few years have seen me improve my personal bests for barbel, golden orfe, crucian carp and (predictably) perch, the latter just one ounce short of the longed for three pounder. Perhaps the secret to catching larger fish is to be found in adopting an ambivalence to size.

In an essay published in 1981 (coincidentally the year in which my angling journey commenced), an American angling writer, Geoffrey Norman, compared the angler's fishing life with the seasons that he (or she) is so aware of around them while pursuing the gentle art. If the seasonal metaphor is employed, my "Autumn" is beginning to look not dissimilar to my youthful "Spring." The venues are similar, the simple pleasure of catching fish of any size and species is as strong, much of the tackle dates from (or predates) my earliest fishing days, in fact the only major difference is that the accumulated learning and experience of almost forty years of pursuing fish means that I catch far more of them than was true of my early forays into the world of piscatorial pleasures.
Perhaps the poet Wordsworth was correct to suggest that "the child is father of the man", and in my fifty third year a day is still considered perfect in which I've been watching a red-topped float that occasionally dips to a moderately sized fish, especially if the strike that connects with said modestly sized fish is made with a rod of venerable age and aesthetic grace, sentiments  which I feel sure will continue into my angling "winter" as time continues its inexorable march.

Perching in memorium

The actual catching of fish is often incidental to the act of angling.

Sometimes behind the presenting reason for being there lies a bigger reality and a greater truth. Such was the case today, when nine anglers from various parts of the Country gathered ostensibly for a perch match, but really to celebrate the life of a friend, to raise money in his memory, and to concur with St Paul who declared with confidence that "neither life nor death .... nor anything else in all creation will be able to separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord."

John was a big man in every sense of the word. Hewn out of the tough stuff that seems to characterise South Africans, he said things as he saw them, had a laugh and voice that carried across a lake, was straightforward and entirely lacking in guile and was able to suck far more pleasure out of every fishing session than anyone else I've known; it wasn't that he was a naive optimist or one who, in denial, fooled himself that he was having fun when he wasn't, John genuinely didn't know how to fish and not have fun. It mattered not if he was freezing cold and blanking, his laugh would still echo in the chill air, along with words of encouragement.

My favourite experience of John's eccentricity came on the Christian Anglers Retreat in the summer of 2018. A dozen or so of us were camped alongside the banks of the River Trent, fast asleep in our tents in preparation for a dawn assault on the river's resident barbel. At around 3am I was awoken by the noise of someone shuffling about the campsite and a  car door slamming. I peered out of the tent and in the shadows saw a figure trying a car door. The inescapable conclusion was that a random ne'er do well was breaking into cars. By this time, Pete also had been awakened by the presence in the camp and, with heart pounding, went to investigate. To his relief, after bracing himself for a conflict situation, the sight that greeted him was that of John sitting in his car, door open, and munching his way through an entire family "bargain bucket" from the local 24 hour Kentucky Fried Chicken, following the consumption of which John ambled down to the river and "touch-legered" through the night until morning.

I think I can, without fear of contradiction, state that John pushed uniqueness to its outermost limits, and all of us in the Christian Anglers club loved him for it.

And so it was that we gathered on a wild and wet November's day, to fish in his memory, raise money for Cancer Research and the developing world charity Tear Fund, enjoy each other's company and award a prize for the biggest perch caught.

The day had an extra piquancy for me, as my son James was fishing with Christian Anglers for the first time in over a year, and he and I sacrificed angling efficiency for sociability and elected to share a swim to best enjoy one of our nowadays rare joint bank-side expeditions.

Around the lake a variety of float fishing methods were employed, with worms, red maggots and prawns being variously tried as hookbaits. I chose to fish a large worm underneath a favourite perch bob, impaled on a size 12 hook.  James opted for double red maggot under a waggler, and was soon catching roach, ide and bream, while my perch bob stubbornly refused to bob and disappear.

For the first couple of hours the rain was incessant and fell with the kind of intensity that in the days of primeval history had sent Noah scurrying for the ark. The fishing, in keeping with the weather, was challenging, and around the lake the nine of us were all finding bites and fish hard to come by.

The first angler to connect with a sizeable fish was Roger, with a brief and spirited struggle resulting in him bringing a perch of exactly a pound and a half over the net.

Roger's lead in the biggest perch stakes was short-lived, with Pete soon upping the ante with a fine fish that tipped the scales at 2lb 3oz. Both Roger and Pete's perch fell to float-fished red maggot.

Pete's fish was admired, weighed, photographed and returned, following which the lake fell into a state of stupour, with only the occasional (mostly small) fish being swung to the bank to break the soporific spell. John MacAngus briefly raised our hopes, managing a couple of nuisance carp as well as a perch of just over a pound on float-fished worm, but by and large the fishing remained slow..

I stubbornly persisted with lobworm, despite the fact that most of the larger perch had fallen to red maggot, a bait which was also (predictably) accounting for a greater number of small perch and silverfish. A couple of small roach and bream with eyes bigger than their bellies chose to attempt to drag my lobworm to their lairs and consequently suffered the indignity of a visit to the bank, but the perch remained resolutely oblivious to the attraction of my worm presented over a bed of chopped worms and accompanied by a "little and often" trickle of red maggots. The lake, which in the past has been kind to me ( four 2 pounders to 2lb 15oz from just four sessions before today) was today showing me its malevolent rather than benevolent face.

With bites at a premium, there were still two last twists to be had before "stumps were drawn" at the prearranged hour of 3 o'clock.
Roy, who like all of us had struggled for bites throughout the day, landed a nice perch of around a pound and a half, which pleased all of us, as he had made the longest journey, travelling from Yorkshire to join us and pay his respects to John.

The best, however, was saved until last. Pete, already in pole position as a result of his earlier fish, hooked into something which fought with determined tenacity, and once on the bank tipped the scales to 2lb 9oz. Better still, not only was the fish large in stature it was equally stunning in appearance, pugnacious, plump and with bold stripes and wonderfully vivid red fins. A worthy fish to win the inaugural John Rellie Memorial trophy.

We gathered at the car park, and presented the trophy to Pete, after which we joined in saying a prayer thanking God for John's life and faith, and praying for the wife of another of our members, John's best friend, Keith, who couldn't be with us as he was accompanying her to hospital in Oxford where she was due an operation on her recently broken wrist.
Despite the difficulties of the fishing itself and the inclement weather, it had been a wonderful day, graced by the landing of the occasional stunning stripey, and had provided a fitting tribute to John.
For us, future fishing adventures await, but John- even now- has embarked on an altogether different and eternal adventure in the immediate presence of the God in whom he trusted, and those of us who knew him and enjoyed fishing with him will continue to treasure his memory, and to seek to understand the present moment in the light of the eternal promise that is now John's reality.

Three men and a bait- "50 not out"

The float shuddered and moved from left to right across the water's surface before submerging with purpose. A firm flick of the wrist and the vintage glass float rod bucked, kicked and took on its fighting curve. It had been a long time. Too long.

My younger brother Andy's impending 50th birthday provided the ostensible reason (for "reason" read "excuse") to reunite the three Barrett brothers for a weekend of angling activity. Friday afternoon saw my (even) younger brother Tim travel from Wales to Andy's Hertfordshire home, while I made the journey from the East Midlands. 

The fish that had caused my float to bury, the first of the day, fought with dogged determination before succumbing to the folds of the net. Twenty minutes later, and one of the the initial fish's smaller cousins was also being unhooked, float-fished sweetcorn proving its undoing, as it had for the larger fish. With the clock not yet registering 8:00am, things were looking good.

However, my brisk start gave way to a couple of bite-less hours in which my float remained untroubled, during which time Andy, fishing just yards down the bank from me in the next swim, started to catch carp with almost monotonous and mechanical regularity on the method, fishing his hair rigged plastic sweetcorn bait just a foot or two short of a central island.

By this stage Tim, fishing boilies in the margins, was also off the mark with a rapid-fire brace, but despite my constant loosefeeding of sweetcorn and hemp, accompanied by small balls of groundbait, my hookbait was failing to elicit any attention from the lake's resident carp.
With the early mild chill giving way to a warm and sunny morning, I sought solace in an example of Cuba's major export product, a fine cigar that had been an unnecessary but very welcome "thank you" from my friend Roger to whom I had recently gifted a retro rod from my collection. The aromatic plumes of smoke hung in the mid-morning air as my float remained motionless and Andy continued to catch a rapid succession of modestly proportioned carp.

The sun rose high in the sky, layers of clothing were divested, and as Andy continued to draw a procession of carp to the bank my purist tendencies temporarily wavered, and I set up a 2lb tc barbel rod teamed with a baitrunner, and flicked a method feeder into the carpy looking corner to my left, which I had been priming with bait ever since arriving.

Within minutes an eager carp had hooked itself against the weight of the feeder, and my third carp of the day was wallowing in the waiting net. My need for a fish assuaged, I returned to the float, feeling only marginally "corrupted" by my foray into the world of contemporary carp fishing techniques.

By this stage Tim, like me, had landed three carp but Andy had taken a convincing lead with ten carp falling prey to his method feeder. With the sun beating down the stage was set for Andy to give a debut to the birthday present Tim and I had bought him, a specialist floater rod. For half an hour Andy catapulted pouch-fulls of floaters close to the island and once the carp were consuming them with confidence he made his first cast. It was clearly Andy's day, and it wasn't long before the first of six surface caught carp was being played to the waiting net.

Bites on my float rig had become increasingly tentative, and so I decided to change from the 2BB Norfolk reed waggler I had been employing to a tiny porcupine quill which required just three number 6 shot to dot it down. Several more bites were missed before moving the tell tale shot to a foot above the hook (something of a gamble when fishing in just three feet of water!) resulted in me once more connecting with fish.

Tim, meanwhile, was preparing to attend to a fish that he'd just netted when his other bite alarm screamed in indignant warning, the result being the opportunity for a pleasing brace shot of two double figure carp as the sun continued to beat down and while the lake, in generous mood, continued to beneficently give up its treasures to us.

Two more carp followed for me (including my only mirror of the session), and when stumps were drawn at around 5 oclock both Tim and I had six carp apiece, while Andy had forged ahead with an impressive haul of seventeen.

The day had been a wonderful antidote to the busyness of the last few months which had unprecedentedly seen three months elapse without me wetting a line. In the manner of the modern primary school sports day it was an occasion in which we could all claim ourselves to be "winners": Andy had caught the most fish, Tim the biggest (all but one of his had been doubles), and I had eschewed the prosaic efficiency of the method to catch all but one of my carp on my own terms, fishing with vintage tackle and handmade floats.

As the day drew to a close and the van was stacked with rods, reels and the varied paraphernalia that is deemed necessary for a fishing trip, we prepared to depart the lake in the very highest of spirits. And why not? There was still a curry at a local Indian restaurant to look forward to, and the anticipation of the following morning which would be spent spinning for pike on the local river.
Sometimes the simple blessings that I too often fail to count, assail me with an overwhelming intensity: along with the priest-poet Gerard Manley Hopkins I choose to thank God for "dappled things", and also for family, fish and near perfect Saturdays.
Today in ways simple yet real, I was truly blessed.