Pike Fishing
The Pike!
(Edmund Blunden 1896)
From shadows of rich oaks outpeer
The moss green bastions of the weir,
Where the quick dipper forages
In elver/peopled crevices
And a small runlet trickling down the sluice
Gossamer music tires to not unloose.
Else round the broad pools hush
Nothing stirs,
Unless some straggling heifer crush
through the thronged spinney where the pheasant whirs;
Or martins in a flash
Come with mild mirth to dip their magical wings,
While in the shallow some doomed bulrush swings
At whose hid root the diver vole’s teeth gnash.
And nigh this toppling reed, still as the dead
The great pike lies, the murderous patriarch,
Watching the waterpit shelving the dark,
Where through the plash his lithe bright vassals thread.
The rose/finned roach and blueish bream
And starring ruffe steal up the stream
Hard by their glutted tyrant, now
Still as a sunken bough.
He on the sandbank lies,
Sunning himself long hours
With stony gorgon eyes:
Westward the hot sun lowers.
Sudden the grey pike changes, and, quivering, poises for
slaughter;
Intense terror wakens around him, the shoals scud awry,
but there chances
A chub unsuspecting; the prowling fins quicken, in fury
he lances;
And the miller that opens the hatch stands amazed at the
whirl in the water.
The catching of carp is mysterious. The lore of tench is easy to grasp, but hard to exploit. However, nothing has more mystery than a big pike in a small lake.
I’ve loved Blunden’s poet since first reading as a child because it paints a picture more bucolic than Constable’s Haywain, more characterful than the Mona Lisa and more accurate with more depth than Michelangelo’s David. No one who has ever stood by a mill pool, or watched a winter lake will fail to recognise the scene of tranquility filled with breath-holding anticipation of brutal force.
In my childhood the method of pike fishing was live-baiting. A hapless roach was beset with treble hooks and left to wander the water transmitting distress to fool a pike into a lunge. It was effective but cruel and hardly now practiced. Instead vast waters are trolled and gravel pits tried with dead-bait. Favourite for this foray into the icy depths of a winter lake are oily fish from the fishmonger… herring, sprat or mackerel not only stay well on the ‘snap-tackle’ but exude oils into the water like a shark-fisherman’s chum. Even sill waters have their ebbs and flows sufficient to disperse the oil to the silent denizen of the deep.
My earliest memory of pike catching was at the gravel pits I first began to fish at 10 years-old when recovering from having my hips pinned. When summer had gone and I was sufficiently ambulant to manage to stand to cast and retrieve we went to a place where two small rivers merged and a weir encourage the flow to plunge and foam in a wide pool. Here dad used his spinners and plugs taking a few jacks from the weir-race. I too tried my hand constantly hampered by inappropriate gear. So, in the depths of the most severe winter on record we ventured to the lakes to try for the coldest of winter fish – pike.
It was as well that I was now able to walk, albeit with sticks, as the lakes were all frozen from bank to bank. So, I held onto my dad’s hands and ventured several feet from the shore and jumped up and down on the four-inch thick ice until it began to crack. Scrambling back, I now acted as anchor as dad stretched out his legs and stamped down on the ice encouraging the cracks to lengthen ten, then twenty and then thirty feet from the bank. Stamping close to the bank then dislodged a huge raft of ice from the main body. Dad rocked it up and down with one foot until on one down stroke the furthest lip slipped an inch or two beyond the main body. A final huge shove sent the sheet plunging away and beneath clearing a pool before us at least twenty feet wide.
I remember it being so cold that ice immediately started form in a paper-thin layer on the water as we built up our rods and tacked-up. Swinging out my dead-bait on to the top of the solid mass of ice was easy and I slowly pulled line back so that it toppled off the edge of the ice-sheet and into the open water. In those days we dead-baited just as we live baited suspending the offering below a solid cork bung painted in luminescent orange, large enough to stop the bait from sinking more than a few feet. Dad cast his out in a similar way and we hunkered down on our stools trying to keep out the penetrating cold. Had there been any breeze we would have had to retreat but it was as calm as it was cold.
From this distance in time I cannot recall how long it was before I had a bite and excitedly struck into what was then the biggest fish I ever landed. I had no art or angling skill to do more than use the heavy-duty line to haul the pike to the gaff, a tool I wouldn’t use today. Out of the water the pike looked massive to my young eyes, 8¼lbs seemed, compared to the half-pound roach and 1lb bream I had been used to, was unimaginably huge. These days one would never have done what we did then, dad despatched it with an improvised ‘priest’ and we took it home and ate it’s earthy steaks with home-made chips.
Those lakes we well stocked and mature even then holding monster carp, big bream and sizeable pike. Over the years we hooked some beauties but rarely managed to land the best, often getting the pike to the bank side only to have it disgorge the hooks with one last surge, many were around the mystical 20lb mark.
Dad did spend twenty minutes sweating to bring one fish to the net that weighed in at over 26lbs but that was certainly not the biggest we hooked. At one point two of the lakes were merged and a gravel bar was left covered in barely a foot of water. One could see pike laying along this bar like a shoal of barracuda. Several times dad or I got into one of these monsters and got them into the shallows but were always unable to land the biggest as there was a six-foot drop from the bank to the water and even an extended gaff was insufficient to get to the fish and as soon as the lines were slackened the fish fought free.
A few even bigger pike lived in an old estate lake, which had not been fished for many years. Dad’s job as the local police station officer enabled him to get permission to fish in many places closed to even angling clubs and syndicates. Our one foray there proved it was unfishable as scrub and trees, which we had no permission to clear, surrounded it. The only way of casting out was to climb a tree and from the boughs catching pike proved impossible.
He managed to get permission to fish another estate lake at Mereworth which was also hard to fish. A carriageway, now deteriorated into a farm track divided two lakes. On one side was a brick damn and an overflow drained excess water into a lower lake. The latter was more wet woodland than lake after generations of neglect. Part of the lower lake retained some water all year although it fluctuated dramatically with the seasons. Wet winters filled it to overflowing, dry summers left a small pool surrounded by impenetrable bog. You could see fish there and among them were predators by the swirls and splashes we saw and heard. Sometimes, in winter the trees resounded to the deafening crash of a waterfall and grew ‘leaves’ when starling murmurations settled to roost.
The top lake was also surrounded by trees apart from one shallow plash left for stock to drink. Next to the path the damn was the only place to fish and even here there was insufficient room to cast overhead. At the damn the lake was, perhaps six or eight feet deep and the lake must have been stream or spring fed as, even in summer, a steady flow of water tipped into a wide sunken pipe and into the lower lake. This flow attracted the two species the lake seemed to hold un abundance, bright red rudd and exceptionally large perch. Rudd seemed to all be around half a pound but the fat perch were at least a pound and sometimes well over two.
The lake was lily-filled apart from a clear patch where we fished. At the far end the water petered out into a leaf mould strewn bog between the trees where either a stream or spring bubbled softly. Once I sought another fishing peg. I tried along either bank where large trees grew, but, if you could get to the water’s edge casting could only be by underhand swing and shallow leaf clogged water was a further barrier. I ventured into the boggy end slipping and sliding across sunken roots and downed boughs until I was in sight of my dad and our neighbour fishing by the sluice. Stepping gingerly on to another root my foot skidded away and, finding no footing, met unresisting silt. It, and I, slid immediately to my waist and I cried out. Younger, slimmer and fitter than my dad, our neighbour (also a police officer) was soon picking his way across the mire to fish me out. By the time he had a hand out to me to haul me back I was down to my armpits and slowly sinking deeper. I was a terrified eleven-year-old, he was a thirty something hero… except for the entire time he was ’rescuing’ me he laughed uncontrollably. That day I learned something of the darker side of human nature. My dad was grateful for his efforts but he barely ever spoke to him again, and certainly never invited him back to fish.
Despite this lake being etched in terror on my child’s brain that incident is not my abiding memory of the lake, but instead its pike fill my dreams. There were, undoubtedly very few pike. I guess now that their numbers were self-limiting. The healthy head of perch kept small fry to a minimum and the pike that did make it to maturity were obviously taken by their larger uncles and aunts. It seemed to us that there were perhaps half a dozen large pike left in the lake, each having its own domain.
Very occasionally one would see one in the cattle plash. Once we saw the cattle bolt as the pike rushed at them, maybe seeing lapping tongues, or sunken limbs as food fish. Sometimes when we arrived the pike lay like a grey log in the shallows there. Across the lake several pools were clear of lilies and sometimes we would see the sudden swirl of a pike taking lunch or tea. But there was one monster. She always lay just beyond the lilies closest to our fishing spot and always took her meals in that one place. Sometimes we saw enough of her to know she was a real monster at least over 30lbs. Several times we saw the pike take waterfowl, usually moorhens from the surface and swallow them whole!
(This phenomena of small estate lakes holding monsters is not unknown. The largest pike known from the UK was recovered from a castle moat, which was drained to be re-lined and reportedly weighed in well over eighty pounds!)
I recall that, once or twice we managed to hook into this lakes’ most powerful inhabitant… but not for long. Each time the hook was set the fish turned and bolted snapping the line, even the heavy-duty line dad used for fishing the wrecks off the Kentish coast. We were not taken and tangled in the weed or otherwise out-foxed, just ‘smashed’ by the brute force of the lady of the lake.
I had several memorable ‘piking’ days with dad. Once on the River Rother on the Kent-Sussex border on a summer’s day I watched dad catch half a dozen pike around the 7lb mark. We fished where the river met a smaller tributary that we had followed across a couple of fields from the parked car. The day was very hot and a thunderstorm caught us but before we packed up we were dry again. When we walked back to the car the tributary’s surface was covered in dead or struggling fish… huge bream for the most part with scatterings of roach, rudd, perch and more. This was an early lesson in conservation for me as the water had been de-oxygenated by the run off from the fields that had been recently dressed with fertiliser to encourage pasture growth.
Perhaps the most memorable day’s pike fishing had little to do with the size of the catch. I don’t remember exactly where we fished. It was somewhere on the Kent Stour where a mill stood at the riverside and a mill stream ran into the river. The mill had been partly restored and partly converted into a beautiful home. There was still a pool fed by a stream where pike could be seen in the shallows. Dad had arranged with the owner to cut weed from the pool in exchange for fishing there. So, after a couple of hours work (mostly by dad) we settled down to fish with him where the stream entered the pool and me a little way upstream where it ran faster. Between us was a small stand of beech trees. Before long dad hooked a pike and shouted for me to bring the gaff which I did. Not much later I was shouting to him to bring the gaff as I hooked a fish… this went on for a while with both of us catching three pike. Then dad hooked a fourth and shouted for the gaff. As I ran carrying it to him I learned another valuable lesson.
There is a ‘blind spot’ where you cannot see what is level with your head. A little lower and its visible, a little higher and it passes harmlessly overhead. But at the sweet spot its possible to run headlong into something you don’t see. In my case it was the low branch of a sturdy beech tree! I remember running and then I remember coming round as dad helped me up… but not before he had managed to land pike number 7 without a gaff!