pikey

Until the last few weeks it hadn’t been a good pike season. The Fenland streams I like to haunt through winter months - in places I consider absolute bankers - gave up nothing. They seemed further away each time I went to them. Stolen afternoons began to lose their appeal. I blamed my lack of success on the usual angler's menu of excuses: the drainage board ruining everything with pointless dredgings; too many cormorants; too many other people fishing the same spots.

Until the last few weeks it hadn’t been a good pike season. The Fenland streams I like to haunt through winter months - in places I consider absolute bankers - gave up nothing. They seemed further away each time I went to them. Stolen afternoons began to lose their appeal. I blamed my lack of success on the usual angler's menu of excuses: the drainage board ruining everything with pointless dredgings; too many cormorants; too many other people fishing the same spots.

But we learn things and forget them, don’t we? I'd forgotten how I struggled in previous years, how my salao period was nothing unusual. And I'd forgotten about the most fundamental thing of all: temperature. The simple law of piking – now I’ve remembered it, is this: if it’s cold and getting colder – stay in bed; if it's already cold and staying cold, get up if you must, you might catch something; but if it’s been cold, and it’s warming up, go now! With pike surely it’s all about metabolism, how it slows down, adjusts and then speeds up again. You want to pick those speeding-up days if you can.

Last Sunday was a speeding-up day. I knew when I woke up, heard birds chirrupping, listened to worried radio headlines about an even earlier spring and felt the unseasonable warmth. I knew because I’d enjoyed a few other days like this in the last few weeks and caught pike a plenty from stretches of river that had been “empty” a month earlier. I'd caught enough, frankly, but I suggested to Vicky a picnic by the river: “It would be great for Iona to catch a pike.” My nine-year old daughter shows a glimmering spark of her dad’s obsession and I reckoned a toothy croc from the Fens would transfix her. There’s something about pike that kids just love – the latent, but actually harmless (unless you’re a little fish) menace of the things, like monsters under the bed and wicked witches.

We took our sandwiches to Pentney – the ruined portico of a once-grand abbey, alongside a farm-house and a barn built with the same stones. It’s a wild and open place of rooks, barn-owls and hares and it is as quiet there, when the wind sweeps away the sound of the quarrying, as anywhere on the Fens. I once followed a mother otter and two cubs for hundreds of yards upstream to this spot and at times I was within ten feet of them. The river swings through two right-angled turns here, and swallows itself under an ancient bridge. The pike lie in a reed-fringed canal upstream. Iona asked if she could use the trout rod I gave her last year, and when I explained that the fish we were after would chew that rod up for breakfast her eyes widened. “Will they pull me in?” she asked. “They will if I let go of you.”

A wet pike fly is difficult to cast – so I did the casting. We moved downstream, me aiming as close to the reeds on the far bank as I could and then handing the rod to Iona, who pulled the fly back in, making it twitch like an injured fish. We hop-scotched our way down the bank, heading for lunch at the fence-post on the far corner. Half-way there a pike hit the fly. Gaping jaws appeared out of the gloomy water and the sparkling fairy vanished. “Oh my God. It’s huge. It’s massive!” Iona shouted as the fish turned a green, reptilean back across the surface and lunged away. I held her round the waist, waited till she was steady, then told her she was on her own and let go. The pike pulled one way, Iona the other. Teeth gnashed, water foamed, the pike playing its part just perfectly. The wicked witch of the Fens had cast its spell!

First published 25th February 2008