A fascinating list of 30lb plus pike caught in Fenland in recent years has just been published.
Dennis Moules, stalwart of the Ely and Fenland branch of the Pike Angler’s Club, has dug back through recent history and compiled a list of 42 fish.
More than a quarter of them have come in the last three or four seasons, suggesting the web of man-made drains and rivers which criss-cross the flatlands could be quietly undergoing a renaissance.
Recent entries on the list are often vague or cryptic, for obvious reasons. Secrecy and success go hand in hand for the modern predator specialist.
When Colonel Atherton hauled a 36:08 lump out of Vandervell’s Lake, in 1957, there was no need to worry about your favourite hotspot getting hammered if you went public. Perhaps surprisingly that fish, which glares down from its glass case at drinkers in the Lamb and Flag, at Welney, still beats just about anything known to have come from an area stretching from the tidal Nene to the Cut-Off Channel.
It comes off second best to one more recent fish – a 38:10, which was believed to have been electro-fished and moved to a water elsewhere in Norfolk three years ago. Despite the lack of further details, like the stories which illuminate Steve Harper’s vivid book of Broadland’s thirties, Moules’ list is an appetite whetter par excellence.
Tiny lodes and land drains, which feed the larger waterways, have produced fish on a par with the household names like the Sixteen Foot and Wissey Pools.
So you never know, that tiny dyke you’ve driven past a hundred times without so much as a second glance could be a better bet than the latest in-water.
Dennis Moules will be giving a talk on the list at the next meeting of the King’s Lynn branch of the Pike Angler’s Club, which is at the William Burt Club, in West Winch, at 8pm on Tuesday, January 29. You can also check the list out on the Ely and Fenland PAC website, at:
