The Alternative Angler

Never mind smelling the flowers, don’t forget to take time out to see the satirical side of fishing life and grab a laugh along the way as well. So here’s a regular column from Kevin Perkins to remind us that life is for laughing at, or taking the p*** out of, whenever we can.

It’s those little things, isn’t it? You know, one morning when you step out of the door and you feel that slight chill in the air. Then a few days later, perhaps an unexpectedly misty morning sees the hedgerows cloaked in cobwebs, all picked out with tiny pearls. Followed perhaps by one morning where you may turn round and see your footprints have left a telltale trail in the dew-soaked grass. You notice that the sun doesn’t get quite so high in the sky, and the shadows are longer and darker. Blood red sunrises and sunsets echo the colours of the leaves on the trees. Those leaves, which have gone from green to yellow to gold, amber and vermilion almost imperceptibly until now. Suddenly you see the trees and bushes in all their riotous autumn plumage. Other signs like the blackberry bushes loaded with fruit, little boys throwing sticks up into conker and apple trees, they only mean one thing to me – it’s time for Pike!

Whilst I will admit to being nothing like traditionalist in my approach to fishing in general, autumn is the ‘proper’ time for set out after pike, just like Christmas could only be in December. True, I will go out and enjoy spinning for pike during the summer months, and have done so many times, and caught some decent fish, but I’m afraid it just isn’t proper pike fishing.

Indeed, one of my best episodes spinning for pike was a June day after a frustrating time having swimfeeders attacked by what seemed like hordes of the little blighters. I packed up, went home and came back with the spinning gear, hell bent on revenge. An hour later I had landed five pike, nothing huge, biggest around eight pounds. I’d had probably thirty takes, sometimes two or three on each retrieve, and every ‘little’ pike I managed to land was shadowed in by one or two of its (much, much) larger relatives. Of course, I went straight back the very next day, thrashed the water into a foam and caught…. nothing!

I’ve been dead baiting in October in my shirtsleeves during a late Indian summer, and it didn’t feel right at all. In fact it I have to say it felt sneaky and underhand, almost as if I was cheating. It brought back schoolboy memories of taking a forbidden shortcut home through a field, which carried the dire warning that ‘Trespassers would be Prosecuted’. The fear as you clambered over the gate, the mad dash over the field and the hope that no-one, least of all the farmer or, heaven forbid, a policemen, was lying in wait to haul you off to be ‘prosecuted’, whatever that meant.

The leaves are an indicator

Those leaves I mentioned at the beginning are an indicator, the first few gently floating on top of the water, then later carpeting the path to the lake or river, still colourful, until they get wet, and turn to mush underfoot. Or go brown and crisp, and get blown everywhere by the wind before finally covering the riverbed or lakebed with a brown overcoat. Leaving the stark skeletons of the trees jutting out of a grey landscape, home only to noisy rooks and silhouetted against the sky, which now seems so low. The pale wintry sun that has to struggle to show through the gloom and hardly makes it above the horizon during the course of those very short days.

Not Kevin unfortunately

The water itself seems to change, no longer able to reflect the blue sky; it looks leaden, with an inky blackness that makes it appear somehow deeper and more foreboding. Or maybe rushing past, pushing over the banks in places, the colour of cocoa, and containing so much debris it looks like brown minestrone soup. Dead and broken reed stems jutting through the surface, sometimes nodding wildly in the wind and the current, sometimes imprisoned by frost in the margins.

It’s not all grim

So this harsh scene paints an unappealing, almost grim picture for those who go pike fishing, But wait, there are attractions here. Perhaps you may see a tiny flash of crimson in the grey landscape that is the Robin. He will always pay you a visit, maybe even perch on your rod if there is the slightest chance of a piece of your sandwich.

The heart stopping moment when the buzzer springs into life, or the float starts to bob then move off, after hours, maybe even days, of inactivity. Your line starts slowing peeling off the spool, slithers through the rod rings and snakes off into the water. Is it a monster? Who knows. The screaming runs are sometimes small fish, the slow stop-start runs sometimes bigger fish, and then again it is just as often the other way round.

But whatever the size, is there a more impressive sight than a pike resting on an unhooking mat laid over a snow-covered bank, with its marbled green flanks, almost golden spots and that glimpse of brilliant red as she flares her gills, impatient to get back into the water?

Other images, such as when you drive through sleepy villages on dark December mornings, the blackness only punctured by the twinkling of Christmas lights. Driving past brown field after brown field, you feel you are completely alone, then there is a cottage, smoke curling up from the chimney, someone else is awake but, unlike you, they’re not lucky enough to be going fishing.

Pike fishing, it’s not just a date on a calendar, is it?