The Forgotten Lake – Part 2

The Forgotten Lake

Fairly quickly it became apparent that it wasn’t a monster. Pretty soon I had a small jack in the net, about 3-4lbs. Still, a fish on my first session cannot be grumbled at.

This pike had a strange peculiarity that I have never seen on a pike before. Just behind its pectoral fin, on both sides of its body there was a small lump. The best way I can describe it is as being very similar to those which distinguish a male tench from a female. The pike was quickly unhooked and returned. To grow into a monster, or maybe get eaten by THE monster, who knows! With darkness drawing in fast I packed up and went home, pleased that I had something to show for my efforts.

Pretty soon I was back at the water for another go, absolutely brimming with confidence. As I pulled up at the lake in my car I noticed another parked up at the side of the lake. I was not alone. This was the first person I had seen fishing the lake so I went over and introduced myself. The guy fishing had set himself up close to the corner in which my mate had spotted the bream on the previous visit. After chatting to him for a while it became apparent that he was a happy go lucky type of angler who was happy to catch whatever came along on the day, perhaps on this lake he would be lucky to catch anything at all! After speaking to him for a while I found out that he too knew about the bream in the corner and he was planning to fish for them. Looking into the corner it could be seen that the water was very coloured and there were patches of bubbles coming up everywhere. The bream were feeding, and hard. The rest of the lake was gin clear. I left my new friend to his bream and went on my way in search of some toothy critters!

The day held no takes for me at all and before long I was pulling the bank sticks out and putting the rods back into the holdall. In doing this I just couldn’t get one of them in, and due to my inpatience ended up shoving it in and, yep you guessed it, CRACK! On closed inspection I had only broken the glass in the tip ring so it wasn’t too serious, but boy did it put me in a bad mood! I slung the rucksack onto my back and trudged back round to the car.

On my way the bream man was still there so I enquired as to how he had done and was pleased to hear he had taken five or six bream before they had moved off. I think he could have had more had he not been throwing a feeder on there heads and fished the float instead – much more enjoyable too.

Over the next two months I had many sessions at the lake, all in pursuit of pike, and all blanks! In fact my diary reveals nine sessions there in total. The only fishing action has been a dropped run on one rod which I missed due to not switching on my bite alarm! How I regret that now. There have though been another couple of incidents which are discussing though……

The first of these I am hoping some of the people reading this article who have more knowledge of pike than myself will be able to help me with. Whilst mooching round the lake fish-spotting (only there were no fish to spot!) I came across what at first looked like a lump of polystyrene with alge growing on it in the water. On close inspection it became obvious that whatever it was had at some stage been living. I pulled a reed up and prodded and twisted the lump of flesh to see if I could try and work out what it was, when I managed to turn it over I revealed a backbone with a skull at one end. After much deliberation I decided in my mind that it was a pike. My heart sank, as I knew that this lump of rotting flesh right in front of me could quite easily be the fish I was chasing. There wasn’t a lot of it left, maybe a foot and a half by three quarters of a foot of flesh on one side of the backbone. I estimated the eye socket to be two and half centimetres in diameter so it must have had a large eye. I decided to take a photograph of the corpse so that somebody could try and help me identify it for definite. I took the picture with my mobile phone so an apology for the quality and it is a bit gruesome but do any of you have an idea? I have since spoken to someone at the lake who thinks it’s a swan, I can’t see that myself though.

Dead Pike? (click for bigger picture)

Around a month or so later I was back at the lake for another crack. I must admit that by this point, and even now, I feel like the lake is beating me up, its not letting me in on its secrets. I am working hard every time I go there, putting baits in the right places, trying all different parts of the lake, but for little reward. But I will see this winter through, I have been having a couple of sessions elsewhere to try and build my confidence up, but even then I haven’t been doing too well!

Anyway, back to the day in question. I hadn’t had so much as a touch, lots of tea drank and sandwiches eaten but that had been the highlight of the day. I decided to have a bit of a cast about with my marker rod at this point to see if I could find a feature to put a bait to. At this point I should really mention that at one end there is a shallow stream which runs out of the lake and into the adjacent river estuary. After about my fifth or sixth cast with the marker rod I spotted a bit of movement out of the corner of my eye. I looked down into the margins, and at first I thought I was seeing things. Had some mushrooms of the magic variety gotten into my tea somehow? Nope, it’s still there, and now it’s moving. Right in front of my eyes in a freshwater lake, at the opposite end to the stream which runs into the estuary and about three hundred yards from the nearest salt water there was a crab scavenging about on the bottom. Not a small one either, about a pound and a half, maybe more, it was a specimen indeed! Now what I still can’t work out is how the hell it had got there, I should imagine most of you at this stage are thinking mitten crab, but I don’t think so. As far as I know they are pretty localised to the Thames area, I certainly haven’t heard of any in my neck of the woods. I suppose it must have come up the outflow from the lake but it must have been in the lake a long time as it would take it a fair while to walk right across the lake I should think. I didn’t think saltwater crabs could live in freshwater yet this one appeared perfectly healthy and even ate a bit of sardine I threw in for it!

Freshwater crab…

Moving on about a couple of months and I have not long finished my most recent session. Me and my fishing buddy decided to have a day there, though he would have to leave at midday for his two to ten shift. lucky me, I could stay all day and freeze my nuts off till my hearts content!

Getting there just after first light, to hopefully spot some kind of fish movement, I found I had been beaten to it by my mate. I opened the car door and stepped out into the very cold breaking morning. I spoke with my mate for a while. He had seen nothing of note and was nearly tackled up. I took out my gear and decided to set up a few pegs down from him with nothing much to go on except for the fact that I hadn’t fished the peg before. Pretty soon my two rods were out and fishing to changes in depth. After around an hour or so I was stood on the end of my creaky wooden platform taking in the morning. Then out of the corner of my eye something caught my attention. I quickly moved my head round and there right in the margin disappearing into the depths was the tail end of a large pike! I slowly but purposefully reeled in my float rod. Then a simple underarm cast put the popped up sardine in the general direction that the pike was heading, this was it, this had to be my day at last! I held the rod for a minute or two expecting the float to drift away at any second. I placed the rod back in the rests, still expecting the float to move off but with time the expectation was slowly decreasing. After maybe five minutes I resigned myself to the fact that I had not been clever enough and almost certainly I had spooked the pike away when I dropped the sardine almost on its head. Gutted, I wandered down to my mate’s peg. I told him about my recent sighting. It got him enthusiastic even if I was left disappointed at the missed opportunity, I suppose at least they were moving.

To start with I thought he was taking the mick.

“There it is.”

“Where?”

“THERE!”

“oh yeah!”

And it was, or at least there was a pike swimming through his swim in the margin, heading in the same direction as the one I has seen. It wasn’t a monster, certainly not the one I had see in the tail end of summer but it was big enough. He immediately tried wobbling a trout past where it disappeared but nothing again!

Fifteen minutes two sightings and two missed opportunities. Still it was more of a result than I had had for a couple of months on the lake. I wandered a couple of pegs back down to mine. It was just as I was walking down that my phone rang, it was my dad. Stood out on my rickety platform again I informed him that yet again I was having no success.

It must have been 30 seconds later that the phone call ended abruptly, something like, I’ve got to go dad, my float’s away. At least I think that’s what I said!

Now I was mega nervous watching the float bobbing and drifting across in front of me. It was almost like I didn’t want to strike in case I mucked it up.

Here should follow a tale of how I wound down until I tightened into the fish then leant into it set the hooks, followed by and epic battle with my quarry.

The reality is somewhat different.

My 15lb 2oz pike from the Forgotten Lake

I closed the bale arm and wound in some of the slack and struck, into nothing. In my nervous state I hadn’t wound down far enough, the line tightened slightly and I wound down some more and set the hooks and immediately I saw the fish turn in the depths; not a big one I guessed, only to revise my estimation about point five of a second later when the pike came to the surface. My new estimation said possibly twenty and my knees went wobbly. The pike opened its mouth, its huge mouth and shook its head at me. Luckily the hooks held and I bundled her straight into the net. Somewhere in those twenty or so seconds I had already called my mate down and he was now behind me.

I lifted her out of the water and onto the unhooking mat where I revised my estimation to about seventeenish. My mate agreed. Quickly unhooked and onto the scales and a weight of fifteen pounds two ounces was recorded. That will do for me!

I am pretty sure that I was the happiest angler in the county at that point. She is without doubt the best, although not the biggest, pike I have caught to date. Unfortunately the pictures did not come out very well and they are a bit blurry. I’m sure you will agree though, she’s a stunner. You can’t really see my face but I promise you, I’m smiling like the village idiot.

That was the end of the action for the day despite staying till dusk, still it did not matter one bit to the happiest angler in Lincolnshire! I packed away in a very good mood! Maybe things are just starting to fall into place on the forgotten lake…….