There are many interpretations of Paradise. For the Vikings it was the dead hero world of Valhalla; the Christians call it Heaven and for Muslims it involves 72 virgins in the afterlife, or some such nightmare because if you ask me that’s a lot of pmt to cope with. For me Paradise is defined by a river at a specific place on a particular day.
Not any old river, but the river of my memories, one which to be honest probably never truly existed outside my cranium but the reality for me was never too far away. It is the Upper Gt Ouse a couple of years ago. Or maybe three or four.
We are there on a hot late July day with a glorious sun shining through a cornflower blue sky, hot enough to warm but not so hot as to induce a sweat. I am wearing a T-shirt I don’t need and a pair of jeans against any sneaky nettle that wants to prove something. The noise of the bees buzzing about in the flood-meadow behind me competes with the shouts of joyous children in the distant school playground, let out from stuffy schoolrooms for the hours lunch break. Considering the speeds at which they are travelling, jet contrails crawl with remarkable slowness across the sky. The smells of summer wildflowers on the steep banks are released as I slide, probably a little too noisily, down the bankside’s long grasses then merge in with squelched mud gases when my foot softly hits the rushes and I come to a halt.
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I also had a few chub with the best going six pounds. |
I look back for my guide. BarbelDave is in the next swim gesturing to me. ‘Cast upstream’ he tells me silently with his hands, ‘and keep very quiet’. I peer into the water. The light is dappled everywhere, bright mirror reflections coming back to me from every angle. From the water, the far banks the overhead trees. I can’t see the fish even with the aid of my Polaroids but if Dave says they are there, then they are. He is never wrong, for this is is his home water and he knows it – perhaps even in the Biblical sense.
I am in a natural clearing at the base of a tree with just enough room to swing my 11ft rod if I do everything right, and certain to either tangle the rod tip in the vegetation or some other equally ruinous course of action if I cock it all up. The trunk shields me from the unseen fish. The water is clear enough that the colours of individual stones are clearly displayed in the margin by my feet. Past that, the dappled sun reflections camouflage everything. I am effectively blind in a land of colour, light-shows and radiance. How can that be?
I’m fascinated in how Dave chooses to fish this river and I’ve taken to copying his style. He only uses one rod and a pin. He doesn’t use leads. When he uses weight at all, he uses a swivel superglued to a stone. Earlier today I watched him fish. He got a shoal of big fat chub feeding, tied a hook direct to his main line and free-lined a single pellet into the middle of the stream. The first cast was the only one he needed and a 5lber was the result. I love his quick change rig too. A small loop of line captures a few pellet bands and a short length of silicone tubing. Slide the tubing onto the hook and you are fishing with a hair rigged bunch of pellets. Slide it off to fish with a worm or floating crust. Talk about a quick-change rig! Quite often that’s all the end tackle Dave will use. It’s a joy to watch him cast such light gear on a wooden rod and a centrepin. He’s a master at what he does, no doubt about that.
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One of Dave’s better chub from this water. A winter fish of 6lb 5oz. |
Dave is not fishing. His rod is put aside. He is watching me. Waiting. I fumble a couple of pellets into a hookbait and attach a small tight bag of half-dozen loose 8mm pellets. I hook the line over my left thumb and swing the rod gently around, dropping my left hand to my side to set the spool spinning in a gentle but lip-biting Wallis cast. After years of casting like this I can still cock up one now and then and it is usually at times like this – when everything depends on stealth, accuracy, fluidity and gracefulness. Great! I got it right! There was a tiny ‘plop’ as the tiny 1/8th ounce lead fell into the water almost exactly where Dave had told me to put it. To be truthful, I wouldn’t risk trying to cast it further, not in that swim. I can’t come back tomorrow. I’m a guest, not a member. I’m on the waiting list but have been told not to hold my breath as it will probably be at least ten years before I get a chance. So, Dave permitting, my next time here will be a year hence so I can’t afford mistakes today.
A brilliant flash of blue shocks my system and my heart races as a kingfisher scorches past flying just above the water line. Then it’s gone, threading a course through still willow branches which trail in the stream like a poachers fingers trying to tickle a trout. I breathe out and begin to relax again. There are no trout here, though THERE ARE BARBEL!! ARRRGH… And one of them is now attached to my soul by 30ft of Fireline and a 25 year old 11ft Super Specialist. I have the reel clamped firm, I’m not giving an inch. I have to stop this incredibly powerful fish diving into those snags. I must turn it and attempt to play it out in the clearer water of this impossibly tight swim. Dave is calling something but the blood is rushing in my ears and I have no time for human contact. All other sounds are drowned by the scream of the ratchet as the fish turns and bolts downstream, the rod performing a miraculous about-turn in it’s power curve and I mentally accuse myself of being a bloody idiot for not getting a screw-on reel fitting to this rod as I have been promising myself for the last 20 years. Time loses all meaning and it is some hours days or minutes later before a huge golden barbel is laying in the net before me.
Above the tintitus roaring in my ears and the fear that my pounding heart will suddenly burst Alien-style from my chest, I become aware of Dave beside me, slapping me on the shoulder, laughing and pumping my hand. With the realisation that the fish is beaten, that I had done it, I start to laugh too. Yes I will have one of his cigarettes, despite having stopped smoking for the umpteenth time that decade. When the shaking stops and the pulse returns to it’s near-normal rate, we ascertain the fish weighed about six pounds, took a quick photo and slipped it back into the stream. As the fish shot off back to it’s haven I thought it a fantastic sight, watching the power of red fins and nature’s gold melting and transmuting back into sparkling water.
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One of Dave’s very many barbel from this stretch. |
This is my third barbel so far today. The largest was over eleven pounds. I also had a few chub with the best going six pounds. I stalked one of of those barbel. Laying on my belly, parting the grass at the waters edge and peering into the depths I’d seen four fish on the gravels below. Pushing the rod tip out and slowly unwinding the reel until the bait was lowered into exactly the correct position then the heart-stopping moment when the fish took the bait and the margins erupted in a shower of spray! Magnificent. The essence of life for this angler.
Later that day Dave and I fed floating chum mixers to the stream and were rewarded with several fat juicy chavandars all of which probably felt safe feeding under the shadow of the willows. We’d had to fish the baits on floating braid around a hairpin bend to present the bait – one of us spotting and calling the bites whilst the other held the rod. Magic moments on a magical day.
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It’s all gone now. Paradise that is. All changed. Those huge powerful fish which put the sparkling magic into that shimmering stream are gone. Victims of… something. I’m not sure what really. Too many opinions lead to too much disinformation. Otters say some. Hormone discharges say others. Add the cormorants, the spawn-eating crayfish, the insecticides and sheep-dips and other pollutants and the fishery I called Paradise is no more. I suppose it still looks the same to a non-angler. There are still dappled gravel beds and perhaps even a kingfisher may still reside there. But Dave don’t fish there any more. The club no longer has a waiting list as long as your arm. And nobody much seems to care, certainly not enough to write a 12 volume poem about it. But for me it hurts – because it really is…. Paradise Lost. And I’m crying now.
Geoff Maynard
