After a close and sticky day with hot, dry winds, the clouds parted just as I set up my tackle on the banks of a small pond in the early evening. The breeze dropped and the clamminess lifted.
As is so often the way when the air is still, insects started rising and fish too, started topping, as they chased after them, disturbed only by a few balls of my ground bait as I tried to roll it across the surface and not disturb the new idyll.
My favourite, battered old carbon float rod had a Trudex reel slipped on it and I tackled up with a float I hadn’t used before. It’s one I made in February with a few others, a sort of ducker with a thin, tapering cane tip, very visible, but very sensitive.
Not many people fish a centrepin reel and a bottom attached only float like a Ducker, but it works easily in the margins and twitching the float down is just a roll of the thumb against the rim of the spool.
There was a flow on the surface as water was being pumped in from an adjacent lake and the now dropped wind didn’t stabilise it as much as I thought so I soon gave up ordinary float fishing, slipped off some weights and put a big ‘un down near the hook to anchor the bait down. Sometimes they’ll take a drifting bait but last night wasn’t one of those times.
I started catching almost immediately. Some were proper lift-bites, some were grab and runs. Just a few were ‘stand still and eat the prawn segment’ bites, which I missed.
Baby Swallows skimmed the water clumsily copying their parents as they left thin streaks across the water, their beaks just breaking the surface as they drank. As they lowered themselves nearer to the water they changed the depth of each wing stroke to a shorter beat, almost looking like dragonflies as they scooped up water into their mouths. Goslings huddled together for a nap not 10 feet from me, like a contended and feathered Medusa’s head grunting happily and still that float went up or down depending on the tench’s mood.
As the light dropped away the insects disappeared, the birds disappeared and a few bigger specimens put in an appearance until finally one of about 2lbs tore off with the hook and I thought I had taken enough pleasure from the evening. More would just be greedy. I made my way back in the increasing darkness and could see the first few stars in the East as I headed off to the pub.
No big fish, true. But I couldn’t have asked for a better evening.
It was perfect.
The Indifferent Crucian
