Big fish come on the feed at dawn and dusk my Dad told me when we were fishing the Essex Colne in Castle Park, Colchester. I remember it being a cold day. The year? It was probably about 1965, but for sure it was some time after the big freeze of the winter of 1962-63. That was the winter we froze our goldfish, for although we moved the old tin bath tub ‘pond’ out of the garden and into our back garden shed, it didn’t stop the contents from freezing.
My memory is hazy, for back then I was five or six years of age and a would-be angler. My rod was all of five feet, and made of green solid fibreglass, with a black wooden handle. My reel was an Intrepid Black Prince before mum and dad upgraded me to an Intrepid Deluxe. My float was very similar to some of the floats I use today – a cork and balsa perch bobber. All very traditional.
And though the recollection is hazy, my first fish wasn’t the ever- obliging stripey, nor the wondrously luminescent rainbow-coloured gudgeon, but a pristine little roach of around four inches. Oh boy oh boy, was I hooked. And that’s a statement, not a question.
I remember that Saturday morning as though it was yesterday – the bait was ‘dough’, made by Dad. On following weekend mornings I caught another small roach, a gudgeon, then another, and a perch. I was a fisher boy, and so began the 45 year love affair, the obsession, the addiction that will be with me until I am packed in my final creel and later balled in to some quiet tench corner against the summer lilies.
But I digress, and not for the first time.
“Big fish come on the feed at dawn and dusk”, said Dad, which is why he dropped brother Steve and me at Frogmore Gravel Pits, one of the 1970s jewels in the London Anglers’ Association crown, now home to Toadless, the forty pound leather, and a Verulam AC run water near St Albans, well before daylight and returned to pick us up at or after dark. And he did so three days a week throughout the long school summer holidays. It was dad’s fault his alarm clock went off in the dead of the night, for he taught us the best times to fish. It was also a long day for Dad, who ran a hot metal typesetting works in Watford. And to add to that, Dad would turn up at lunchtime most days with two bags of piping hot chips and a brace of pineapple fritters. He was, and remains, the Daddy among Dads.
A decade before, in Colchester in the mid 1960s it was Dad who took us to the huge expanse of water, an ocean to young impressionable schoolboys. It was Abberton Reservoir. We went as guests of our neighbour, the man who was chairman of the local Colchester Piscatorials. Back then Section 30 stocking consents didn’t exist, well not in my young mind anyway, and perhaps not in reality, for the local fishing club secretaries seemed to queue up on the occasional Sunday morn and take away huge double-figure slab bream and gi-normous eels from the trap at Abberton. It was our introduction to big fish and despite our tender years, brother Steve and I wanted to catch fish of similar size. Though I was sure I would never land one on my five foot green glass wand of a rod. We saw these huge bream again at Tring Reservoirs in our early teens; alas we did not catch them, but one day while tenching on Marsworth Reservoir we witnessed two London men land at least a dozen ten pounders fishing off the wall at Startops behind us. They were throwing maggot filled swim feeders sixty yards, a method so alien and unknown to us margin fishers.
“Big fish come on the feed at dawn and dusk,” said Dad. And these words linger with me whenever I venture out to river or lake. It was not so many years ago that, excuse the pun, it dawned on me. I realised that dawn was indeed my favourite time of day, when the sky is often, though only fleetingly, as brilliantly coloured as any sunset at dusk. That quiet reflective time of day, when all is still, birdlife is waking, dews drips from the waterside balsam. I have taken hundreds of photographs of my friend dawn , though only occasionally among a disk of dozens does an image whisper to me that’s it’s good enough to be my computer screen saver. Often dawn hypnotises me and I wind in my rod to sit and take in her beauty. I forget about the fishing, but only momentarily, for several blinks later she is gone. It’s day break. And her mesmerising beauty wanes into the pastel canvas of the morn.
It was Dad who said he would buy us a keepnet if ever Steve or I caught a fish big enough to go in it. It happened 40 years ago at the precise moment my Intrepid Black Prince fell off my rod and into the Grand Union Canal by an overhanging willow at Heath Park by Hemel Hempstead Town Cricket Pitch. Between us we hand-lined in a mass of weed on the end of my line… and a ten inch roach. We were proper fishermen now. And Dad even bought us a small triangular folding landing net with aluminium handle.
Our keep net was about three feet long, it was bottlenecked with a red draw string, it was pale yellow in colour and made of thick waxy netting with a particular smell that will instantly now waft over any fisherboy over the age of 50. That net went on to see huge bags of roach Steve caught from his hempseed swim at Frogmore, using the tiniest of balsa floats and a twist of lead wire on the line for shot, so as not to register false bites by using seed-sized round shot. Halcyon days indeed, as were all fishing days in our youth. One of the best being when I cycled 14 miles to witness the 12 pike my brother caught in the same day.
It was Dad who came to witness my first ever crucian carp from the same Frogmore waters, Dad who came home with a second-hand wicker basket that I still sit on today; Dad who downed tools mid-afternoon to drive across to photograph my first pound roach – it was one glorious pound and two very big ounces – and won me my first Angling Times Kingfisher Guild Certificate.
And it was Dad who gave me the extra pocket money to top up my savings that bought my Mitchell 300 that I yearned for so achingly when it was time to upgrade my Intrepid Deluxe. And it was taxi-driver Dad who sat patiently in the car park at Stanborough Lakes at Welwyn Garden City while I was basking in the glory of my first huge mirror carp, a fish so large, jaw-dropping and eye-opening, that it nearly went a full ten pounds. It was caught in days when a carp bait was actually used on the hook, not dragging behind it on a gossamer string. That day it was a two inch square lump of luncheon meat, held in place with a short stick of dry spaghetti under the bend of the hook. It christened my new carp rod, the 10ft two piece glass Vortex Aurora, by E. T. Barlow & Sons of Thames Ditton, and my Mitchell 300.
But today, 35 years after that huge carp capture, with sub zero temperatures, and a vicious ground frost, I have missed day-break opting for the warmth of my bed and producing this memory-evoking yarn. But later, after lunch, I will be chubbing on my favourite stream, trotting for a couple of hours with breadflake. Then, late on a winter’s afternoon, I will move over to a static bait on a small lead, and fish just into dark. And I will concentrate on my fishing…..for big fish feed at dawn and dusk.
Gary Cullum 
