When I was seventeen I fished the Leeds and Liverpool canal at ten o’clock at night by the lights from Leeds City Railway station. This was the nearest I’d ever been to night fishing.
These days it seems, with the proliferation of affordable high quality bivvies, bite alarms with remote sound boxes and increasing numbers of venues permitting night fishing that it’s almost becoming the norm. So, I let myself be talked into having a go by my long-time fishing buddy Micky, just to see what all the fuss was about.
Micky has powers of persuasion bordering on the hypnotic; he managed to convince my wife, Sue, that it’d be a great time so she came too. There was only one obstacle:
“I haven’t got a bivvie, Micky”
“That’s alright,”
He gave this information some thought and added “I’ll sort you something out”. Which I took to mean he’d borrow one from a mate. So, it was all settled; it was early August when we set off for a commercial fishery fifteen miles from home.
For this memorable all-night carp session we were taken to a kidney-shaped hole in the ground where, we were reliably informed, there were carp to thirty pounds and cats to nearly seventy pounds in a stretch of water barely bigger than my garden! The bank of the fishery resembled a supermarket car park on the day before Christmas and there were about ten or eleven anglers, each with two or more rods, all with olive green bivvies.
As promised, Micky had arranged our overnight accommodation. He handed over a small rectangular box on which were written the words:
Tesco “Two Man Tent: £4.97—not to be used in extreme conditions”.
The tent, once erected, differed from Micky’s in only two respects: It was about a half the size of his and was bright red! It’s the sort of thing you’d buy for the Glastonbury Festival — to leave behind!
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| Sue makes it look so inviting! |
Sue, ever the homemaker, set about making things comfy whilst Micky and I set up our rods. I don’t know what it is about women, but when she’d finished it looked most inviting. All that was missing was a vase of flowers and a couple of bedside tables.
Micky is an experienced carp angler and has all the matching kit whilst I make do with a barbel rod and an incredibly cheap 2½ lb TC Dragon Carp rod I use for piking. I could see this wasn’t going to suit Sue, as the sort of fishing she likes relies on her extraordinary powers of concentration, hovering over the rod like a preying mantis waiting to strike at the slightest touch. Hanging around for the bite alarms to go off just isn’t the same.
Obviously, if you’re fishing overnight, and bites are few and far between, food becomes a big event. We had taken two large cans of Cassoulet, at least that’s what Sue thought, only one tin turned out to be duck breasts in French lard or something equally Gallic, but we tipped them all into a large pan with fantastic results. The second big event was alcohol! Bottles of red wine appeared, and the chink of lager bottles being opened was heard; I was beginning to see the attraction.
After we’d eaten we spent the next couple of hours mulling over a particularly ‘jammy’ Shiraz (with layers of plum and berries), and watched the stars come into view as darkness fell. A few residual shooting stars from the Pleiades meteor shower whizzed across the huge East Anglian sky; bats flew busily around and we had loads of line bites.
It was harvest time and the countryside was dotted with clouds of dust as farmers gathered in very dry crops. Every now and then a trailer with a flashing orange light came into view and we followed its progress along narrow country lanes. A peaceful calm had fallen over us when, at about eleven o’clock, the owner of the lake turned up in his truck, tromped over and switched a large industrial generator on about twenty yards away. This was powering a massive aeration pump and was expected to run for ten hours! He said he’s sorry, but he’d lost a few fish recently to low oxygen levels.
The noise and fumes were terrible but we weren’t going to move, so we had a few more drinks and made the best of it.
After more beers and another of bottle of wine the wife and I shuffled off into the tent, it was about 1.15, and slept restlessly for a few hours. It was like sleeping in the engine room of a diesel submarine while it sailed through Niagara Falls!
I poked my nose out of the tent at about 4.30 am; the guy opposite was putting a fish back. He saw I was up so he came round to see if I’d ‘ad owt?’ During the night he’d had a 16lb cat and 37 lb cat — both on live bait!
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| Mick’s 7lber. Note oxygenator in the background |
Around five o’clock there was a run on Micky’s left hand rod, I moved towards it, but Micky just came out of his bivvy in time — a bit bleary eyed — and struck into a small common about 7lb, caught on a bunch of worms. That was about it until I got a screaming run on my pineapple boilie and missed it.
My alarm went off again at about nine in the morning. This time it was a carp being played by a guy from about five swims away. He had caught it on a match rod and 1½lb hooklink. He played it through several swims including mine setting off the alarms (Micky’s, of course, had some weird ‘back-leads’ that keep his line on the bottom!). It was relatively entertaining for us as we cooked breakfast: he played it for about three quarters of an hour before it inevitably broke him.
We packed up late in the morning and I drove us both home as the effects of sleep deprivation began to manifest themselves. The afternoon was spent dozing and I was unable to concentrate on anything for longer than about two minutes. I’m not sure I could cope with this on a regular basis. How do the boys who do this all the time manage?
Andy Scholey
