I know chasing named fish is a no-no as far as a lot of people are concerned, but what do you do when a biggie turns up on your doorstep..? I’ve never caught a 30, so when one turned up on a club pit just a few miles from where I’m sitting four years ago, I sat up and took notice. I’d fished the pit a few times and managed a string of lanky jacks and a couple of low doubles, before moving on. It was deep, remote and only around five or six acres.
Firing on all cylinders but Nelson eludes me A few weekend trips in late September confirmed what I’d heard on the grapevine. Two of the regulars had caught her the season before. “It’s a big old fish all right,” one told me, producing a dog-eared photo. “And it’s blind in one eye – my boy caught it over there in the corner.” The pit became my second home as autumn set in. All I managed were jacks over there in the corner, so I decided I’d just fish my way around the pit until I bumped into the one I was after. As winter came I really thought I was firing on all cylinders. One day I nailed four doubles in a mad dawn hour. But before long the pike were starting to look a bit familiar. One fish, which hovered around the 16lbs mark, came out three times from different areas of the pit within the space of a few weeks. I recognised it from a thumb-sized birthmark on its gill cover. It’s amazing how you overlook the obvious sometimes. I decided there wasn’t much food in the pit, so the pike had to go looking for it. Cormorants had ravaged the stocks of hand-sized prey fish in the lake’s clear waters. There was nothing to eat between that year’s milk bottle tops and larger tench, bream and carp which had escaped the black death. The real story didn’t click that season. Time for a move March came and the biggest fish I’d managed was the 16. I’d fished just about every inch of every swim , I knew the bottom contours of the lake as well as my back garden and I still hadn’t caught the 30.My catches had dropped off, the place was getting hammered at weekends and I decided it was time for a move. I started flitting around the Ouse and Fen drains, desperate for a 20 to end the season. Phone calls to a few mates in other areas threw up a marina on the Thames, so I did a couple of 250-mile round trips and caned a few more jacks to cheer myself up. Geoff Baker had an ironic smile on his face when I walked into his tackle shop in King’s Lynn a few days after one of my marathon jack bashing sessions. Out at 32lb – but not to me! “I don’t know if I ought to show you this,” he said, reaching that week’s Angler’s Mail out from behind the counter. “But someone’s had that big fish down the road out, look at it – 32lbs. Do you know, the guy was only in here a week or two ago. He’s just moved up here and wanted somewhere to go for a few hours so I told him to try the pit, he came in last week and said he caught it the first time he went down there.” I looked at the picture. I’d even fished the same swim, with the same bait. I’d probably have fished it that week if I’d been around, come to that. I fished the last day of the season from dawn to dusk, leapfrogging up and down the same bit of bank without even a jack to show for it as the dying hours of the season ticked away. Maybe he deep hooked it and it’s dead, I thought, as the day wore on. As dusk came there was a huge swirl 20 yards down the bank and I stayed there wobbling deadbaits through the swim until it was pitch dark. What was I doing wrong? I asked myself. Not learning anything and not fishing enough different waters, I decided. Next season I finally had a ticket for one of the better rivers on the patch and a beautifully-marked 23 that fought like a demon on a hot summer’s day did a lot to restore my confidence. Did you see the size of that?” The wife said But while I flirted with the river, my heart was back at the pit. I still wanted that 30, as much to prove to myself I could catch it as anything else.
I watched them slinging their unused baits into a weedy bay as I set the drifter rods up. Around half an hour after they were gone, a large fish started porpoising over the bay where their baits had caused a sizeable slick. “Did you see the size of that,” the wife said as the lake erupted. “It was enormous, was it a pike…?” “That’s it,” I said, frantically reeling in the drifter. “It’s got to be the thirty.” I set it to fish shallow, just four feet deep and stuck on the biggest deadbait out of the box – a 10 inch herring which had been laced with an oil I’d been experimenting with. The float bobbed violently The drifter sailed straight across the pit like it was on rails, with a slick of fish goo ahead of it. Seagulls wheeled around it as I steered it for the bay the fish was swirling in, the best part of 200 yards away. I can still remember what happened next like it was yesterday. The fish showed again as the float bore down on it, a huge swirl that flattened the ripple ten yards in front of the big orange vane. Then the float bobbed violently and skated off sideways. My hands were shaking as I wound down like a madman and heaved the rod back over my shoulder. A few violent thumps and it was out of the bay in a great bow wave, kiting off across the pit with the drifter float racing along behind it. Twice it surged off leaving me backwinding frantically, wondering if it would spool me and the hooks would pull, or throw them with a tail-walk. We stayed attached and I gradually pumped it back into the margins on autopilot, before sliding the net under the longest pike I’d ever seen. I only had one thing on my mind as I unhooked it. The magic number. I’d done it at last. But as we zeroed the Avons and eased her into the sling, the dial went to 28 and settled two ounces lighter. Right fish, wrong weight, but now I had the answer Right fish all right. Right eye clouded over and sightless, there was no mistaking it. Wrong weight though. “Still, at least you’ve caught it now,” the wife said, as we drove home. I’d finally sussed the pit. They weren’t chasing prey fish because there weren’t any. That fish – we christened it Nelson – and any other large unknown pike the water held almost certainly lived on discarded deadbaits. When Sunday afternoon came round the guys who’d spent the weekend fishing threw their unused baits in, regular as clockwork. As they headed home, the pike came on the feed – or at least, that particular pike did. A couple of times I checked the pit on a Sunday afternoon, made a note of where other anglers were fishing and tried the margins the following day, using baits past their sell-by-date which had been used and refrozen. It worked, I was definitely onto something. Maybe they didn’t associate old baits with danger. Or maybe the other anglers’ prebaiting had conditioned the pike into staying out of trouble when the lake was busy, then coming on the feed as they departed. Snag was it was back to wading through a stream of jacks and familiar faces all over again.
All I had to do was fish a big smelly bait and she’d come crawling up my rod, I told myself. But somehow the magic was starting to fade. I’d caught the biggest fish in the water and it was time to move on. I hardly fished the place for the best part of a year. On a rare visit when I dropped in for an hour to see what was happening on the way home from somewhere else, I saw a different fish come out, a beautifully-marked 24. I made a mental note, thinking I’d go back and see if I could catch it later in the season. I knew how to fish the pit now, after all. One way and another I never got round to it until I fished it with Andy Doughty and his mate Lee. I sat in a nice quiet corner and caught a jack. They plotted up on the opposite bank, in the teeth of a gale. I’d looked at the swim when I got there an hour before them but it was too cold for my liking. Andy’s mate steered a smelt out into the deep water with a bait boat and five minutes later he nailed Nelson, at just over 25lbs this time. Still going strong but looking a bit frayed around the edges – and nearly three pounds lighter. Maybe it wouldn’t go 30 again anyway, I told myself. I didn’t bother going back until March, when I met a guy at a Pike Angler’s Club meeting who’d just moved to the area. He’d been trying the pit without success, although a number of different 20s were doing the local rumour mill. I offered to come down for a couple of hours, show him the swims and see if I could help him crack the place. We meet again but Nelson has the last laugh I turned up with just a few bits of kit and my drifter rods to find he’d blown me out. After a runless morning, he’d decided it wasn’t worth it and cleared off elsewhere. I nearly went home without bothering to fish. I thought I’d give it an hour and hit the boozer. But for some reason I stayed as the shadows lengthened and the few other anglers that were on the pit threw their unused baits in and went home. I reeled one rod in and picked up the other. I was about to strike the bait off and call it a day when the float went down a hole in the lake. “Hello Nelson,” I shouted into the gloom as I pulled the hooks in. Five minutes of heave-ho later and my first 30 was glaring up at me through its one good eye. Err, not quite. Same old fish that seemed to go on for ever, but the Avons didn’t. They stopped at 26lb 4oz this time. She was thin and empty and must have spawned a few days earlier. “You had the last laugh on me again,” I told her as I slipped her back into the lake. |
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