The Fens

Five years of dawn starts, bumping down nameless droves and farm tracks, and I know my way around parts of the Fens like the back of my hand.

I can also recite the shipping forecast on Radio Four, which so often seems the soundtrack as I head into the back of beyond in search of the pike that haunts my dreams, that monster with my name on it that’s always lurked a cast or two away.

“Attention all shipping. Here is the forecast for 6am today. Thames, Humber, Dogger, Fisher, German Bight… Easterly, force six, expected imminent, visibility poor.”

Half the time, it might as well say Middle Level, Sixteen Foot, Wissey, Great Ouse… Brass monkeys. It’s going to piss down all day (expected imminent), and you’re going to get wet through for a couple of missed runs and a six pounder.

So why do it..? Why follow half-baked hunches round the middle of nowhere when there’s easier fishing to be had elsewhere..?

I haven’t found King John’s treasure yet but there are still riches galore for the angler who craves a different fix to named fish and circuit waters.

By and large these days the Fens aren’t for the number crunchers who judge the success of a day in pounds and ounces. But it’s somewhere you can find out as much about yourself as the fishing. A place where just being out there might be all you’ve got to show for it half the time anyway.

Chris with a big Fen zander

Driven By What Lies Around The Next Corner

While they’re hard guys to pigeon-hole, they’re all explorers and adventurers in their own way. They’re anglers with itchy feet, driven by what lies around the next corner, rather than the latest in-water or tackle fad – or a comfy day behind a brolly.

So let’s lob the rods in the back of the car and take a ride through the flatlands. We’ll meet up with a few characters I know along the way and hear their stories over a bankside brew-up or a pint or two of Black Dog.

I’d wrap up warm though. It’s probably going to rain all day. It’s rained all week and it’ll probably rain for another one come to that.

In fact sooner or later, it’s going to rain so much the waters the Dutch drainers channelled away from the Fens are going to come back. Knowing my luck, I’ll probably be fishing the day they do.

Living On Borrowed Time

Between the Witham and the Great Ouse lies a landscape living on borrowed time. A shrinking sea of peat which only stays dry by defying gravity, sandwiching its rivers between higher and higher banks and pumping the water off between tides.

Some stretches of the Ouse and Nene are already 20 feet above the fields around them. And the sea is rising as the oceans warm and expand.

Water, water, everywhere

Environmentalists reckon parts of Fenland could be under water again in what’s left of my lifetime. It’s a case of when, not if the waters will return. Even old Vermuyden, the first of the great drainers, didn’t realise the whole enterprise was doomed from the start.

When the Duke of Bedford bought his spiel about the riches reclaiming the land would bring, and commissioned him to dig the Bedford River in 1630, he didn’t realise the whole scam was fatally-flawed.

Sure, the Forty Foot Drain still carries his name. And the Old Bedford still flows in testament to its patron nearly four centuries later. But neither the Duke nor his whizz-kid water gardener realised the land would shrink as it dries – a process still going on to this day. And as the banked-up rivers silted up, their seaward flows could rush inland in a vengeful torrent with a turn of the tide.

It was the Romans who started it all. Or the Saxons, depending who you listen to. Their legacy has left us an intricate chain of drains and rivers, leams and lodes, dykes and eaus.

Rivers were banked and diverted. New cuts galore were dug, to give rivers a short cut to the sea. There are even aqueducts in the Fens – at Mullicourt and Stoke Ferry – which carry the original courses of rivers high above drains which have long ago sunk with the land around them.

Whoever dug the first drains, the war against tide and gravity was still being waged well into the last century, as Irish labourers put pick to peat to scour the Cut Off and Relief Channel in the age of Flower Power.

The process goes on today, in a ceaseless war against water. Internal drains, usually well below the level of the main drain system, are still being dug. And a channel connecting the River Nar to the Relief Channel was full of water almost as soon as it was finished last year.

An Ever-Changing Landscape

But then Fenland is an ever-changing landscape – as far as being an angler is concerned. It’s a landscape shaped by the interaction between tides and rivers, man and water.

As our climate changes, the balance is becoming tipped more and more in water’s favour, as we pay the price for the havoc we’ve wreaked on our environment.

Enough of all that for now – we’re nearly there. My mate Dave’s fishing just up the road. Let’s see how he’s interacting.

Dave Marrs

If zander were a drug, they’d be Class A. No two ways about it. Those that hunt them around the Fen drains and rivers resign themselves to long, blank nights, dropped runs and frustration that can drive grown men to tears.

Dave Marrs is so addicted quick fixes can’t stem the craving. He fishes in binges which go on around the clock, for days and nights on end, no matter what the weather throws at him.

When I left him on the banks of the Middle Level four days ago, the water was the same colour as the tea in my flask and they were pumping it off so hard you could see it going down like someone had just pulled the plug on a great big bath tub.

The pumps at St Germans dump 4600 tons of water a minute into the tidal Ouse between tides when they’re running full-tilt. That drain keeps the best part of 250 square miles of Fenland dry. Or as dry as it can.

I lost a pike as Dave stood behind me, weighing up the prospects. It hit a jerkbait in fifteen feet of water going through like a train and came off after a couple of thumps, as it kited off in the current. I decided life was too short to try for another one.

The drain looked a lost cause to me as we stood on the bridge comparing notes in the drizzle. Worth a cast or two on the off-chance, but not a full-blown all-night assault.

Dave’s made of stronger stuff than me. He set up on the opposite bank, got soaked through and didn’t get a single run from the zander he thought might have taken refuge in a deep hole which is the deepest part of the drain.

I’d have gone home or gone somewhere easier after that. Time for a few beers or a few easy fish to cheer myself up.

Dave didn’t. He pulled sticks for somewhere even harder – the Relief Channel at Magdalen, where he stuck it out for another three nights.

He’s just packing his kit away as I pull into the car park on Thursday morning, thinking I’m going to tempt him into a few hours on a jack-infested gravel pit down the road.

“Mate, I’ve never seen it running off like this,” he said. “I couldn’t hold bottom so I went into Downham and bought some 4oz leads, but they barely held – even right under the rod tips.”

Under the rod tips is what used to be the bank. That’s the bit where saner people, who only fish the ‘Channel when it isn’t eight feet up and going through like the Zambezi sit and fish.

“It came up so fast last night we just had to grab our scratchers and all the gear and run up the bank,” said Dave. “Mate, it was pretty scary.”

Incredibly Phil and Harvey, two fellow zed-heads from Lincoln, have been sitting it out as well. It hardly seems worth asking the obvious. Their stubbled faces say it all as we stare at the torrent raging under Magdalen Bridge.

Over 18lbs – an awesome zed – is it still there, waiting to be caught, and a lot bigger?

Blanks are bread and butter to those who brave the Channel in December. It isn’t even a drain, strictly speaking, but an 11-mile-long, 100-yard-wide reservoir, which stores excess water from the Great Ouse catchment between tides.

Why, you’re probably asking. There must be easier places to fish. It’s true the Channel has a much lower head of zander than many nearby drains and rivers. But the prey fish pack into certain areas in the winter and the few predators which live in its depths dine well.

Ask any zed man on the Channel and he’ll tell you about a mint zander a little over 18lbs, which turned up during an EA fish survey a few Septembers back. Slipped back into the murk by the netsmen, that awesome zed which could have been the first British 20 by the back-end of the season was never seen again. It wasn’t through lack of trying by several in the know anglers once the story got out either.

That Channel monster still stalks a lot of dreams and turns legs to jelly when a bite alarm shrieks in the darkness, and shaking hands snap the bail arm over.

“Chris mate, you know it would only take one run on here to catch the fish of a lifetime,” smiles Dave, slinging the last of his sodden gear in the car. If there’s any justice, he probably will one wet night.

Thanks to Colin Brett, Mark Williams, Chris Hammond and Phil Pearson for some of the photographs used in this series.

Part 2 Next Month