The Fens – Part Four

Stuart Sparkes still can’t believe it hours later. It’s written all over his shell-shocked face.

The floats are bobbing idly by the rod tops. He might as well pack up, but he can’t quite tear himself away from the river that’s just made his dreams come true.

The baits are still in the water, even though he knows he won’t catch anything else to rival it today. Maybe not as long as he lives.

But he still can’t put his rods away and head for home because he’s savouring the moment he’s waited 14 years for, the day it all came right for one quiet, unassuming piker.

On a morning when it seemed like every tractor and sugar beet lorry in Norfolk was on the roads, the dawn slipped by as I fought the traffic. As I gunned the car past another artic, Stuart was sliding his landing net under a Fenland 30 on a quiet, reed-lined corner of the River Wissey, a few miles down the road.

As I walk up to congratulate him a few hours later, I plan to ask him about the fish and whether he intends going public. But I can see it’s not the right time to intrude.

I don’t want to ruin the moment by thrusting a notebook under his nose and firing questions at him, so I leave him alone with his thoughts and a brief “well done mate”.

THE BAR WENT SILENT

Stuart’s more collected when he shares the story. Philosophical almost, now the capture’s sunk in and he’s finally come to terms with it.

The bar went silent when the pictures were passed around at a PAC meeting two weeks later. Stuart shrugs and blushes as he relives the moment in his soft, understated tones, as we hang on every word. The consensus is it couldn’t have happened to a nicer bloke.

“As soon as I lifted it out of the water, I knew it was a new personal best.”

Stuart called out to other anglers down the bank to help him weigh and photograph the massive fish.

Stuart Sparkes and his Wissey 30-pounder, his 100th pike of the season

“Without Paul, who I had never met before in my life, I would only have had pictures of it on the ground, which wouldn’t have done it much justice at all,” Stuart said.

Work and other commitments mean that Stuart can only fish on Sunday mornings. Yet the 30 was his 100th pike of a season the 27-year-old horticultural manager was already rating his best-ever.

He was mildly chuffed with fish 99 – a low double which came along almost as soon as he started fishing. He’d unhooked and returned that and settled back behind his rods when the float went again and he quickly realised something a lot bigger was on the end.

“When I tell people about this amazing fish they think it came to me easily,” said Stuart, whose previous best pike scaled 22lbs. “But it’s taken me 14 years and I know some people will never catch a fish like this in a whole lifetime of trying.”

Plenty of pikers were on the Wissey the morning that fish came out. But every other boat or bank man I passed greeted me with a shake of his head, collars pulled high to keep out the lazy wind whipping up the river.

I don’t know if the Norfolk poet John Kett was a piker but he had the weather sussed. The boat was blowing around all over the place, I couldn’t work the lures the way I wanted to and the lazy wind was rattling my bones.

“I’M GOING TO GET YOU THIS TIME…”

Even Andy Doughty blanked a few swims away in the reeds. It was one of those days when you drive home wishing you were a better angler, but then the Wissey’s taught me a few lessons since I fell in love with this shallow, fast-flowing river that seems so out of place in the Fens.

It had made me eat humble pie plenty of times before Stuart Sparkes’s float slid under its surface.

You can fall in love with a river. But you can’t take a river for granted. I learned that one the hard way after a December fish of 27lbs turned up in the weeklies.

I kept meaning to try for it and on the last but one day of the season I was on the river at dawn with the lure rods, thinking it just might turn out to be my day.I caught a couple of jacks as the sun came up and the traffic thundered past on the A10. Then the water erupted by the moored boats 30 yards or so downstream as a shower of silver fish leapt clear of some unseen assassin which struck in a swirl which rocked the cabin cruisers.

It had to be that fish.

I crept down the bank, just upstream of the boat I guessed it was lurking under, thinking: “I’m going to get you this time…”

An easy lob would land the Shad Rap right where those roach just got the fright of their lives. I calmed myself down by sharpening the hooks and checking trace and knot were sound enough to withstand the first mad rush as a fast-water monster careered off downstream.

I’d already played and weighed it in my mind. Filling out with spawn it would be knocking 30lbs, maybe even bigger with a few good meals inside it. Imagine playing that in four feet of fast flowing river.

MAKE IT COUNT……

I got the feeling this was a fish you’d only get one chance at. One cast, make it count, I told myself, as I swung the rod back over my shoulder and took aim.

I paused for a second – thinking that I could be a cast away from my first 30. Then the lure’s flying straight for the mooring – and straight through an old tyre dangling from the woodwork, pressed into service as a makeshift fender.

You couldn’t have hit it on purpose if you’d tried. I mouthed a curse as the current grabbed the braid and tightened it. I lifted the rod to flick the lure free but those needle sharp hooks went straight into the tyre instead.

Calm down, I told myself. Drop the rod, walk back to the bridge, down the other bank and free the lure. Go careful and you might not scare it off.

I legged it back to the bridge and down the other bank, crawled along a makeshift wooden platform and found my trace sticking out of a half-submerged tyre.

As I inched it up to get at the lure I noticed a movement out of the corner of my eye and there’s a pike that looks like a great green railway sleeper sitting under the staging, fins rippling in the gentle current.

I could have scooped it up if I’d had my landing net. I could have got a picture if my camera wasn’t on the other side of the river in my bag. I might even have caught it if I’d used my brains in the first place, and tried from the other bank.

But there’s no going back now. The game’s already up. Its fins quiver as it clocks me peering down at it. Two swipes of its tail and it’s gone in a swirl, leaving me holding an old tyre with my lure impaled on it, on the other bank to the rod.

Do not pass GO. Do not connect with 30lbs pike.

AMONG FENLAND’S BEST KEPT SECRETS

I’d fished rivers of every shape and size for pike before I pulled sticks and headed for Norfolk. But I’d never even heard of the Wissey until I read its nondescript mention in the King’s Lynn AA club card. That club card is a passport to some superb stretches of water. Yet cross the Fens on a perfect spring morning and you’ll hardly see a soul away from the bridges and access points.

Pass the car park at Dent’s of Hilgay, on the other hand, and it’ll be crammed full like Tesco’s. Ditto the other commercial fisheries, which dish up netfulls of pole-caught carp all year round.

You’re never far from supermarket fishing, even in the Fens. If 50 or 60lbs of pole caught carp is what floats your boat, you’re welcome to it.

Yet some of the smaller rivers like the Wissey, Little Ouse and Lark are among Fenland’s best-kept secrets.

I’ve never understood how anyone could drive past waters like these and not want to wet a line. Ours not to reason why the banks of this lovely river, so at odds with its surroundings, are so often deserted.

Last opening day Andy Doughty and I travelled five or six miles of the Wissey on our old tub of a boat. We saw three other anglers and two of those were fellow pikers. A handful of anglers in our own private paradise. Probably the luckiest five blokes alive on June 16.

ALL STRIPES AND SPIKES

The Wissey spins an allure of its own as it winds seductively across forgotten corners of the Fens. You never quite know what could be waiting as you nose the boat around the next bend.

Chris Bishop admires his Wissey perch and wonders just how big it is. But does it really matter, he asks.

Take the perch in the picture. It came from the river on the final afternoon of the season before, when a crossfire of kingfishers flashed like bullets across the river. It was more like May than March, the reed-lined banks which had looked so gaunt and brown just weeks earlier were a riot of green.

With next to no road access for miles, parts of the river are virtually untouched. Naturalists reckon in the 1970s, when otters had been hunted and poisoned almost to extinction, it was one of the few rivers where these elusive creatures survived.

The Wissey might be a picture of secluded beauty but our old boat was the usual mess with lures, unhooking gear and assorted other junk strewn across the seats and floor, as we headed home from a day’s piking.

Well my end of the boat wasn’t exactly tidy, put it that way. It never usually is. But Andy was a picture of serenity as he rowed us home in slow strokes of the oars, like he didn’t want the season to end.

I was trolling a big silver Ondex spinner behind us, drinking in the scenery and the last of my flask when the rod nearly went over the side.

I thought a jack had hit the lure and bullied it in accordingly, but a great dorsal fin broke the surface instead of the expected gob full of teeth, as I reached over the side to lift it aboard.

“God knows where the scales are,” I said to Andy, admiring one of the most beautiful fin-perfect fish I’d ever seen, all stripes and spikes as it sparkled in my hand. “Call it over 2lbs and I’ll settle for a picture.”

I slipped it back as the spring sun sank behind the trees and turned the sky as red as its fins.

It wasn’t until I got home and I saw what looked like smaller fish in the weeklies, with weights of over 3lbs next to them that I realised it might have gone a bit heavier than 2lbs. Quite a bit heavier.

But does it really matter in the scheme of things, if I can’t tell you what my PB perch weighed..? Ask me about my best-ever perch and I’ll tell you about a mild March day under a cloudless sky, when two blokes left their cares behind in a car park and paradise was just a boat ride away.

STOP PRESS:
Stuart Sparke’s 30:07 pike is being added to the list of Fenland 30s compiled by Pike Anglers Club liaision officer Dennis Moules. Another 30 was rumoured last season, from the same stretch of the Wissey. But the story went cold on me as I pressed for a picture and a witness, melting away into the mists.