The Ghost in the Drain.

Down below our village, in the flood plain of the old mill, is the drain that used to fill the valley to work the mill in summer. Although we are on clay this drain brings down sand from the Greensand Hills and consequently the soil is quite soft and crumbly around the banks and the water murky. In summer when the flow is slow, almost non-existent, it clears however. A weir was lowered by the Rivers Authority many years ago and the drain is quite shallow now, but in one section it remains quite deep, around 5 foot or so. This can change when it rains and the hills become waterlogged. The drain is some 5 or six feet below its banks, but the stream can rise very quickly and the banks can burst and cause enormous bank-side damage. Sometimes whole small trees are swept down, sometimes dams form and last a year or two.

I’m told sea trout run up there in winter and I was once fishing and barely, just barely ,caught my rod as it leapt from the rod rests when something very big took the bait on the run. The 5lb line parted like cotton.

I was given exclusive permission to fish there and ‘treat it as my own’ which meant much chopping down of trees and bank-side vegetation before I could even see much of the water. I spent some time baiting up to draw the fish back into the now rather open water and returned every few days to see if there were any signs of the bait being taken. I sprinkled sweet corn at the margins and hoped if any mammal took it I would see footprints to tell me it wasn’t a fish. I made bucketfuls of ground bait containing mashed sardines and bread paste.

I got pretty excited when the bait was gone with no sign of little feet and decided it was time to cast a line.

Early trotting floats

This wasn’t as easy as it sounds due to a combination of my amateur skills and the nature of the place. It soon became clear that the water was infested with as many snaggy roots as the bank-side was with snaggy brambles! I surely wasn’t helped by having given up on float fishing nearly forty years before. I’d been sold a stiff spinning rod and couldn’t work with it. Nobody told me it was the wrong rod for a float, so I fished lures almost exclusively. All part of the learning curve. I then tried a short telescopic rod, but there just wasn’t room to cast. So I ‘invented’ floats that would take my bait downstream and not spook the fish. These consisted of leaf imitations with a bit of lead glued on. In the end I learned to cast a bit of bread flake gently enough to let it do its own thing alone.

Floating baits seemed the best approach and I would walk the twenty or so ‘pegs’ I’d opened up and distribute bits of Mr. Kingsmill’s finest. I’d then go back to the first, most promising peg, and watch the bread float by for the next hour .

Just below this spot, between a tight right and then a tight left turn, was a dam created by a fallen tree, a collapsed bank and a lot of debris. Effectively the water all had to pass through a gap not more than a foot wide and I saw dark shapes below the surface which moved occasionally. I soon found that sticking my head through the Himalayan Balsam on the bank-side to look at these shapes made them disappear rather quickly. The one spot that had no balsam had the sky directly behind me and just to raise your head there meant that same thing happened. I went through a short phase of wearing hats, camouflage clothing and even a mottled army head-net with eye holes sewn in, in an attempt to hide my presence from these fish, before I built a wall of driftwood , branches and an old tyre to stop me being ‘sky-lined’.

Then I found a big hole in the bank, I think it was a collapsed drain, and I dug it out and made a fishing spot that had my head below the bank when perched on my tackle box. However I couldn’t see the dam and those dark shapes from there. I stuck with it though and caught some small roach of around half a pound. Occasionally there was a big splash upstream, but I never did see what caused it. I think it was chub.

The mask of shame

I was fishing this way one afternoon when a white shape moved through the swim. A few minutes later it appeared again and came up to the surface. I could see it was a large white carp, a Ghost Carp! It raised its head, finned strongly and pushed itself through the surface so that its eyes were above the water. I felt as though it was looking straight at me and held my breath. It was no more than six feet from me, a fish of around 6 pounds…a monster! I didn’t dare move.

As the fish submerged itself again and turned slowly away from me I flicked my baited hook gently out behind him and hoped he wouldn’t spook at the splash. Luck was with me and he seemed not to even notice.

He turned back again and I could see that he had seen the bread as he moved slowly towards it. Then he dived down gently and disappeared . At about this point I realised I hadn’t drawn breath for ages and started panting away. Then he re-appeared and made towards the bread again. Once more he dived and I thought I could take no more.

Then he came up from under the bread and took it with a noisy slurping sound.

I lifted into him and felt his weight, as he felt me and dived deep. Almost immediately the line broke and I was left speechless, breathless and in a state of shock.

I had never hooked a fish so big, nor at such close range. There was no more than 4 foot of line beyond my rod tip and the rod itself was a stiff, 6 foot, spinning rod. Such a short distance of line, such a stiffly tipped rod all combined with my over-enthusiastic strike, had done for me!

Worse still I had been fishing with barbed hooks and I knew that I had left a hook stuck in the mouth of this noble and rare fish. I had to do something about it…but what?

‘What’ was a number of things. I knew I could never fish with barbed hooks again and I acquired a 13 foot carbon float rod. This proved un-manageable in such a place and so I bought an Avon Quiver rod which could be played as a stepped-up float rod at 11 feet.

I fished on and occasionally saw the Ghostie, but he never came near that spot again, so I looked for somewhere else to fish for him. Eventually I noticed that a gully that I had to scramble across to get to my swim went all the way to the waters edge and I cleared it of trees and growth. I was now right on the first bend and had a clear sight of the dam where the dark shapes lurked and upstream where the Ghostie had broken me

As the summer went on I turned those dark shapes into fish in my landing net. Such fish as I had never seen before , roach approaching 2 pound, perch the same and a few brown trout too. Each holding station at the dam where all had to pass before their hungry mouths. I caught a number of small common carp including my first fish on a centrepin reel.

The Ghostie finally showed up again in this stretch and I was pleased to see it healthy and apparently feeding unharmed by my lost hook. Like the roach it was taking floating bread, but never ventured into the areas in which I could swing my baited hook. Often it just held station at the approach to the hole in the dam and let the bread come to it. But I couldn’t trot a bait there as the line would make it move the wrong way and I couldn’t ‘mend’ the line for there was no room. (Months later I did learn to trot a bait there, but of course there was no sign of him.)

The only answer was to draw him back towards me with less food going into the swim so he had to come and find it.

This went on for another 5 months and not once did he come near my hook.

Eventually I went down on a beautiful late summer’s day, when I should really have been at the village cricket ground, and tried yet again. I crept up to my new spot and watched the water for a while. The Ghostie was there in a place I could cast to upstream of the dam, so I crept away and went upstream to send some bait down.

I returned to the spot and set up whilst the bait slowly drifted past and watched as various fish nibbled at it and occasionally the Ghostie sucked some down. He wasn’t more than 10 feet from me as I quietly tackled up and swung my hook out upstream of him.

Imagine my disgust as three fat chub surfaced under the hook and one of them took the bait. I had to play the chub, net him and release him all without disturbing my target. I did it, but I have no idea how and I chuckled to myself as I realised that on any other day, on any other stream, those chub would seem a gift from God. Now they were just a pain!

I cast again, with a re-baited hook, hoping that the carp would be feeling competitive with so many others around and as the chub approached I flicked the bait away from them and was amazed that the carp didn’t spook . In my enthusiasm I’d leaned nearer the water yet still he didn’t see my white face not 8 feet from him.

He approached the bait and I saw two of the chub swimming towards him in a determined manner. With a single beat of his tail he shot forwards and took the bait, diving with it immediately. I held my breath, counted to five hundred thousand, and fifty and lifted the rod tip in a steadily increasing strike.

First fish on a centrepin

He was on!

None of the fish ever made long runs in this drain, perhaps restricted by the poor visibility, but this fish made five or six that I thought I would never control. I went through all the emotions that every angler does when attached to a good fish: “I wish I had stronger line on. Will that hook bend? Will it straighten out? Is the landing net big enough?”

Eventually, my arm aching, I slid the net under him, propped the rod in a holly tree and held the net in my lap as I sat on my box. I’m not one to keep fish out of the water much, indeed these days I unhook them in the net and slip them back without touching them, but I did gawp at the Ghostie for near a minute before I remembered my duty. Slipping the barbless hook out easily I searched his mouth for my old barbed hook from the springtime. I knew he hadn’t been deep or foul-hooked, but there was no trace of it!

I wondered if it was another fish for a moment, but decided that was impossible. It seems a fish can shift and lose a barbed hook by itself and this has given me great comfort in the years since when other fish have broken me.

I learned a lot that summer. Don’t pull your line straight at you if you catch a lure in far-bank brambles. Pretty though Rapalas are, they are not meant to be male face ornaments. Luckily I made it back to the workshop unseen and have always kept a mirror on the wall there for just such occasions.

Don’t fish with barbed hooks. ( see above)

Don’t tug at a knotty tangle at the tip of your 13 foot float rod, not unless you want a 12 toot 11 inch float rod

Don’t waste time searching for clear plastic floats in summer…wait for winter when they will shout and wave at you in a bid to return to your tackle-box.

Don’t trust hooks to nylon that have even been lightly touched by your forceps…that cost me the roach of a lifetime…ten minutes to get the bait to the hole in the dam, involving three mends of the line in difficult circumstances and as he took the bait and I lifted the rod I saw the little pig-tail unravel. That fish was over 2 pounds. From a Surrey drain!

Sadly the rains came early that autumn and the bank broke in September . I never saw any of these fish again. In total there were 6 floods that autumn and all of the fish are gone bar the trout which breed well there.

But I am left with some marvellous memories of that year. The time I heard gurgling upstream and waited breathless as a small mink surfaced not three feet from me. Eventually he saw me looking at him and his eyes widened in fear. I blinked slowly and he relaxed for a few moments before diving away leaving only a trail of small bubbles. The time a fox made a kill in a higher part of the drain about twenty feet from me in the dusk. He screamed in pain, as he fought his prey, but try as I might the next day I could find no clue as to what he had caught. He damn near did for me though!

Another time I watched a pair of kingfishers patrolling the drain below bank level at high speed. Just once, one landed on my rod tip to watch the waters below, and I thought I would die of rapture. Another time I watched a chaffinch show what he had learned of mayflies as he dived below an emerger, turned sharply and took it from below, thus breaking its wings. He flew to the nearest branch, swallowed his prize and spat the wings out all in one motion.

I’d watched squirrels and woodpeckers, robins and blackbirds. I’d watched the whole world pass by that summer, but most of all I’d learned to fish at last and I’d caught that Ghostie. What an appropriately named fish for it certainly haunted me that year and I shall never forget it. Sometimes when my beer glass is empty I stare off into the distance and I’m back there, the sun dappling off the water, the squirrels scrabbling above in the oak trees, the fallen leaves moving upstream in a breeze. The splash upstream from those boisterous chub. A slurp as a brownie takes a fly from the far bend. Then a big white wraith moves below the surface…….

The Indifferent Crucian.