by Will Millard
My grandma passed away that Christmas. It was heartbreaking, but dementia had taken a hold on her to such an extent that this utterly charming and dignified lady had been reduced to just two sentences: ‘I’m managing’ and ‘Yes, boss.’
Grandma and Grandad had been happily married for over sixty years, the pair of them champions of the life and love that could be extracted from our waterways; him from the end of his rod, her from the tip of her paintbrush.
Twenty years ago Grandad caught a truly big perch. ‘You should have seen it, Will! It was massive!’
I remember him splaying out his palms as if he were holding aloft a priceless china plate; re-enacting the precious moment he had held it for the very first time.
I dearly wished I had only been there to witness it. His finest captures always seemed to happen away from me. I wasn’t even sure it had actually happened.
I should clarify that Grandad was no liar; he had definitely caught a big perch, but we were both fishermen after all. Memories blur and sometimes the distance between our palms can widen with time.
Grandma left behind an old plastic ice cream tub filled with pictures when she departed, and right there, somewhere in the middle, I found a picture of Grandad with his most magnificent perch.
I hold that image between my fingers as I type this. That picture is more precious to me now than any big perch of my own.
The fish’s stripes are a darker shade of green than the stripes on his jumper. He props up the perch’s dorsal with the tip of one of his big thumbs and his mouth is wide open in a self-satisfied and slightly stunned grin.
It is a Wilson mega-specimen, and I am in absolutely no doubt he caught it on a lobworm.
The Water Wolf
It was as deep as England. It held
Pike too immense to stir, so immense and old
That past nightfall I dared not cast.
Ted Hughes, ‘Pike’, (1960)
When I was around nine years old I owned one VHS tape that I kept specifically for Mum to record John Wilson’s Go Fishing series on direct from the TV. There was one episode in particular, filmed, I think, somewhere in the Norfolk Broads, that I had watched so many times that the tape itself had started to warp and go fuzzy.
I could recall that episode near verbatim. In fact, I’m pretty sure I still can.
The episode begins with a slightly awkward ‘Hello’ from a thick-rimmed-bespectacled gentleman who bore more than a passing resemblance to a giant land tortoise. I didn’t realize at the time that this was in fact the legendary Dick Walker, a true fishing icon.
In this film Mr Walker was playing the role of surrogate grandad to the thousands of young fisher folk tuning in across the nation; explaining the rudiments of pike angling and biology in a safe environment, before the hero, John Wilson, took over at the sharper end of the spear.
‘Pike are predators, and they’re scavengers too,’ he begins, with a grim-looking stuffed pike staring on blankly from the wall behind. ‘They are very well equipped indeed for both jobs,’ he continued, ‘they will eat practically anything, dead or alive, that will give them some nutriment.’
A pencil-drawn otter is framed over one of the old man’s great oaken shoulders and ancient-looking books surround him. Everything about this office, from the interior to Dick himself, looks like it has been dipped in sepia and warmed up with wood smoke. It was the sort of place where I wanted to be for all time and I poured my consciousness into its cosy security to such an extent that I could well believe Mr Walker was addressing me directly; from right across his well-worn hardwood table to the rug of my parents’ lounge, where I would sit cross-legged, inches from the TV screen.
‘Now, here you can see what I’ve been talking about,’ continues Mr Walker. He reaches down and produces the giant head of a stuffed pike. The warming atmosphere of Dick’s Den is extinguished in an instant, a brooding malevolence creeps into his office and my sense of longing quietly tiptoes back out.
Mr Walker works the head carefully around his fingers, gradually illuminating the business end in the dull light of his table lamp. He says it is from a 43lb giant caught in Ireland but all I can recall is its enormous jaws. Row upon row of razor-sharp fangs along the jaw-line backed up by hundreds more, pinned hard to the roof of the fish’s mouth.
Mr Walker notes how all the teeth angle slightly backwards towards its blackened throat. Whatever goes in there isn’t ever coming out, I thought. ‘Never put your hand in a pike’s mouth,’ says Mr Walker, while clearly running his own thumbs and fingers over the teeth. He was my kind of man.
The film cuts to the heroic Wilson rowing his way alongside a tall reed bed. There is a vast expanse of wild-looking fresh water opening out right behind him; it’s February, it’s bleak, and he even says it’s cold, so just what is he doing in that tiny wooden rowing boat with just a tweed hat for company? I grip the remote tightly and pray nothing bad happens to John.
Somewhere along the edge of the deep water he drops anchor and plucks a small live roach out of a bait tin. He says something nonchalant about only using ‘small’ live baits these days but I can’t help noticing that the roach he has selected is actually the same size as my personal best from the creek. A highly unpleasant sense of shame burns at my cheeks, a feeling I later learn to interpret as a sense of inferiority combined with instant emasculation. I remember how it felt to land that best-ever roach, the euphoric ‘championship-winning’ sensation carried me through the whole summer and the glow stayed with me every night I closed my eyes and thought of that fish. In one swift move by Wilson that feeling had been obliterated: my best was his bait. How, even after a few years of fishing, could it be that the gulf between Wilson and myself, between being a man or just a little boy, was actually widening? He had no idea what he was doing to me of course. Hooking up the roach, he simply swung it out into the water under a large bright-red float and confidently commented: ‘When that goes I’m in business.’
The final pike of the programme comes from ‘the middle of the hole’, which is how Wilson describes the slate-grey no man’s land where he has cast his bait. It is, of course, the beast we have all been waiting for, but incredibly, as Wilson battles it to the side of the boat, he describes it as ‘only a small one’.
The giant pike writhes on a foam mat after he’s got it into the net. It’s long – three or maybe even four feet – with a dark, muscular back leading on to a crocodilian head.
‘As fat as butter!’ exclaims Wilson jubilantly.
He holds his fish up for the camera and I get a good view of its mossy flanks. It is as if an artist had taken the time to delicately flick light-yellow paint along a green pike-shaped canvas, then decided to finish the job by scraping through the lot with a yard brush. The fish’s thick, olive sides may be interspersed with pretty blond flecks and subtle vertical stripes, yet the overall look and feel of the fish are of pure brute savagery.
At the rear of the fish a russet-red and black-striped dorsal fin stands erect and rounded. It is set so far back along the body it almost meets the tail fin. This intentional back-loading of the pike’s powerhouse affords it all the explosive forward motion it needs to intercept prey from a stationary position. Like the perch, they prefer to ambush their prey, but they can also take fish, frogs and even ducks, well out in open water, such is their confidence in their own turn of speed.
Somewhere towards the end of the programme, Wilson rotates his fish so it is head on to the camera lens. The skull is uniquely flattened in appearance, with large, predatory eyes set unusually high on the sides; perfect for peering up from the depths and selecting its next victim.
The grim jaw of Wilson’s fish hisses open like a trapdoor and I can’t help but imagine what it must be like to have that as your last view on earth. Horrid, I would expect. ‘Absolute magic!’ says John victoriously.
When the theme tune kicks in I am left alone with a feeling of raw inadequacy. I was nine, almost ten, and quite desperate for a pike
of my own. It represented much more than just another fish. It symbolized growing up, doing something on my own, facing my fears – in short: being a man; but if the fish that Wilson caught in the film really was ‘only a small one’, and the bait he used as big as my personal best, then how could I ever expect to manage a pike for myself?
The beginning of the winter of ’92 saw me fish like I had never fished before. For three months straight I was out almost every single night, drawing a triangular-shaped piece of shiny metal through every inch of the Creek’s brown water, but trapped deep in a piker’s purgatory.
Spinning for pike was my first major new fishing skill after five years of float-fishing for the Creek’s roach and perch. Until that point I had been pretty much sat on my hands waiting for a bite, but spinning required constant movement of both myself and my hook: to animate the spinner – literally, to get it to spin, and make it flash through the water like an injured silverfish.
Winding the spinner in on my line would only last about twenty seconds in the narrow Creek, which meant I was now casting many more times in a day than ever before. Given my earlier problems with this most basic of fishing skills, I felt I was now risking my end tackle almost twice a minute. To make matters significantly worse, I also learnt the most likely pike-holding areas were right under the trees and along the reed beds: the very obstacles I had spent the previous half-decade trying to avoid casting towards. The arms of the trees and roots of the reeds might have been tackle thieves, but the shade and shelter they afforded the pike made them the perfect ambush points for any unsuspecting fish. To stand a chance of a pike I had to land my spinner perfectly: firmly in the pike’s lair and within an inch of the devastating grasp of the bankside bush.
Grandad wasn’t interested in helping at all. ‘Pike fishing is too easy,’ he would say dismissively. Perhaps he understood this was a fish I needed to meet by myself, but the effect of his words was to heap yet more pressure on my infantile shoulders. If it really was easy, then why couldn’t I just catch one?
Looking back, I know precisely what the problem was: my retrieve was always too fast and too uniform. I would never let the spinner drop beneath the top six inches of surface water, meaning any interested pike would have to come right up off the bottom to grab it; nor did I vary the speed of my draw to allow the lure vital space to flit and flutter along like a wounded fish, meaning, in the eyes of a predator, that my spinner was in fact a turbo-charged superfish with a full bill of health.
Zipping my spinner across the Creek’s surface merely served to give onlookers the impression I was a man out pike fishing, the man I wanted them to believe I was, while, in reality, I was never really giving myself a chance of hooking my quarry. Effectively, I was a rank boxing amateur dancing round the undefeated prizefighter without ever getting close enough to throw a meaningful punch, or get hit myself. I was simply too terrified of the potential consequences of hooking a pike, and too bloody-minded to just give up.
There is a unique existential crisis brought on by anyone seriously into pike fishing.
‘Why am I here?’ is a question that will inevitably pass the lips of this peculiar breed of angler.
Fish are as much a product of their environment as are the people who angle for them. Carp, with their fat scales, soft mouths and friendly curves, have the look and feel of summer, to be had from lily-strewn ponds and picture-perfect lakes. The typical carp angler prefers fairer weather and appears built for comfort, not speed; paradoxically, though, the fatter the carp, the slimmer and more pathological the bent of the carp fisherman, and no one should doubt that even the laziest-looking carp, and carper, has an extraordinary turn of pace when it is required. The barbel’s golden hue is classic autumn; its angular fins are shaped and coloured like an early leaf drop and the torpedo shape marks this fish out as a specimen of fast water. The barbel fisherman, like the fish, is a shrewd and romantic character, a lover of nature and hardy too – easily capable of withstanding stormy weather and early starts – but this angler can’t match the pike and pike angler for sheer durability. They are the embodiment of winter and both thrive on a rare form of neglect.
Of course, you can catch pike in the summer, and there are many anglers who fish for all fish species all year round, but the pike are at their largest in mid-winter, and it takes a very special breed of fisherman to convincingly morph their own character to match up to the deep cold their quarry prefers. As a child, I was a pretender, a mere sheep in wolf’s clothing, but, unbeknown to me at the time, my dad was about to give me a big helping hand.
On the Creek you know spring is around the corner as soon as the daffodils outnumber the snowdrops. Time was running out for my first pike and me. Soon the water would warm and the river-fishing season would close till 16 June. I lay in my bed near wild with frustration.
I couldn’t sleep that particular night for two distinct reasons: firstly, I had discovered Dad had taped over Flash Gordon at the precise moment he begins to turn things around in his fight to the death with Barin, and ‘Flash! I love you! But we only have fourteen hours to save the Earth!’ was now for ever jump-cut with Geoff Hamilton talking about manure on Gardeners’ World. Naturally I was furious, but the second reason I was counting sheep was considerably more devastating.
Just as Mum and Dad had been going to bed I had overheard them have the following conversation right outside my room:
‘Will is spending a lot of his time fishing at the moment, even more than normal,’ said Mum, standing on the landing as Dad came up the stairs.
‘He’s trying to catch a pike,’ replied Dad.
‘Really?’ answered Mum, with audible concern in her voice. ‘Isn’t that dangerous?’
‘Not really,’ said Dad, ‘but don’t worry, he won’t get one in. He’s not strong enough.’
The words slapped my eardrum and tore straight into my heart. Instantly, I could feel hot tears filling up my face and bee-lining for my tear ducts. It was the first time I had ever heard Dad doubt I could do anything. We had always been brought up on the principle that you can succeed at anything if you just try your best, yet here he was saying that, despite everything I was putting into it, I was never going to be good enough.
I tried to cover my ears with the pillow and will his words to leave my brain. Every fear I had suppressed to that point had been realized in full; the shadow of self-doubt reared up and smothered me in my bedsheets.
Hours later I was still very much awake. I gritted my teeth and thumped my fists on the duvet. Why would he say that? How dare he say that?
I got up and looked at myself in the mirror; my sense of my own shortcomings was quickly being replaced with a wild rage. That was a total betrayal from Dad. I glowered back at myself. I would show him; I would prove I did have the strength.
In its elemental form pike fishing necessitates in an individual a curious brand of madness: crumbling docklands, isolated rivers and windswept reservoirs – the last places your average anglers would choose to spend their time; but the purist piker casts into these locations with a sort of masochistic thrill, fearlessly fishing a fearful landscape for a fish seemingly without fear.
In my late twenties I fished a handful of times for pike in a long, narrow fenland dyke called the Cuckoo Drain. You could probably spend a lifetime searching through the names of waterways and not find one as ill-fitting as the ‘cuckoo’ moniker given to this place. The cuckoo throws up more than simply the iconic bird sound of spring; it is the vision of renewal: a glade filled with fresh-sprung wild flowers, an oaken woodland rousing itself after a week of rain, the resurgence and resilience of life – a clarion call to heat the soul, reminding us that winter has passed and the good times are here once more. The Cuckoo Drain in winter was miles of pure brutality. Its near unrelenting misery placed it well among the hardest places I have ever fished. Thus it was near perfect for big pike.
It took some time simply to find the place, tucked, as it was, tight between a pumping stat
ion and a dip between two brown fields that stretched ad infinitum. As all fenland drains contain pike of some measure, and with Cuckoo both being deep and sporting a good head of shoaling roach and bream, it seemed fair to assume there might well be some decent-sized resident fish. This assumption was backed up by the only person I ever saw down there besides me: a typical piker, tall and grizzled with a rugged ginger beard and slightly gaunt appearance; he strongly resembled a starving Viking.
Few words were wasted between him and me. ‘Anythin’ doin’?’ he would mumble. I would answer in the negative, and repeat his question back to him. ‘Nuffin’ doin’,’ he would respond with a sniff. I was really quite intimidated.
I decided to take a small spinning rod and had huge early success with a trio of fine averagely sized fish on my first outing; but from that moment forward I really struggled. It was as if the drain itself had lured me in with the promise of pike, only so it could then enjoy watching me endure an endlessly barren ice-cold search along its desolate banks.
After a dozen or so visits I began to seriously question whether those early pike had been a mirage. Pike-shaped sprites, kelpies, spirits or sirens? Even the Viking was nowhere to be seen by the bitter end of that bitterest of seasons. A barn owl would usually emerge when there was an hour of daylight remaining. It offered cold comfort, haunting the banks and circling my position like a ghostly vulture, just waiting for me to drop so it could pick apart my frozen carcass.
It would take until my final visit for the drain to yield me another pike. A slamming take and dogged fight marked it out as a decent fish, a good double for sure, but, as I reached down to slip my fingers into its gills, a hard headshake left only the tip of one hook in its stiff upper lip.
I had been fishing with two treble hooks on a wire trace specifically designed for the bony mouth of the pike. The extra hook points (six in this case) should give you a greater chance of landing this hard-mouthed fish, but with just one hook-hold left I now stood a very slim chance of success unless I acted quickly.