The Old Man and the Sand Eel

by Will Millard

  Almost imperceptibly the line starts to shudder and slide. Unbelievable luck. I wait, imagining the giant pike first taking the roach sideways in its mouth before turning it slowly towards its final journey on this earth. I take a deep, deep breath, wind down, and lift into the fish as hard as I dare.

  Massive resistance gives way to a thunderous charge towards the bridge. The pot-smokers have gone now and my reel screams as line escapes the spool at speed. There’s no acrobatics to be had this time around: just dour, dogged confrontation.

  The pike steams right through the bridge and out the other side. I didn’t think I was going to be able to stop it from rounding a bend in the canal at first, but, at last, it starts to yield to pressure.

  As the great pike inches to the surface I drop to my knees. Here she comes, like a thick, green submarine. I steady myself as the head presents itself. There is only one spot on a pike where you can grasp it by hand without lacerating your fingers or hurting the fish: it’s inside the mouth, right underneath the lower jaw by way of its hardened gill plates. With no time to put on a glove I slide my hand into the cavity and lift.

  She’s beautiful. A spawn-filled female, thick and so darkly marked that you could easily be staring right at her without ever realizing she’s there; a metaphor for this canal system if ever there was one.

  I roll out a soft mat to safely remove the hooks without causing any more disruption to her day, and spend a few moments on my knees simply gazing at this precious sword from the stone.

  A man in a suit walks right past me without even acknowledging our presence. Even with the fish out of water the canal’s secrets remain invisible to those incapable of belief.

  I lie down on my chest and attempt to self-take a photo at arm’s length, but I’m interrupted. ‘Jesus Christ, mate!’ It’s one of the boys from beneath the bridge, back with the remains of his spliff hanging at a comedic angle from his trembling lower lip. ‘What dafuk is that!?’

  He pulls down the hood on his black Adidas tracksuit to reveal a tightly dreadlocked scalp. He attempts to take a photo with his phone, but his hands are shaking uncontrollably.

  ‘Oh my days,’ said the lad, wiping his brow at the sheer intensity of the experience, ‘I’m not going to lie, I’ve seen some crazy shit down here but I ain’t never seen anything like that.’

  Together, we sat down next to the great fish. Paying gentle homage as I showed him its mouthparts, fins and armour, before sliding her carefully back into the canal.

  Momentarily the pike just sat on the shallow bottom glowering right back up at us.

  ‘That’s crazy,’ he said.

  ‘I know,’ I replied.

  It really was.

  A waft of her tail eventually sent her back to a life of obscurity beneath a floating mat of litter, and my partner decided it was also time to make his own way back into darkness.

  I watched him as he went, pulling his hood back over his head and sparking up the biggest spliff this side of Jamaica.

  If Grandad had been around today we would’ve talked about that capture for weeks, but all I had was the Wilson Encyclopedia to pour my experience into, and all that came back was the cold hard fact that my fish wasn’t a record breaker. In fact, it wasn’t even anywhere close to being a Wilson mega-specimen.

  A 30lb pike is a very rare beast in itself, but a forty-pounder capable of threatening Roy Lewis’s 46lb 13oz record is almost beyond the realms of possibility. Scanning the list of the fifty biggest pike ever caught, and immediately discounting the sketchy records, repeat captures or those that are likely to now be deceased, I felt it was probably realistic to say there were fewer than twenty known 40lb pike alive in Britain today; most of which were highly nomadic individuals living within immense expanses of water.

  Llandegfedd, the water that provided Roy with his record back in 1992, would have seemed the obvious place to start, but by the turn of the century the water had headed into such a state of pike-fishing decline that a five-year hiatus on predator angling was called in 2010.

  By the time it reopened in 2015 there was already a new contender firmly on the block. Fifty kilometres to the south-east, Somerset’s Chew Valley Lake, or ‘Chew’ as it is affectionately known by pike anglers, was crushing all comers. 2015 saw an astonishing trio of pike over 40lb grace Chew’s banks, and with a further seventeen fish of over 30lb falling in just the first week of the pike season, it was no longer a question of whether Chew was the No. 1 pike water in the UK, but whether it could actually be one of the greatest of all time.

  From the moment Chew’s super-sized pike started hitting the angling press I was quite literally desperate to fish there. If I was going to stand any realistic chance of catching a record-breaking pike, then clearly Chew was the place to go, but simply getting tickets to pike fish the place represented an immense challenge of will and patience.

  There are only two periods in a year you can actually fish for pike on Chew: one two-week spell in February, and a second, longer spell, running through October and November. These are known as the ‘pike trials’, and the only way of getting tickets is to call the Lodge landline on the first Saturday after the Christmas and New Year holidays. With every serious pike angler in Britain jamming up the line, for the strict limit of twenty-five boats and twenty bank tickets, the odds of getting a result are extremely slim. No one could say it wasn’t fair: everyone is equally unlikely to win this lottery.

  It endeared Chew to me no end. Predominately it was a trout-fishing water that happened to contain monstrous pike. No one wanted to outright deny pike anglers the opportunity to catch the fish of a lifetime, but equally the owners felt they had a duty of care to their bread-and-butter trout anglers, and, as we already know, big pike hate attention.

  As if the odds weren’t already stacked against me, the great Chew phone-in landed on 9 January: the morning after the World Darts quarter-finals at the Lakeside. It took the most almighty effort just to find my phone that morning, but I was present and correct at 9 a.m., albeit barefoot and surrounded by pizza boxes and screwed-up tickets from the night before (our hero, ‘Scotty-Dog’ Mitchell, had been knocked out). I took a deep, fortifying breath, and began punching in the number.

  An hour passed as I notched up my first hundred unsuccessful calls. I was then joined by my bleary-eyed mate Stuart, who deployed both his landline and his mobile phone, effectively tripling my chances, but it was all to be in vain.

  We ceremoniously called it a day once we had heard the engaged tone for the 1,000th time. ‘I guess that’s why they call it the pike “trials”, mate,’ said Stuart while looking for his van keys. He could see how much it meant to me, I appreciated that. We sloped off to the semi-finals and I tried my best to thoroughly drown my sorrows.

  I eventually got through three days later. The polite West Country man on the phone told me all the spots for 2016 were long since gone. The horse had not only bolted before the stable door was closed, he was in the next town and midway through a national lecture tour on farm security. The man told me there were now a raffle and an auction to try for. I failed in the former and the latter topped out at an extraordinary £880 for a single day on a boat. There was nothing more I could do. I was just going to have to look elsewhere for my chance.

  With Chew gone and Llandegfedd out of the running, I had to find another big trout water fast. Closer to my childhood home there were the Graffham and Rutland reservoirs, but the really big pike had been curiously absent there for the last few seasons; over in the Brecon Beacons there was Llangorse Lake, famously referenced in The Domesday Book of Mammoth Pike for producing the world’s biggest-ever pike (in 1846 to the rod of a Mr Owen, a giant fish weighing an alleged 68lb), but that was unsubstantiated, and would have been dead for well over a hundred years. I called up the kindly owner anyway, and he readily admitted that, although the lake certainly had potential, it realistically couldn’t ever compete with Chew for the sheer size of pike. The last big fish there was a thirty-
two-pounder in 2007. It wasn’t looking good. I had one last avenue to try, but I knew this was an even longer shot than Chew.

  Scarborough’s Wykeham Lakes had a lot going for them on paper. Currently the biggest known living pike in Britain, a giant 46lb 11oz fish, was resident in their waters, and at only seven acres (to Chew’s 1,000-plus) the odds of a record-breaking hook-up were dramatically reduced. However, access to pike fish the water was strictly restricted to members of an exclusive syndicate. I fired off a hopeful email and was extremely surprised to get a quick response inviting me to speak to Jake Finnigan, the fisheries manager.

  Jake was a politely spoken and articulate northerner who clearly cared deeply about the fish in his lake. I wanted to get a feeling of what it must be like to look after a water with such a legendary fish, a real-life Loch Ness monster, a proper, tangible lake beast; and then I wanted to nonchalantly request special permission to have a crack at it.

  I was going to have to play my cards very carefully indeed, but Jake tripped me up within moments of answering my call.

  ‘She’s been out on six occasions over the last five years,’ he began. ‘First she was thirty-nine pounds, fifteen ounces back in November 2010 …’ He paused. ‘It was me that caught her then actually.’

  ‘Sorry, Jake, can I stop you there?’ I presumed I’d misheard. ‘You just said you caught the pike first?’

  This was an absolute bombshell. I stammered on but my carefully loaded questions on fish care, leading up to a request to fish the lake, had just flown clean out of the window.

  ‘Tell me exactly how it happened.’ I leant into the phone and tore a fresh sheet of paper from my notebook.

  ‘It was just a trout lake back then and this fish was a total unknown. People aren’t totally sure how she even got in there. Some think she was placed in, but I reckon she most likely travelled up the becks and streams that flow to the River Derwent; right back when this whole place was flooded some years ago. From that point, she’s obviously just gotten bigger and bigger.’

  It was more than plausible that a small pike had made its way into this trout lake, and with rich pickings and freshly stocked trout, she would have piled on the poundage: up to 4lb a year for the best weight-gaining predators.

  ‘The water here is deep,’ Jake continued, ‘twenty-eight foot in places, and has been stocked with trout for some thirty-odd years. It wasn’t hard for it to hide, I guess, but the occasional trout angler talked of seeing a really big fish chasing their trout on the retrieve.’ He took a deep breath. ‘Honestly though, Will, we all thought the most it could be was thirty pounds.’

  I had seen a few photos of this pike from its most recent captures. It was incomprehensibly enormous: a long, fat, female fish, with a back so wide you could fit it with a saddle.

  My personal best pike was a 22lb fish caught from the depths of the Fens when I was twenty-five years old. I couldn’t reasonably imagine tackling a pike nearly twice that size, and nor, it turned out, could Jake.

  ‘A couple of trout anglers had returned their boat early one evening, so I just hopped in for nothing more than a twenty-minute mess about.’ I liked that: a ‘mess about’ that led to the biggest single pike discovery since the turn of the century. ‘I went out in the boat around the edge of the lake. It was right at the end of the day and I was on my last couple of casts, making my way back to where the boats were all kept, when suddenly the big girl took my spinner.

  ‘At first I thought it was just a trout of a couple of pounds; she didn’t really do that much, just headed straight in towards me. Then I saw it for the first time. That’s where the fight truly began. I couldn’t believe it.’

  I couldn’t believe it either. What a story. He went on to say that by the time he had the fish under control he realized the net he had with him wasn’t anywhere near large enough to fit her in, and that he had then been forced to use the electric motor on board to get within shouting range of the shore. By a supreme stroke of good fortune a colleague eventually managed to net her tail first before the fish could free itself from the tether.

  He had just landed the fish that would go on to become both the English record and the largest known living pike in the United Kingdom today. His previous personal best was just 14lb. It was, and still is, a fishing miracle.

  ‘You just don’t know how to feel when it happens. You’re gobsmacked.’

  That was where the good times ended for Jake and the pike. News of the giant fish travelled fast and Wykeham had to immediately limit the number of pike anglers allowed on the water. She next came out just four months after Jake had first caught her, but, astonishingly, the fish was some 6lb heavier. Now, with her just one meal away from being the next British record, interest in the fishery reached fever pitch. Jake was soon bombarded with requests to fish the lake for the pike.

  ‘Look, it’s a trout lake at the end of the day,’ he said, with more than a touch of exasperation. ‘Trout fishing was getting compromised. I had guys ringing up to enquire about trout fishing that couldn’t get through because of all the interest from pike anglers. The syndicate seemed the best way to go then: limit it to ten anglers with a maximum of four a day on the water. I know it’s very exclusive, but I prefer this run as a trout lake with the pike as something of a bonus. The amount of pressure she’ll get is overwhelming if I don’t do something. At least on Chew they’ve got more than one forty-pound fish and over a thousand acres for them to disappear into: here she’s on her own with just seven.’

  That last comment struck me hard. I started to feel a sense of real guilt. This wasn’t what fishing should be about.

  ‘Pike groups are getting more and more abrasive, just like the carp groups in fact,’ continued Jake, ‘you can’t post a photo anywhere without someone tearing into someone over something. Every time our fish gets caught you’ve got one big group of people saying we’re running it like an exclusive club and then another big group of people saying it’s going to be a dead fish within a year. We’ve had one guy who said this time around: “I know I said last time it’ll be a dead fish next year, but this time I really mean it: next year it will be dead.” What are we supposed to do? We just can’t win.’

  Clearly Jake had a point: you’ve got to really look after these big individual fish. I started to wonder if this pike was more of a curse than a blessing.

  ‘If only I could turn back the clock, I would make this lake invitation only for pike fishing and that’s it,’ he said, with finality.

  For the first time in my entire fishing life I didn’t want to catch a fish. Jake was right, pike fishing was going the same way as carp fishing and chasing named and known fish into potential oblivion on small waters was not cool at all. It was actually quite disturbing.

  By the end of our conversation I no longer wanted to ask him for permission to fish; in fact, I was quite embarrassed at myself. I wondered what Grandad would make of it all. I knew what he would think actually: he’d laugh at me and question why anyone would ever place value on such a shortsighted pursuit.

  Without me needing to say, Jake offered to set me up with a couple of the guys on the syndicate, and potentially, with their permission, have a little fish for the big one.

  I told him how grateful I was for the offer, and really meant it, but there was no real mystery around this pike any more. It was still a challenge of sorts, but Jake’s original discovery and capture were the real purist piece of angling. That’s what was really impressive. That’s what I wanted for myself.

  Barring a miracle, any hopes I now had of angling for a record pike were fundamentally over. There wasn’t much more I could do. Jake was spot on for trying to keep his fish safe in a small water and Chew were doing the same by massively limiting their numbers and restricting the pike-fishing windows.

  The start of Chew’s February pike trials saw bad weather and a few blowouts. The £880 angler didn’t get his day out due to high winds and I managed a couple more sessions down the wharf and canals
, but returned empty-handed.

  One afternoon I went to Garry Evans Tackle, my local Cardiff shop and a tackle enthusiast’s haven, and chatted to my friends Rich and Andrew about pike. ‘I reckon there’s a chance of a big one in the bay,’ suggested Andrew, ‘we’ve all been catching big perch down there all year.’

  I told them about the fishing I’d been doing on the canal and down the wharf, and Andrew showed me a picture of a young bloke with a huge 16lb sea trout from one of the feeder streams. ‘Yeah, the docklands are doing really well,’ continued Andrew, stowing his phone back in his pocket, ‘I’ve had loads of small pike down there, but the carp fishermen reckon they keep seeing really big pike battling it out with the rats.’

  That sounded pretty much in keeping with that particular set of docks. It’s a pike-eat-rat world down there. ‘I’ve had a really big pike, and I mean a really big one, chasing my floating frog lures down there on several occasions,’ Andrew continued, ‘but there is something about that lure that the big pike really doesn’t like. He keeps turning away right at the last minute …’ He looked to his fingernails with a touch of embarrassment. ‘… So I’ve bought a lure shaped like a rat.’

  I didn’t even know there was such a thing, but Andrew knew everything that was worth knowing about lure-fishing, and, besides, it wasn’t like I didn’t get it; I’d once spent an entire afternoon fishing with a Pot Noodle on a whim.

  ‘I’m going to be trying that soon,’ he said, suddenly far surer of himself, before a ringing phone took him back to his work.

  I left the tackle shop wondering about making a proper effort on the wider docks, as well as the wharf, or at least buying myself a rat lure and joining Andrew. In my heart, though, I couldn’t help but think that this was feeling very much like needle-in-a-haystack time, or at least floating-rat-in-giant-rat-infested-dock time.

  I went home feeling a little defeated, but on the journey back my phone pinged to life with an email. It was from a man named John Horsey, a legendary fishing guide who led trips to Chew during the pike trials, if you had already been lucky enough to snare a ticket of course.