The Old Man and the Sand Eel

by Will Millard

  Days later, with Peter’s book spread across my thighs, my fingers hovered nervously over several digital folders filled with photos of fish. Gradually, I began clicking my way through my catches past.

  The princely brace from a recent visit to a farm pond were clearly just brown goldfish; they looked like crucians but the scale count was way over. I went back further. The surprise two-pounder from a Newport commercial in the depths of winter. Urgh. It was glaringly obvious now: the dorsal was the wrong shape and the – almost grossly – disproportionate fantail marked it out clearly as another goldfish cross. This was looking bad. Armed with the truth in Peter’s book I was starting to feel pretty foolish. I clicked through to the folder containing my personal-best crucian, the 3lb fish, a real beauty: a Wilson mega-specimen none the less. Staring proudly down the lens in the twilight, I’m holding what I knew now could only be a clear crucian–common-carp cross. I even sent the image to Peter Rolfe to be sure. His capitalization of the word ‘not’ before the words ‘a crucian’ was the final thumping nail in my specimen-crucian-carp coffin.

  I continued, searching, almost desperately, for something to cling to, but as fish after fish failed to make the grade it slowly became clear that in all my years of carp fishing there was probably only one occasion when I caught a pure crucian. I was eleven years old, fishing a holiday pond somewhere in the rolling farmland of the south-west because I had been told by the owner that it held a mirror carp. The surprise crucian had taken a fancy to the piece of sunken bread flake I had freelined unwittingly into its path, but, back then, I couldn’t have been more underwhelmed.

  I can remember it now, this little golden fish in my palm, all friendly curves and smoothened fins, that I decided couldn’t possibly be a proper carp. It was small and somehow fraudulent, more suited to a goldfish bowl than a fishing pond. Mutton dressed as mutton. I plopped it back in and re-cast, harder and further, hoping pure brute power would bring me closer to my own Shangri-La: my first king carp, just like the ones in all the magazines.

  I hadn’t even bothered to photograph that fish, and here I was, over twenty years later, pleading the details of that distant memory to materialize into a barbel-less fish, with a convex dorsal fin, and thirty-two to thirty-four scales along its lateral line. It probably only weighed around 6oz, but that crucian, I realized now, was my new personal best.

  In that moment my whole record-breaking challenge had been turned right on its head. It was like someone had fired a rocket into my front room. I slapped the laptop closed, more astonished than disappointed. This was absolutely extraordinary. All this time. All those carp. Not one of them actually a crucian. I laughed out loud and sent Lottie, my cat, charging out of the catflap in fright.

  This was far bigger than me and some record chase. Not for one moment did I actually ever think I would end up chasing a species with the pure objective of simply catching one for potentially the very first time as an adult, let alone a fish that had survived such an epic threat to its very existence.

  I fell in love with the thought.

  As I type, the crucian record at 4lb 10oz is held jointly by two anglers: Stephen Frapwell and Michael James, who caught the same fish in early May 2015 from the crucian mecca, Johnson’s Lake in Surrey. I had been very kindly invited by Peter to fish the crucian ponds he had developed with his own hands, but they observed the close season until 16 June. I couldn’t wait till then. It wasn’t simply just aesthetically pleasing to be bankside at this time of year: all my research pointed to the fact that the bigger crucians came out then too. They were fit to burst with spawn by early June, preferring to deposit their loads before the king carp, and, according to Peter, just after the roach, perch and rudd. This year June had arrived with unseasonably high temperatures, and the king carp in my local lakes were already beginning to splash the shallows and deposit their loads; if I was going to smash my personal best I needed to act right now.

  Utilizing the fisheries database on Peter’s crucian website I narrowed down the potential waters to those that had either recently broken records or had only just been pipped at the post, then I hit the phones. Back in May 2003, Little Moulsham Pit near Yateley had given up a 4lb 9oz fish to Martin Bowler. It was tricky to get a ticket and there were few details online. A call to the Yateley angling centre revealed it was now a syndicate carp lake owned by a man named Alan Cooper, who ran a groundbait company. Eventually I got through to Alan, but the news was bad. ‘They’ve all been eaten by cormorants, mate,’ came his flat reply, ‘it’s too expensive to restock them and it’ll take twenty years before a crucian ever gets to that size again. That’s twenty years of running the gauntlet with the cormorants and even at record size they can still be eaten. Big carp are a much better bet for me, everyone is a carp fisherman these days. I’m afraid it’s where the sensible money is.’ Over in Pembrokeshire, I was very excited to learn that Holgan’s Farm claimed to house potential record-breaking crucians, in a bespoke crucian lake, but a phone call there brought another rebuff. They had opted to stock brown goldfish and the resultant ‘crucians’ today were almost certainly hybrids. Realistically that only left me with two other places: one a real wild card, the Leather Lake, on the Verulam Angling Club ticket, which had produced a – at the time – record-equalling fish of 4lb 9oz five years previously; and the other the home of the current record, Johnson’s Lake, which is looked after by Godalming Angling Society.

  I was in a very tight spot. Membership to both those clubs would set me back over £200. Perhaps if I lived closer it might be worth considering at a real stretch, but just for a day’s fishing out of my home in South Wales it was, quite simply, an insane amount to spend. I’d learnt my lesson the hard way that winter on Chew and my funds just weren’t going to stretch.

  I emailed both clubs and explained my case. A week later the wonderful people at Verulam got in touch to grant me permission to fish the Leather Lake, asking only that I let the bailiff know when I intended to fish, but sadly I didn’t hear anything back from Godalming. Life at the top of the crucian tree is probably tough – you can’t be granting permission to every Tom, Dick and Harry with a hard-luck story. There was some very good news though. Johnson’s Lake was actually closed till 16 June anyway, to give the fish a deserved break, but right next door was Harris Lake, which was available to the public on a day ticket and stocked with the same group of crucians as Johnson’s (which I later discovered, to my immense surprise, were all originally taken from the monsters past of Little Moulsham, an afterlife of sorts for this exceptionally strong strain of fish). A call to the on-site tackle shop revealed the lake had emerged, perhaps unsurprisingly, as the odds-on favourite to best the fish in Johnson’s, and with favourable conditions and a larger stamp of crucians coming out earlier in the week I needed to get down there sharpish. I cancelled all my work plans for the next day and set the alarm for 2 a.m.

  I had a chance.

  Just before 5 a.m. the sun was rising on the most beautiful lake I have ever had the fortune to visit. Found the other side of a glistening trout stream seemingly fit to burst with Canada geese and their young, the Leather Lake unfolded from a thicket like something out of a dream.

  It looked almost like the water had been poured into a divot in a fantasy forest, such was the density of the trees and greenery pressing into the water and spilling out of the sides of the small, shrub-tufted islands. It felt to me that if you simply were to pull the plug and drain the lake water, the rest of that forest would still be there underneath, just waiting to heave up from the lakebed.

  The dawn added to the whimsy. Reflected in the gin-clear water it cast something of a week-old-bruise purplish haze across the place, and one inviting-looking corner was so choked with lily-pads that it wouldn’t have felt out of place in a Beatrix Potter book. Indeed, I could very well imagine the hapless frog, Jeremy Fisher, punting his way through the whole scene in search of his next minnow.

  But it was the noise of the birdlife that set th
is place apart from anything else I’d ever experienced. There was a riotous, cacophonous clamour coming from all sides of this avian amphitheatre. I don’t think it was simply that I was up at a ridiculous hour – I have been fishing at silly-o’clock many times in the past, but I have never ever heard birdsong quite like this in Britain. For at least an hour it was absolutely astonishing and caused the whole lake to crackle with the sort of electricity usually reserved for major sporting events. This was a gathering of feathered souls participating in a massive collective experience, and I felt utterly privileged to witness it. This was their performance though – I was merely an uninvited audience member, and shuffled round the junglified banks with my head down in deferential silence.

  I settled myself into a spot hemmed in by a weeping willow and a semi-submerged tree branch. I had seen a few bubbles, not a mass of action by any means, but certainly better than nothing. Plumbing the depth revealed it was significantly deep at the margins, a healthy five foot or so, but also that the entire swim was chock full of weed. A long tendril of green blanket snared on my line as I retrieved, like the clasping arm of a mighty kraken or sea serpent. On inspection, the tendril was erupting with tiny bloodworm that leapt from the fresh air and back into their lake water home as I tried to free it. It was a wonderful sign of the health of the place, but not so good for my chances of catching. These were naturally fed fish that didn’t need the carpet of synthetic bait I was proffering. Here the ethos seems to be to stock light and let nature do the rest. There was no question it had worked, as, alongside the record crucian, the lake had once housed a legendary leather carp, a variant on the mirror that has hardly any scales, which had risen to be among the largest leathers in the UK.

  I put down a couple of doormat-sized patches of freebies to try and tempt the crucians in for breakfast – a few halibut pellets, some sweetcorn, maggot and casters – and float-fished over the top with the lightest kit I dared. Crucians are renowned for being delicate feeders, taking small baits and giving only the slightest indications of their presence – a murmur on the float and tiny plumes of bubbles, so I had heard – but my presumptive experiences with the crucian had taken such a battering recently I had elected to start from the standpoint that I effectively knew nothing.

  Great spirals of buzzers and nymphs drifted like wood smoke across the lake. As the night gave over its hold and allowed day to break, a regal-looking pair of great-crested grebes hunted in the depths beyond my float. Their wonderful russet-coloured plumage fanned water droplets from the upper reaches of their slender white necks every time they emerged from the drink, resembling snowflakes cascading from a furry bordering around the hood of a winter jacket. Clearly, they were having significantly more success with the fish than me.

  The birdcalls faded as the dog walkers arrived. All too soon I could hear the M25 droning in the background and all the magic that had briefly held the lake in suspense had gone. It was midnight and Cinderella was back to being a maid with a pumpkin and I was back in the world of man. Nature was supposed to take its rightful place on the seats at the back of the theatre.

  It was weird. Like the compression of our natural and wild spaces in this phenomenally over-cultivated and over-populated island had caused the most intensely compacted expression of the resident wildlife in the space of that single hour. I began to pack up my gear.

  When I was a child, my favourite joke was:

  ‘Knock-knock.’

  ‘Who’s there?’

  ‘Cook.’

  ‘Cook who?’

  ‘That’s the first one I’ve heard this year.’

  If I’m blessed with children, the amount of explanation required to describe why that joke is funny will be as tragic as it is pointless. I remember reading recently that one in five birds in Britain are now on the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds Red List. Just in my lifetime the majority of those have had their natural habitat reduced by half.

  By mid-day I had successfully negotiated my way around the massive single-storey, three-lane car park that is the M25 at rush hour, and arrived at a very different place entirely.

  Images of crucians adorned the sign to the Marsh Farm complex that housed the Harris Lake, as if I were in any doubt that in the small world of crucian fishing this place was the celebrity venue.

  At first glance, it felt every inch the comfortable commercial: cut grass, a huge on-site tackle shop, neat gravel paths, and clean toilet blocks with hot water and hand towels, but down at water level there was more than a nod to wildlife. Thick flag iris and reeds smothered the banks between fishing pegs, lending the place an air of seclusion once you had settled into your spot lakeside. Numerous mallards cruised the water alongside diving tufted ducks, and, most wonderfully of all, a breeding pair of Arctic terns had taken up residence for the summer. With their long, brilliant-white starburst tail feathers, black caps and bright-red bills, they danced like sprites over the water all day long, remarkably fresh from their recent migration from the Arctic.

  All the other anglers had stationed themselves in the deeper water that ran along the opposite bank next to a trainline. The tackle shop had advised that these were very much the hot swims, but, as I’d turned up late, I was going to have to look elsewhere.

  I wandered around the lake perimeter before eventually settling into an overgrown corner fed by a stiff breeze. I was feeling confident despite the slim pickings. I quite liked the look of my corner. In truth, I probably would have picked it regardless – it put more space between me and the other anglers on the complex, which I always liked – and within seconds of placing my bag a large fish rolled right at my feet. If that wasn’t a good omen, then I didn’t know what was.

  I had some fairly hi-tech gear with me – flavoured fish pellets and syrupy liquid attractants – but I decided to leave them all in the bag. Instead I mixed up a bucket of blended breadcrumbs, which I balled into the deeper water about three rod lengths out, and fixed up a simple float rod with half a worm as hook bait. This was fishing just as Grandad had taught me: traditional and simple.

  I had been forewarned that though the king carp might rock up to your bait and sucker-punch you like a heavyweight champion, the crucian tends to dance around it like a featherweight, throwing the occasional jab, that might just quiver your line, without actually taking the hook. That means you need to be prepared to spend time sat on your hands with your heart in your mouth: waiting for a positive indication that something has happened down there.

  Half an hour in, my float tip wobbled. It was so gentle, like a divination rod in the presence of a spirit. The crucians had arrived and were transmitting their presence. Gently, oh so gently. The float tip lifted.

  The fight of the crucian isn’t anything like the smash-and-grab of the king carp; nor is it jagged like the perch or a sustained pressure like a tench. In the words of the Supremes: it’s a game of give and take; a tug of war where your opponent gets randomly weaker and stronger, leaving the hook free to be pulled out at any time.

  Gradually I stole line from the fish till I had it in the net.

  It was breathtaking. I wrapped my hand around its golden form. The crucian was exactly 2lb, a phenomenal start, and everything about it – scale counts, fin shape, mouth – matched up precisely, but I just couldn’t believe the size. It was well above the average for this fish. I had crushed my personal best with my first fish. I looked up to see an even larger crucian roll on the surface above my groundbait. The plan, unbelievably, was working.

  I slipped the 2lb fish right back and re-cast feverishly. This place was extraordinary; by rights these are fish that should be the sole preserve of the dedicated specimen fishermen, yet here I was fluking one out after an absence of over twenty years. I felt as cheeky as if I’d borrowed the rod of a proper crucian carper, caught his fish, and then nicked his wallet.

  Almost immediately I hooked and landed a second fish. Slightly smaller this time at 1lb 8oz. These crucians are deep-bodied, high-backed fi
sh. They had a totally different feel to the so-called crucians I had caught before. Of course, that is understandable, given what I now know, but holding that first brace of fish, with their wonderfully curved underbellies that so elegantly filled the palm of my hand, it felt as rarefied an experience as cradling a newborn baby. In fact, the Harris crucians were so utterly distinct in feel (and, I realize now, I did need to ‘feel’ the fish, as photographs simply don’t cut it) that it is hard to believe I could ever have mistaken those hybrids of my past for the real thing. The crucian is one of those very few fish that doesn’t seem to lose its sheen after capture. If anything, the shape and golden hue are so satisfying, you could fool yourself into thinking the crucian was crafted purely to be held in the human hand.

  Other anglers approached. No one else on the lake was catching anything. My late coming had put me right on the fish. Another huge crucian flopped over my carpet of breadcrumbs. ‘They are really taking the piss,’ laughed an elderly angler, albeit through gritted teeth.

  As the afternoon wore on into evening I felt I was going crazy. Not only was my swim fizzing like a jacuzzi, but also massive crucians just kept rolling, one after the other, right next to my float. If that wasn’t enough, one specific fish kept swimming forward, projecting its body clean out of the water, and tail walking like a dolphin in repeated nail-straight assaults on my float. To be perfectly honest, it made me feel so self-conscious I started to look over my shoulder to check no one could see what was going on. (Later I read a chapter in Peter’s book by a very experienced crucian angler called Peter Wheat. He too had witnessed the performance, and attributes it to one individual fish, commenting: ‘I have never known another crucian to activate itself in this way.’ I was just glad I hadn’t completely lost my marbles.)