The Late Fish

I have noticed that I never get anything right first time; I never breeze through things; I'm always fighting till the last moment to get something completed, or waiting until it almost seems to late before I finally achieve what I want to.

I haven't always been like this. I was one of those hateful people at school who finished the exam paper with half an hour to spare, got up and left while others were still furiously re-working their answers or resting their head in their hands on the desk, and still got good marks. But exams were a simple set of rules to learn and follow, and life is quite the opposite. All sorts of strange fish swim in the rivers of life, and I still have to learn all of their names and what tempts them out.

I went fishing again, on a wild and blustery day that owls begin their stories with. The last time, earlier this year, I caught nothing. In fact, I found that I couldn't remember when I had had a successful fishing trip. I know it was about fifteen years ago, when I moved into the station, and my one vivid memory of the time was of casting out the carp bait and having the rod snap halfway along. My old wooden fishing gear just wasn't up to the task of handling modern baits, it seemed.

My youngest brother took pity on me after I showed him a couple of old fishing rods I had acquired, a split-cane salmon rod and another glass-fibre rod. He bought me an ultra-modern carbon-fibre fly-rod that packs up into six sections in a storage tube less than 2 feet long. It will be perfect for strapping to the crossbar of the bicycle.

We went out today to fly-fish for pike on the Stour; not at the stretch of water where I had unsuccessfully tried for trout earlier in the year, but higher up, at a stretch near Hindon St Mary. I was reading the local free paper the evening before, and came across an article stating that they had only just re-stocked that stretch of the river following a pollution incident earlier in the year, when effluent from an unidentified source killed large quantities of the fish. I mentioned this to my brother in the morning as we loaded his gear into the car. He rushed off to telephone the shop from where he had purchased the day tickets, and came back looking a bit concerned.

I thought it shouldn't be a problem; there would be loads of new fish wandering around like new kids on the first day at school, too uncertain to know what was right and what was wrong, all hungry for food, all raring to chase those brightly-coloured feather toys we were going to dangle over their noses. "But I think they should have told me before selling me the tickets," said brother.

We parked beside an old roofless mill, derelict long before the unknown vandals had torched it one night and left nothing but charred timbers scattered amongst the blackened stones. There was a catwalk that lead out over the weir to a halfway point, from where you could cast either upstream into the slow-moving mill pond, or downstream into the more turbulent but less weeded stretch of water beneath the foaming weir. I opted for the cleared water in order to learn how to cast with the new rod. Brother put on a bright pink feather on his line, while I went for a more subdued tawny-coloured affair with a hint of sparkling silver in the tail. I felt it looked more natural.

Pike are like fussy cats, (but with scales instead of fur). They have vicious teeth, and will chase something if it is dangled in their vicinity. Or not. Sometimes they will lie sulking on the bottom and you could actually brush the lure past their scales and they wouldn't even blink. Note to self: do fish blink? I think not, but it would need researching. What sort of person would devote a large portion of their life to determining whether or not fish ever blink? How many hours of painstaking observation would it take to be able to state definitively that fish do not blink? Supposing they only do it once in their lifetime, as a sort of rite-of-passage? How could you be sure you had carried out sufficient observations to be certain that fish never blink? Shut up.

I soon got control of the line and the feather, and only got it comprehensively snarled in a tree once. Brother had used his chest-waders to explore the sill of the weir thoroughly, as well as the banks of the upper stretch, and I had thrashed the lower water into a foaming mess, but neither of us had seen a flash or felt a twitch. We decided to go downstream through the field and see what lay in the weedy stretches.

Nothing lay in the weedy stretches, we decided after another two hours and a chicken sandwich each. In my earlier lifetime, I would have used some of the chicken as bait to see if the river really was as dead as it appeared to be, but like Father William, I have grown older, and no wiser; I have, however, become greedier. All the chicken went in me, in case I needed the energy to balance an eel on the end of my nose. Above us wheeled a pair of Buzzards, waiting hopefully for one or both of us to collapse from boredom or frustration and give them the meal of a lifetime.

"We could go to Hamoon, to the free stretch," brother suggested. And so we set off again, half-collapsing the rods and stowing them in the back of the car. Hamoon is another weir, but without the mill, and is one of the last places I have a vivid recollection of fishing. I used to work at Southampton, before I set out on my long bike ride, and was living in Marnhull. I used to stop off at Hamoon on the way back from work. In the back of my car would be the enormous and archaic 3-piece Spanish Reed rod, the one which I subsequently broke while casting. I would park and walk out onto the bridge, staring out over the downstream railing at the foaming and weed-riddled water. Upstream, in the calm section, there were always a few fisherman sitting on chairs and stools by the bank side, firing handfuls of groundbait and maggots out with catapults to pepper the water around their floats, their rods laid carefully in rests beside them. I would put a large piece of crusty bread onto a hook, and float it carefully through the tumbling waters to a spot beyond the weeds about fifty feet below the bridge. I usually caught two large chub, sometimes even a smaller yearling, carefully steering them back up through the rippling channels between the weeds to a spot beside the bridge per where I could just reach down with the landing net and lift the fish up out of the water. I did this no more than once a week, so that the fish didn't start to remember me, and the upstream fishermen didn't notice what was going on not quite under their noses.

We walked down a few hundred yards from the bridge this time, because brother admitted that he had never managed to catch a pike in the bridge pool, and started working the flies around a bend in the river. He had almost instant success; I heard an exited grunt, and scrambled up the crumbling bank to see him bringing a small jack pike into the side. I reached for the landing net, but he decided it was light enough to just swing in, small boy style. He unhooked it easily, one of the benefits of using barbless hooks, and I went back to my casting with a lighter heart, knowing that it was possible to catch pike in this stretch of the river, on flies, in the autumn. The wind began to skitter across the surface of the water, making Vee-shaped ripples that hinted at darting fish. A magpie swooped down across the weeds as though it were a kingfisher. An autumn bonfire's smoky scent wafted through the field and lingered in the scrubby bushes where the wind couldn't quite get a grip on it. I forgot about time while the daylight lasted.

Two hours, two dozen pools, and two miles later, I was still optimistic, but in a deflated way. I had become reasonably comfortable with the rod and line, and could loft the fly across the water almost to the other side of the river. For those of you who aren't fisherman, fly-fishing is rather like flexing an old-fashioned coaching whip, but in slow motion, waving the line through the air in a swirling curve that settles gently on the water and lets the bushy lure on the very end plop down like an exhausted insect. We were using wet-fly method, where the lure then sinks beneath the water and you tug it back to you with a series of random jerks to simulate the movement of a small fish swimming erratically; something that is supposed to cause pike and trout and other predatory fish to lunge for it in a cat-like frenzy. Only, I wasn't being lunged at. Nor was I being nudged, or tugged, or even twitched. For all I knew, there had been one solitary pike in the river, which my brother had caught and which was now sulking on the riverbed with a sore lip. Doubt and uncertainty grew as the afternoon ran out.

At the farthest point downstream, we stopped and debated what to do. The light was beginning to fade. I had caught nothing, but brother had caught another couple, and had lost several. One of them had been in a large pool which I had definitely tried. I looked at the rather dull lure on my line, and decided I should try the gaudy ones. When subdued sophistication doesn't work, disco is a viable option. This is a typical fishing syndrome, using the wrong bait, fishing too deep, fishing too shallow, whatever you are doing seems to be the wrong thing, particularly when someone else is catching fish in the same water. It is, of course, partly psychological, as I well knew, and the real secret to fishing was to be quietly persistent, in a bloody-minded sort of way. But it didn't hurt to try something different once in a while. A herd of frisky bullocks watched and jeered as I strung on a fluorescent pink lure and went back to whip the water once again.

We were almost out of daylight, and almost back to the car, when I felt a sharp series of tugs, and knew it wasn't just another underwater reed. I struggled to get both hands doing their independent jobs, one clutching both the rod and the taut end of the line, the other reeling in the slack coils I had been retrieving so that I could finally get the fish onto the reel with the controllable brake. I felt the momentary fear that it would get off the hook before I had full control, and had to fight my own panic almost as much as the fish was fighting me. Brother appeared with the landing net as I steered the fish away from the tangled mass of weed it had been trying for, and it shot away towards the opposite bank. I still hadn't caught a glimpse of it, but knew from the feeling that it wasn't a minnow. After another two anxious minutes I drew it over the landing net and brother hoisted it up onto the grass.

I could have killed it and taken it home to eat; it was a four or five pound fish, a predator that lives mainly on the fish that other anglers love to catch, and they would have thanked me for removing it from the river. But I found I didn't have any desire to kill it. I would put it back, because it was lucky; it had been the first fish I had caught in something like fifteen years, and that had spared it from the cosh.

Instead, I did something I have never done before. I have caught fish since I was four, since before I went to school. I have caught river fish, pond fish, lake fish, sea fish, even fish in grass-marshes only ankle-deep in water, but I have never had my photograph taken holding one of my catches.

So here, after half a lifetime, is my first fish shot.