by Will Millard
I would tell everyone in the family several times of my heroism, establishing a lifelong fourth and final rule: always amplify any special capture, especially if there was no witness.
Finally, with no one else in the house left to tell, and my sister getting visibly irritated by my boorish antics, I made my concluding performance to my grandparents.
‘Impressive, son,’ Grandad remarked at the curtain call. Lifting an enquiring white eyebrow from behind his large, wire-framed glasses, he casually dropped an absolute thunderbolt into my life:
‘So what would you say to trying to catch a fish?’
A spark flickered into life; somewhere well behind my out-and-proud bellybutton and the small of my back: a truly great journey was about to begin.
I was almost five years old when I caught my first fish but I can’t tell you what it looked like. I was so excited by the prospect of catching and holding a real live fish that when my float eventually slid under the water, I struck so hard that I projected my catch directly out of the river, over my head, and deep into a field filled with sugar beet.
‘A little too hard perhaps, Will,’ said Grandad after a short spell of mutual silence.
He took the rod, freshly baited the hook with a couple of maggots, and re-cast into the middle of the Creek.
Technique wasn’t all that important in those seminal days. With Grandad it was all about experiencing the first fish on the bank, by whatever means possible, and enjoying time spent in each other’s company. That meant size was an irrelevance also. Our best bet, clearly, was with the vast shoals of roach that teemed within the Well Creek right opposite the house. They never seemed to grow beyond a few inches in length, but that didn’t mean they were foolish – far from it in fact.
With the float now bobbing happily in the centre of the Creek once more, I was passed back the rod. It was my first, a bright-red two-piece number with a smooth plastic handle and reel loaded with light monofilament line and I loved it more than anything else I have ever owned.
‘I’m just going to feed a few maggots to get them interested,’ said Grandad, selecting a pinch of the wriggliest bait tin residents and flicking them around the float with extraordinary accuracy. The float bobbed. ‘It’s another bite!’ I screamed, standing up, blowing our cover, and forgetting to strike. Grandad pulled me back into the seated position via the elasticated waistband of my bright-red shorts.
‘You’ve got to stay calm, Will,’ he implored in hushed tones, his eyes sparkling with suppressed laughter tears.
I refocused, pleading with the float and river to give me just one more chance. A couple more maggots flew out and then, finally, mercifully, it happened.
In the photo of that first fish, I am sat next to Grandad with a look of utter disbelief plastered across my face; my eyes are as wide as they could possibly be, gripping a length of line with what can only be described as ‘a miracle’ on the end of my hook.
Incredibly, given how many roach were in the Creek, my trap had worked its way into the mouth of a small skimmer bream. Like the roach, the skimmer appears to be a silverfish but it is, in fact, the juvenile form of the darker and much larger common bream. It differs from the roach in its elongated, slate-grey anal fin on the underside and its generally much flatter, wider appearance; hence its ‘skimmer’ name, in homage to a skimming stone.
To be honest, it could have been any fish of any species ever; my reaction would have been just the same. In that moment I was the king; the master and commander of the river; the man who had unlocked the secrets of the deep and tamed the great beasts that lay within. It mattered not that this was, in reality, an extremely small specimen either; in that brief moment I had been handed the keys to a lifetime of pleasure and study, and in Grandad I had a more than willing teacher.
The five years I then took to reach the age of adolescence revolved around fishing and an endless supply of fishy stories and patient tuition from Grandad. The pond, the conservatory of animals, my family and, later, school all dissolved into the background. I had a new magic man now, capable of conjuring the most almighty tricks with a dainty flick of his thick wrist.
We float-fished for the Creek’s roach at any opportunity. He couldn’t say no: I was irrepressible. He would rock up to ours usually on a good sunny day as Grandad really hated being cold, even though he did always like to claim: ‘There’s no such thing as bad weather, just bad clothes choices.’ He would be wearing a floppy sunhat, and a T-shirt usually several times too small for his enormous stomach, and would often have a large pork pie secreted somewhere on his person, wrapped within a capacious handkerchief and brought out well away from the interfering eyes of my grandma.
I had the rod and reel of course, a couple of cheap floats, and a handful of hooks and weights he had given to me himself, but he would always ask: ‘Got all your stuff then, Will?’ as if my collection of tackle were vastly larger, and not, in fact, comfortably able to fit in his top pocket.
Grandad was both a thrifty man and extremely industrious. His fishing gear was as ancient as it was immaculate and his favourite floats were all handmade from drinking straws. ‘McDonald’s ones are the best,’ he often claimed, usually before adding: ‘it’s the only time you’ll see me in that bloody place.’ Repetition and consistency are a key component of any good angler, as well as any good grandparent.
The session would begin with my taking ten times longer than him to prepare my rudimentary tackle. I would first thread a small orange-tipped float onto the line by a tiny hole at one of its ends, and then secure its tip with a small rubber float sleeve, a finely cut piece of tubing that fixed the float to the line. Next I would carefully tie on a hook from Grandad and pinch a small line of lead shots intended to cock the float till just its top half-inch would show above the water. Finally, I was ready for bait. I would take an age to decide which two of the tens of thousands of maggots would be skewered onto my hook, usually drop a couple of hundred on the floor by accident, and then spear the grubs through the wrong end and have to start all over again.
When I was eventually ready to make a cast I would either overdo it and chuck the whole lot straight into a tree, or I would forget to release the line on the reel and tangle my float approximately one million times around the rod tip. Both eventualities took time to fix, and would nearly always result in me having to start the whole process again from scratch.
Grandad would never fish on through my dramas, but he wouldn’t just sort it out for me either. I had to learn to do things properly, and, as tackle cost money, it paid to learn quickly.
Time passed and gradually I improved. In the early days any fish was a real bonus, but several seasons in I was beginning to catch nearly every time we went out. Expectancy is a terrible thing in fishing: it murders the heady rawness of feeling you get from the first few fish you ever caught by suffocating it under a fixation with catching as many fish, or as big a fish, as you possibly can. Sadly, a bit like the first time you ever fell properly in love, or saw a magic trick, or rode on a rollercoaster, that exhilarating feeling of holding one of your earliest fish can never be matched by simply catching more of the same.
With the sheen fading from the silver scales of the roach I began to wonder what other challenges might be living within the depths of the Creek. One day, while quickly retrieving a red-fin roach along the Creek’s surface, a massive impact tore my fish clean off the end of the hook. My line fell limp at the rod tip and I turned to Grandad, near rigid with shock.
‘Pike, son,’ he said, with a solemn and knowing glance at the pathetic remains of my roach, which was now little more than a smattering of tiny silver scales descending to a murky oblivion.
I had just been humbled. That was a man’s fish and I knew I wasn’t ready to take it on, but luckily there was another, more pocket-sized, predator lingering close to my diminutive grasp.
The temperature gauge on my van tells me it’s a dispiriting 4°C outside. I flick the indicator to take a long rig
ht-hand turn at the roundabout by the football club, and steam happily away from the commuter traffic trailing into Cardiff for work.
It feels like the wrong day to begin this challenge – the Vale of Glamorgan strikes me as particularly numb and lifeless this morning: lumpen, cold and grey, like the contents of a mortician’s drawer. I turn up the fan heater and squeeze the accelerator.
It’s overcast too but that doesn’t bother me nearly as much. Big perch hate bright conditions. To be fair, even 4°C isn’t truly the end of the world – there’s plenty of fish willing to feed in those conditions; but this is the first major temperature drop after a sustained period of double digits, which is very bad news indeed as fish really dislike sudden changes in temperature, and, worse still, the opening frost of winter is forecast to arrive tonight. That’s an event guaranteed to put every fish in Britain off its food.
After a frost some fish species will remain on the bottom; hidden, in a trance-like torpor, just subsisting off their reserves until the warmer months stir them back to life. Others, like the perch, will adjust to the colder climes after just a few days and will gradually come back on the feed.
The worst possible time you can try and angle for them is just after a frost; the second-worst time is right now: just as it’s starting. By rights, I should have stayed under the duvet this morning, but I felt I had one very good reason for wanting it today more than most.
Fishermen are among the worst offenders when it comes to believing in ‘signs’. I’ve seen the most hardened atheist turn clairvoyant when it comes to the desperate search for a fish-filled future; scientific anglers who, no matter what the conditions, will only fish their lures and flies in a certain order; and those who sincerely believe that a specific choice of socks or the sudden appearance of an auspicious bird or favourite mammal can conjure a fish for the fishless. Even my grandad, a no-nonsense engineer throughout his working days, would never fish the river if there was even a hint of a westerly wind.
What was sticking in my craw that morning was that it was precisely a year ago to the day that I lost the biggest perch of my life: I simply had to go fishing.
A little perch is almost always every little fisher’s first ever fish. It wasn’t quite mine of course, but they were an ever-present pleasure in the Creek, ready to step in and save my blushes when a blank day seemed otherwise inevitable.
‘Like a Japanese Warrior in his medieval armour,’ intoned Jack Hargreaves in his 1951 classic book, Fishing for a Year; and what a perfect simile that is for this classy little predator. With its hard, sharpened gill plates, black eyes, and spine-tipped and sail-like dorsal fin, the perch is absolutely built for a fight; but it’s a strikingly handsome fish too: its flanks are marked by a series of immaculate black stripes blended perfectly over a dark olive backdrop. With striking blood-red fins and a whitened-cream belly that is wonderfully plump in the bigger specimens, it really is one of the best-looking of all the freshwater fish.
Unsurprisingly, it was one of the most in-demand fish to pass under the taxidermist’s scalpel in the Victorian era; but it’s the perch’s mouth that truly must strike the fear of God into any fish or bait unlucky enough to fit inside, for the perch must be the greediest fish ever to have lived.
Its jutting jaw is specially hinged, allowing its oversized mouth to engulf surprisingly large prey. As a boy I would often catch them fishing on lures intended for pike ten times larger, such is the perch’s capacity to sense weakness and an opportunity. When they are in the mood, they will bully their patch of water and intimidate others with a yobbish enthusiasm.
On the Creek we would catch them near boat moorings, reed-lined banksides or, more often than not, directly beneath wooden jetties: right in among the pilings, where they can leap back and forth from their ambush point. Clearly, they are comfortable in large shoals. I remember one astonishing day with my little brother when we simply could not stop catching them. Like shelling peas, we flicked them out one after the other from an area under a landing stage no bigger than a ping-pong table. Eventually, it got so embarrassing we had to stop and upended a keepnet filled with at least a hundred little stripy fish.
On a clear day I would observe the Creek’s vast perch shoals, tucked tight into the holes and structures they preferred, allowing their zebra stripes and dorsals to fuse with the reeds, wood or each other, till the individuals were near indistinguishable from the shoal. From here they would conduct their remorseless assaults: plundering the roach-fry like a marlin destroys a bait ball, sending their panicked prey scattering on the surface in great shimmering plumes of silver.
On occasion I would spot one or two that were clearly a lot larger than the rest: hump-backed and aloof, these were the adults. These wise old fish were given respectable space by the smaller fish in the shoal, most likely not out of deference, but because big perch have a cannibal’s reputation.
They would observe me with an infuriating indifference as I made cast after cast in their direction, never once looking even remotely likely to come to my hook. Eventually they would tire of my intrusion, and would simply disappear with a flick of the tail; leaving a boy with a face redder than his rod, kicking up clods of turf in wretched frustration.
The Wilson Encyclopedia describes a ‘mega-specimen’ as any perch over 3lb, and lists the British record at 5lb 9oz, but, as I write, the current record is now headed by two separate fish caught just a year apart, and which tipped the scales at a whopping 6lb 3oz.
What I wouldn’t give to catch such a perch. I can’t think of any other species where the gulf in skill between catching the smallest member and the largest is so vast. It has to be one of the biggest challenges available to the British angler. Once hooked the perch is unmistakable. The pugnacious jag-jag-jagging fight, as they repeatedly dive back for their cover, is like having your line attached to the sword of an Olympic fencer. It singles out the striped assassin every single time. In the bigger ones this pulsing motion is only magnified, till the shudders on your rod register with the force of a piledriver.
As a child, having blown my opportunity to snare a big one for just about the millionth time, I consulted Grandad on the appropriate method for snaring the larger of these princely predators. ‘The tail of a lobworm, nicked through the bloody stump,’ he opined simply, in much the same manner as a witch might recommend a wicked potion for curing warts.
‘Is that really all there is to it, Grandad?’ I enquired, my heart full of hope.
Grandad was a keen devotee at the church of lobworm; they were the only alternative bait he would consider when his maggots failed to work. He dug his mud snakes, the largest of the British earthworm species, out of the sweet-smelling compost heap he managed out the back of the bungalow. From there, he would roll them tight within long leaves of newspaper and stick them in his large white chest freezer.
I recall the first time he showed me his supply. ‘Don’t be shy about using a big hook; it’ll work, but, look, Will …’ He stopped and fixed me with his big brown eyes. ‘… big perch need patience. You can’t be jumping about and re-casting all the time. You have to learn to time it right: early mornings or the last hour of light.’
He placed his giant forearms on the chest freezer’s top and leant forward. ‘You must be prepared to wait for him to make the first mistake. Otherwise,’ he added, ‘there’s not much point in you even trying.’
In much the same way that I discovered collecting conkers was actually more fun than playing with them, I took to collecting worms with more enthusiasm and early success than catching big perch. Of course, Grandad had me pegged. Totally.
I had heard the best time to look for the biggest worms was in the dead of night, just after a summer storm, preferably on the outfield of a cricket pitch. That seemed like a ludicrous number of variables to me, and with night-time cricket matches in the rain particularly thin on the ground in my patch of Cambridgeshire, I took to re-creating a rain storm with a washing-up bowl filled with Fairy Liquid s
uds, and the tactical deployment of a gently wiggled garden fork. Once I got it right it was like raising Medusa’s hair from the turf. Up the worms would pop en masse, no doubt poisoned from their homes by the sudden influx of soap, and I would scoop them up and into my bait tin with unbridled glee.
One week later the largest and juiciest of all my incarcerated lobworms landed within an inch of a big creek perch’s mouth with a resounding thump.
It was the stealth equivalent of hiding behind a door for an hour to quietly surprise your mate, and then slapping him round the face with a draught excluder the second he walked into the room. Naturally the big perch flushed immediately from its hole in fright, leaving me sat impotently watching my giant worm squirm its way along the bottom without a single fish anywhere else in sight.
What was it about these cursed bloody worms? Perch holes and playgrounds: lobworms seemed to clear them both with ruthless efficiency.
For thirty seconds I waited, roasting from the inside out with a furious impatience. How did Grandad do it? When I did give up, I made sure I gave the turf the most solid kick I had in me before heading straight home to catch more worms, swearing blind that day I would never bother trying to catch big perch ever again.
After the sand eel was lost and the Wilson Encyclopedia found, it made sense to me to start my quest with big perch. Not just because they had such a presence in my childhood, but also because it was the perch that had slowly begun to ease me off my carp addiction in the months before the sand eel hammer blow.
It started with a few speculative casts with a worm a couple of years ago; purely to fill in time when the carp weren’t biting. I wasn’t expecting anything to happen, but, to my sheer delight, my float zipped away with a familiar jagging riposte and I found the swarms of little perch had been dutifully waiting for me, almost as if they had been following me around since I was a little boy.
