The Old Man and the Sand Eel

by Will Millard

  For the most part, any native wildlife that could be seen to have any detrimental impact on carp growth in the carp pond was actively discouraged or ruthlessly controlled. At the fisheries that could afford them otter-proof fences were erected, cormorants – ‘the black death’ – were managed, or just shot, and so-called ‘nuisance’ fish species – bream, roach, rudd and tench – were netted en masse and removed altogether. The key to success is to ensure the customer’s hook baits always have the very best chance of working their way to the lips of a specimen carp, and specimen carp only.

  Chris Yates, an angling legend and staunch traditionalist, who famously broke the British carp record in 1980 on an antique rod and single grain of corn, wrote a scathing attack on the direction of the sport in his brilliant 1997 book The Secret Carp: ‘this standardization has gone beyond a joke. Not only do the majority of carp anglers have to fish with at least three identical rods and reels, they must also have the complete product range of whoever happens to be the most fashionable tackle and bait manufacturers of the day. And of course they also require waters that can accommodate this multi-rodded, heavily equipped regimental approach. So the lakes have become standardized as well. Ultimately even the fish have become standardized with all specimens entered onto graphs which show growth ratios, condition factors, identification marks, colour variations, dietary habits, intelligence ratings, dress sense, musical appreciation and knowledge of world history.’

  He’s being disingenuous of course, but only slightly. Carp fishing today has arguably gone even further down the standardization road. On one side are the big fish venues with lightly stocked, but named and well-known, carp giants that might grace the bank several times in a season, and on the other are fish-filled carp factories that provide constant rod-bending action all year round.

  Thirty years ago a fishing catch totalling 100lb or more would have been big news, but this season a six-hour match was won by an angler who banked an astonishing 1,500lb of carp. His haul amounted to 350 fish at a catch rate of one carp a minute. With the top three competitors also catching in excess of 1,000lb of fish each as well, it amounted to over 1,900 carp out of that one lake in a single August afternoon.

  Given the Environment Agency recommends that natural fisheries can only hold 200 pounds of fish per acre to remain healthy, it is clear something is very definitely, very seriously, wrong. No fisherman is that good. Fishing in this way places fish, and fish welfare, as firmly secondary to the demands of the angler. In the worst-case scenario, the fish in these oxygen-depleted and unnatural environments must eat the food we offer them just to survive. It’s little more than Battle Royale or The Hunger Games of carp, fishing reduced to a game of numbers based wholly on a single species.

  It sounds awful, it really does, but for the past twenty years I’ve absolutely lapped it up. This is, in part, because not all commercial fisheries are quite that bad, but also because they can be an enormous amount of fun. I get the attraction, I really do. When you haven’t got much spare time to indulge in a hobby that has a tendency to be a slow burn on the best of days, sometimes you just want to catch, but this overpowering magnetism of the commercial lake has fundamentally altered fishing as we know it, and not for the better: for the majority of anglers today, there is simply no longer any alternative to the commercial.

  I had learnt from the Canal & River Trust that many of our once great waterways have fallen into a state of neglect purely through a total lack of angling interest, but I also recalled John Ellis’s comment that all the youth seek these days are thrills from bigger and bigger carp; and this, I discovered, doesn’t necessarily keep them in our sport for life.

  This season’s rod licence sales show there is a huge lack of young people coming to fishing; worse yet, junior licences are down a massive 50 per cent in just the last five years. The only growing branch of the sport today is among pensioners, the sorts of people who had grown up around massive canal matches and the understated pleasures to be had from dangling a worm in wild rivers and streams.

  In building up to the carp lakes through the small perch, roach and pike of my local river, I had already received a gradual apprenticeship in the essential techniques I needed, but I also formed a critically important, and deeply intense, connection to my natural environment. It just isn’t the same if you jump straight into the sport and catch a big lump from a stocked pit at the very first time of asking. There’s no question that carp fishing is extremely exciting, but the buzz wears thin if that’s all you ever experience and catching something is guaranteed. It’s hard to imagine many young people sticking with fishing once that box has been ticked multiple times, and I can’t see them reverting to the subtle pleasures to be had from plundering small fry from a river either, especially once they’ve been hooked on the power of the carp.

  You can’t blame the owners of the commercial fisheries. It’s just business after all, and many have since taken serious steps to set up in a manner that is better for the carp, but these waters shouldn’t be to the exclusion of all other fishing styles and species. It is down to us, as a fishing community, to take responsibility for protecting the integrity of our sport by choosing to be more diverse with our angling. After all, shouldn’t fishing represent the exception, the foil, the buffer, to a modern world already filled with uniformity, instant gratification, click-bait buzzes and shrinking attention spans? Angling, by its very nature, is a random, often chaotic, collection of environments, species, methods and possibilities that afford the fisherman the opportunity to get utterly lost for a lifetime or more. You can’t always win, but that doesn’t mean you necessarily lose.

  ‘Whatever next? Rods that reel the fish in for you, or devices that cast your bait into the perfect spot?’ I didn’t want to tell Grandad about the electronic bait boat I’d seen during my latest trip to Wood Lakes – it quite literally did cast that man’s bait into the perfect spot. ‘It’s taking the skill out of fishing,’ he droned on and on.

  By the end of the summer after that fateful first year at secondary school my fishing friends from the village had drifted away. We had caught a handful of small carp between us, and had swapped our river tackle and maggots for our own series of identical rods and bags of boilies, but the polarizing demands of our new schools in different towns had come between us in the end. We were all on different paths now, and I missed them a great deal.

  The biggest new challenge on my horizon was found within the new commercial carp fishery that had just opened, ironically, at the end of Grandad’s garden. I knew beyond doubt that I needed those carp more than ever now. Besides, it seemed more than just mere coincidence that big carp were available a stone’s throw from Grandad’s lobelias. This was my chance to fill the void left by friends and sporting failures, and it felt like it was being handed to me on a plate. I told Grandad we had to go. He just laughed. So I went on my own.

  It took a couple of weeks down there before it happened. I was fishing a bunch of maggots tight to the back of a purpose-built island feature when my rod was, quite literally, ripped clean off its rests and into the lake.

  I picked it up by its disappearing butt and began a fight like no other. The reel screamed and the rod hooped to breaking point as it tried in vain to cushion a thunderous opening run. It was far and away the biggest fish I had ever been connected to at the time, a fish I had long dreamt of and a fight I had spent long hours practising for and considering. But now it was all happening I felt a sense of near-paralysing fear, both at what the fish might do to my tackle and what it would do to my vulnerable emotional state if it managed to escape.

  Eventually the great carp wallowed, hippo-like, directly under the rod tip. It was as if I was watching Wilson on a video of my childhood, laughing along and reaching for the net, but it wasn’t him, it was me. I leant forward, waist-high in the lake with water seeping down deep into the fibres of my Umbro tracksuit bottoms, and folded the fish deep into my memory for all time.

  I had caugh
t a mirror carp, so named after the set of shining reflective scales that adorn its flanks. It tipped my scales at a hefty 12lb, not massive by carp standards, but the restorative properties that fish had for my self-belief were worth a thousand centuries in cricket or a winning goal in the ninety-third minute. If I could emulate my fishing hero, then what else couldn’t I achieve? I was euphoric that night and, in a rush of blood to the head, asked Mum, our household’s cricketing impresario, if I could join the village cricket club.

  From now on I would seek only bigger and bigger challenges, and I would take them head-on. The capture of the mirror carp had bolstered my sense of self-belief to such an extent that I could almost imagine its immaculate scales were to be worn as plates in my own suit of armour. No one was going to make me feel scared or hopeless ever again; and I was going to get better at sport, even if it did kill me.

  In spring, I returned from a long period of filming in the jungles of New Guinea to find blissful sunshine bathing the nation. Finally, the horror rains of the endless winter had passed and the new season had brought some superb fishing weather.

  I had wanted to catch crucians from the outset of this challenge. Mostly because I thought they were among the most beautiful fish swimming in our waters – I still do – but I also hoped it would be a really good way of exploring the unsung traditional still waters of the nation. The sorts of places you might see in the paintings of the English Romantics, very Constable-esque, I imagined, but I also felt, after the drubbing at the hands of both the pike and the perch, that this was a fish I actually had a fairly good chance with. I had caught a fair few crucians while out carp fishing, including one real beauty almost 3lb in weight, so surely with just a few tweaks to my tactics, and perhaps a bit of research, a whopper was well within my reach?

  I, along with many others, believed that the crucian was native to Britain. Its pocket-sized and dignified appearance was surely more in keeping with these fair isles than the brutish king carp? However, I soon discovered that was not the case at all. The most recent DNA analysis of a sample in Norfolk can only place the crucian here in the medieval period, around the same time as all the other carp species. I forgave myself for my mistake – the analysis was only a couple of years old and was hardly official. Even Alwyne Wheeler, fish expert and former curator of the Natural History Museum’s fish department, had believed they were native, stating as much in his paper published in the year 2000, but there was still no way of getting round the cold, hard, present-day facts: this fish was introduced.

  Its being so much smaller than the king carp has led to suggestions that the crucian might have been brought here from the east as something of an ornamental species, a splash of colour in the noble’s pond, but it is hard to find precise references to support the supposition. What we do know is that carp as a whole were a much sought-after food item in the Middle Ages: perhaps a multitude of carp species were actually ordered to create something of a smorgasbord for those with a piscatorial palate? Carp was no food for the peasantry though – maintained by monks and consumed by monarchs, carp were both luxury food items and status enhancers, favoured, in particular, by the House of Tudor. Who knows? Perhaps the rotund King Henry VIII was chewing down on his umpteenth crucian while considering executing another wife? He certainly had a partiality for the carp species, and practically every other freshwater fish in Britain. Susanne Groom, in her book At the King’s Table: Royal Dining through the Ages, describes a magnificent starter course served to Henry VIII that naturally included carp, but also herring, cod, lampreys, pike, salmon, whiting, haddock, plaice, bream, porpoise, seal, trout, crabs, lobsters, custard, tart, fritters and fruit, and that doesn’t even touch on the man’s penchant for whale meat, black pudding and swans. It was curious, I thought, how all the other fish species to grace the tables and plates of the palace were so well distinguished and explicitly referenced, yet when it came to the carp, everything from goldfish, to commons, to crucians, fell under the same generic ‘carp’ banner. I glossed over this detail at the time, but it was actually a sign of things to come.

  I thumbed through the Wilson Encyclopedia to the crucian section. I noted his description of the unusual ‘upturned mouth (without barbels)’ and tendency to ‘shoal according to their size’; but it wasn’t until I came to cast my eye on the listed British record size that I stopped in my tracks. Something wasn’t right.

  5lb 10.5oz.

  There was no way that could possibly be accurate. I knew for a fact that there was no verified crucian catch in Britain in excess of 5lb as, after I caught my three-pounder, I had checked the record books and discovered that the record back then was only around 4.5lb, but I just couldn’t imagine Wilson making such an elementary mistake either. I was going to need some help.

  Peter Rolfe runs a wonderful website dedicated wholly to the species (http://www.crucians.org) and after a friendly exchange of emails I tapped the digits of his number into the receiver and a gravelly, almost Shakespearean voice soon answered the phone.

  ‘The sooner we drop “carp” from “crucian carp” the better,’ he growled.

  Peter Rolfe has been dedicated to the preservation of the crucian for the past forty years. He is a bona fide hero for the species (even receiving the Fred J. Taylor Award for Environmental Stewardship in acknowledgement of his work), but I doubt he’d ever wear such a title.

  ‘People think the fish is related to the king carp, when they hear that “carp” moniker, when of course it isn’t. It’s related to the goldfish.’ I scribbled furiously as he spoke. It was all news to me. ‘The bigger carp species out-compete crucians for territory and food, so that’s bad for one, but also they interbreed with them with tremendous ease, as does the very similar brown goldfish. As commercial fisheries and the stocking of king carp became popular everywhere, well, the humble crucian didn’t really stand much of a chance.’

  In my twelve-year-old haste to pivot on the scaly backs of king carp and hop into the world of ‘real’ men, I didn’t once stop to consider what the consequences of such a wholesale stocking programme might be. By the end of the 1990s it had become abundantly clear that the crucian was actually in very real trouble indeed. ‘It hadn’t seemed so bad at first, I suppose it was just that they had become less popular,’ continued Peter, ‘but once we realized just how many fish that we thought were crucians were in fact cross-breeds with goldfish or common carp, well, we realized the situation was somewhat dire.’

  Peter was putting it delicately. If the crucian wasn’t marching to the brink of extinction in this country, it was certainly gearing up for the walk. It was a paradox of sorts, our obsession with the king carp speeding the decline of a different species of carp, but it was pretty easy to see why things had gone so wrong for the crucian: it was small enough to be ignored. Little wonder it preferred the hidden season: as a fish of Britain it was once dangerously close to vanishing altogether.

  The Wilson Encyclopedia puts a crucian mega-specimen at over 3lb: that is chump change for the king carp, really, a very average-sized fish; and with an angling population hooked on the bigger-is-better mantra the crucian was almost predestined for trouble. The odds were stacked further against the fish as their traditional habitat – small, rural pools – began to disappear nationwide through drought, pollution and shifting agricultural practices. The crucians might have stood something of a chance in an environment where a disappearing waterway would at least make local news – in small pools in our parks or urban ponds, for instance – but unfortunately the well-intentioned communities here have a tendency to unwittingly liberate their pet goldfish directly into the crucian gene pool. With that, it seemed, to Peter and his friends at least, the crucians’ fate was sealed.

  Then came a quite unexpected turn in their fortunes.

  In 1997 the British Record Fish Committee hit the ‘reset’ button on the whole crucian record list. Following the cross-breeding revelations it was felt the record as it stood was essentially redundant: no
one could be sure if the leading fish were pure crucians or just cross-breed hybrids with goldfish and common carp. Clear rules were set out to help the layperson identify the fish – between thirty-two and thirty-four scales along the lateral line, a lack of barbels around the mouth, a large convex dorsal fin – and a new fishing challenge was laid down to an army of anglers apparently itching for something new.

  One year later, the capture of a truly enormous 4lb 2oz pure crucian lit up the angling press, and the wider fishing public, surprisingly, switched on to this diminutive fish wholesale. Perhaps the king-carp-shaped blinkers were gradually being lifted as the new millennium approached, but, either way, as the tragic plight of the fish made the national press, the call to do much more to save the crucian reached an unprecedented level.

  ‘Things were quite suddenly much more optimistic for the crucian.’ Peter warmed at the thought. ‘The word has since spread and many more people are interested in fishing for them these days. Really, I’m chuffed it’s all happening.’

  The Wilson Encyclopedia had hit the shelves, and my Grandad’s own Henry VIII-esque stomach, in 1995. Wilson, like the rest of us, simply didn’t realize these ‘carp’ were all separate species with a truly extraordinary ability to cross-breed.

  ‘There is a lot of misinformation out there about the fish still. Ponds and fisheries claiming to hold the crucian when really they don’t, and also fish breeders who think they are selling pure crucians when in fact they are goldfish or common-carp hybrids. You can see online, people still think they are catching near-record crucians when, in fact, they are all just cross-breeds. The problem is, as soon as you’ve unwittingly stocked these hybridized fish you stand no chance of maintaining a healthy pure-crucian population.’

  I put down the receiver and immediately ordered a copy of Peter’s superb book Crock of Gold, which is, to date, the only book dedicated solely to the crucian carp, but I had an awful feeling. If the entire nation, and many of our top anglers, had been so easily duped with cross-bred fish, then what was to say every crucian I’d ever caught was not an imposter too?