A pike from the Forgotten Pit

There's a big swirl and the water boils as a good fish smashes into the lure. On a forgotten pit in the middle of nowhere, I've sunk my hook into an angry reminder of why I love this so much.

 I'd never set eyes on the place before I clocked it on Google Earth. Pits elsewhere in the valley hold pike, so this one surely must. I plotted the track that winds around the old gravel workings from the by-road, sketching it on a Post-It I could stick on the dashboard of the car to help me find it.

The first few casts revealed an underwater jumble of bars and drop-offs, weedbeds and silty shallows full of sticks and twigs. I persevered in a corner where a tiny pike barely bigger than the lure chased the Big Hammer.

Baby Pike should, in theory, mean Mummy and Daddy Pike are in here too. I dropped into a gap between two trees where the wind was off my back and I could send the shad right out towards the middle, into the pit's main bowl.

It's not much deeper, maybe five or six feet. It needs a brisk retrieve to keep the shad above the weed. A few casts later and bang - Mummy's here. The sleek low double fights hard in the clear water. From up on the bank, I can see it flare its gills and furiously shake its head.

Then it's in the net and it's mine. No monster, but a near-perfect double - apart from the rosy scrape on its flank. The new Big Hammer droops from its scissors, ripped to shreds as I grab a quick photo on the mat, flick the hook out of its gob and drop it back. As I watched it swim off, I wished I'd weighed it.

Caught on the hop

I seem to be catching more than I was last time around. Plenty of small fish seem well up for sinking their teeth into one of the above selection of rubber things, or something out of the other box of rubber things I've been lugging around with me on my first half a dozen or so trips.

Despite the lack of anything half-decent, I've learned a bit about fishing the shad-type lures so many people now seem to use almost to the exclusion of anything else in the Fens. The first thing's how versatile lures I always thought were just chuck and retrieve baits can be.

When a straight cast/retrieve, cast/retrieve style of fishing them doesn't work, I've had one or two fish hopping them back along the bottom, which I'm guessing will be an even more useful technique once the weed's died back. Onwards and upwards.

Feminine intuition

 
This looks like a nice spot, says the wife, plonking down the picnic box. We've come to a picturesque stillwater, because the wife didn't fancy fishing one of the drains. I am laden down with deadbaiting rods, because the wife doesn't like lure fishing.

I get a few out, while the wife and dog plot up under a tree and start on the sandwiches. It certainly looks the business, with a gentle westerly rippling the surface and bait fish dimpling off the reeds.

Half an hour later, I hook into one, followed by a couple more. Nothing earth-shattering size-wise, but worth coming out for an afternoon all the same.

Man arrested for "twatting" a heron

Back in the days when the local evening paper was most peoples' main source of breaking news, you can just imagine anyone who cares about the wildlife that lives along our rivers snapping up a copy of the Evening News to find out more on this shocking crime.

But a quick look on Google, after the picture emerged on Twitter, revealed it to be a spoof. Newspaper pundits argued no bill (as the posters are known in the ink trade...) would use the word local - let alone twatted, for starters.

Evening papers no longer carry 'late prices', as most now come out much earlier in the day than the late editions of days gone by.

Besides this small clue, not lost on lovers of newspaper geekery, a more obvious question would doubtless have been on the lips of anyone who knows anything about herons all along.  Like, how do you get close enough to, um, twat one in the first place..?

Where do coarse fish on sale in King's Lynn's eastern European supermarkets come from..?

I wonder where all the coarse fish you see on sale in almost all the eastern European supermarkets in King's Lynn are sourced from.

There are dried roach, dried bream, smoked bream and all kinds of other fish on sale with nothing to indicate their origin on some of the packaging.

How anyone could even eat a 4oz roach is beyond me. There can't be much more than scales and bones left by the time you've dried or smoked it.

Ditto bream, like the skimmer above, which could be yours for £1.35 with no use-by date or any information on the packaging (plastic bag) regarding its provenance.

There could obviously be an innocent explanation to all this and a clear and verifiable supply chain to wherever these fish were caught.

This in turn would clearly separate the shops which sell these fish from the illegal netting operations which come on top, from time to time, when gill nets are found strung across drains a few miles from King's Lynn.

Standing down

Ash and I are standing down as King's Lynn ROs for the Pike Anglers Club. We don't have the time to give the role the commitment it needs - and truth be told, it probably needs a new face (or faces) who can inject some time and enthusiasm into it.

I wish our successor(s) well. There was some money in the kitty which is being sent back to the national PAC to look after until they're appointed.

The Norwich Eskimo Song

Testicle eating fish on its way to the Fens..?

A fish which feasts on anglers, um, wedding tackle is on its way to our shores. Well, the Daily Mail reckons it is.

"A piranha-like fish known for biting and eating testicles may be on its way to Britain," it reports. "The pacu, known as 'The Nut Cracker and 'The Ball-Cutter', was recently discovered in the Seine river in Paris.

"Fishermen in South America have reportedly bled to death after losing their testicles to the vicious teeth of the fish."

Male swimmers in Denmark were warned not to 'go commando' when one was caught near Copenhagen last month, the Mail adds. It quotes an expert who reckons the fish are sometimes released into lakes and rivers when they grow too big for their tanks.

I can't quite see this somehow. But in this era of health and safety, dynamic risk assessments and litigation gone mad, I'm not taking any chances.

I reckon if you stuff a couple of plums down your boxers, you should be safe when wading.

++Daily Mail story *linky*.

+++French newspaper website story *linky*.