End of ban bodes well for pike fishing in the Fens

The red light flashes on the engine house, as the pump fires up with a puff of diesel exhaust. The bank beneath me trembles, before a torrent of water pushed up from the land drain courses into the Ouse sending a tinge of silty water downstream.

A mate once had two twenties here, like peas in a pod, within 10 minutes of dropping a bait just off the slacker, where water pouring in from one of the numerous land drains in the area has scoured the bed of the river a couple of feet deeper.


I've given it the odd go over the last couple of winters, but the pumps have stood silent more often than not and the pike seem to have melted away. Another slacker swim on a nearby water, where even I could catch pike in years gone by, has gone the same way.

In a roundabout way, the picture sums up what autumn and late season in the Fens should look like. A time when there's usually water everywhere, and the rivers and drains are doing the job we've spent three centuries adapting and building them to do, carrying water away to stave off a flood.

Last winter was the driest for yonks. Spring saw a hosepipe ban imposed, amid widespread drought warnings. Then we had three months' worth of rain in a few weeks and the ban's been lifted. And all bets are off regarding what the weather's going to do over the rest of the summer.

I'm starting to get optimistic about the autumn now. This could be partly down to the fact that when you haven't been pike fishing for months, you tend to remember the rose-tinted days when you had a good haul or a decent fish or two, rather than the run of blanks.

It's also down to the rain. For my best-ever season was when we experienced above average rainfall, and the rivers were coloured and running through from the word go. We might have to endure a hotter-than-average July, the papers say.

There again, the long-range forecasts have got it spectacularly wrong so far, so I'm not going to rush out and stock up on Factor 40 and Pimms. Well, I might get some more Pimms in, but you can drink it when it's raining too.

It's the wrong kind of rain for pike fishing

After five days of solid rain, the rivers are on the move. Out in the black Fen, it's filling the dykes and drains, swirling around the staunches as the lodes and leams rise to the brim. 

It's now officially the wettest drought on record, but it's the wrong kind of rain. After a prolonged dry spell, it runs straight off the dry soil into the rivers, prompting flood warnings as it runs out to sea.

It'll take weeks and weeks of it to restore the soil moisture deficit and replenish springs deep underground. So when the weather breaks and things warm up again, we're hardly going to notice much difference, once the drains and rivers return to their normal levels.

Where the Middle Level meets the tidal Ouse, the new pumping station stood idle for much of last winter. We know the consequences of prolonged heavy run-offs, when fish get flushed through sluices, decimating stocks in the lower reaches of drains.

The system needs a certain amount of rain for fish to flourish. But it needs it spread through the seasons, so there's enough water to go around once the crops begin to grow in the great peat prairies, sapping water from the land.

Changing weather patterns are skewing the equation, upsetting the apple cart beneath the surface. When the EA carried out research into declining barbel populations in the upper Ouse, the anglers blamed otters for falling catches.

But while there was ample evidence of Tarka, every fish tagged electronically at the start of the study was still alive a year later. What the scientists found was that low flows had allowed silt to choke the gravel on the barbel's spawning sites. That decimated fry recruitment, meaning there were no younger fish coming through

Pike are just as vulnerable to the vagaries of the weather, in a slightly different way. Fluctuating levels can see their spawning sites and the areas which harbour fry shrink or dry up altogether, while sudden downpours can simply wash them away.

Declining numbers of jacks points to a bigger problem than people who go fishing with lure rods from Lidl and carrier bags to carry their catch home for Svetlana to cook.

Maybe it's a problem nature can't solve on her own. Maybe it's time pike anglers lobbied for the the EA to conduct similar research into what's going on in one of our rivers or drains, to look at whether pike need a helping hand, like they gave the Ouse barbel when they restored their spawning sites, to ensure populations flourish.

Is this the way forward for pike fishing in the Fens..? Answers on a postcard.

+++It's not just pike which suffer, according to John Bailey - click here to read what he's got to say about how fluctuating levels affect roach spawning in the River Wensum. 

Brief respite for the River Nar

It's not exactly a household name when it comes to pike fishing, but it might well hit the headlines later this summer. For of all the rivers in the Fens, the Nar's one of the most vulnerable to drought.

Its upper reaches are totally different in character to the embanked stretch that flows through the Fens on its way to the old whalers' quays of King's Lynn. It's a chalk stream, shallow and fast-flowing, that supports a run of sea trout, along with resident brown trout, dace and a few chub.

It was raining hard this afternoon, when I dropped in on a couple of spots around South Acre and Castle Acre. The Nar was bowling along like a good-un, but several inches down on its normal level. Spots where I'd seen fish in the past, like the glide above a ford that usually held dace, were all devoid of life.

It's forecast to rain for the next few days, bringing short-lived surface run-off to the river. But the Nar depends on springs deep beneath the chalk hills to feed it. And if they fail, the river and the life it supports will struggle to survive, as it shrinks to a just a trickle through the water meadows.