An otter's leftovers beside the drain..?

Despite the number of otters I've seen in recent weeks, this bream we found yesterday is the first carcass I've found which looks like an otter's had a hand in it.

It was some distance from the water, half way up the floodbank, on a stretch where there's a sheer bank too high for even an otter to drag a fish of this size up.

It must have dragged it for 10yds or so, from a bit of bank that's collapsed into the drain. Looking at the displaced scales, whatever hauled it up the bank grabbed it near the wrist of its tail. I'm not sure if the otter dragged the fish up the bank and left it for something else - perhaps a mink or even rats to dine on.

The drain's got large shoals of bream around this size in it, so one down's no great drama in the scheme of things. I did see what looked like spraint a few yards down the bank, but with the rain and other disturbance on the bank it was hard to tell for sure.

I remain convinced otters aren't the menace they're made out to be. Not to our wild fish populations, at least. But I have to admit to becoming increasingly fascinated by these creatures, as they recolonise our waterways.

Cloudy day and another otter

The wind's howling down the drain but I gave it a go all the same. Eight feet of water, the top two feet bowling along at twice the speed of the flow. I try angling the rods into the blow, tips just above wave height, but I'm not happy with it. When a passing lump of weed unclips me, the braid spills wildly off the reel down the bank.

Off to the river, where the wind's off my back. Two over the far side, one down the margin. Clouds darken ominously, but the rain holds off.

The club chairman appears and we have a mardle. As his 4x4 bounces off down the road, an otter appears in the middle of the river - the first I've ever seen on this part of the system. It's the third otter I've seen in the Fens in a fortnight. 

I don't want to blame these once-maligned creatures for another runless day, as it reaches the far bank reeds and disappears from view.

It's otter than July

Another winter's pike fishing begins with a cold, grey, drizzly dawn. The water's clear but there's a gentle flow, a slight ripple and prey fish topping for a fly hatch.

Bream anglers are having a post mortem after a biteless night session a few swims downstream. There was a shoal here but it seems to have decamped elsewhere. One look at the water tells you that, with no colour caused by the silt a shoal of grazing slabs disturbs as they root around on the bottom.

This doesn't bother me too much - I'm sure the pike follow the hand-sized roach and rudd around on here, not the dustbin lids. The banks are overgrown but I can get the rods over the worst of it and crash through the rest if I need to net a fish.

I check the hooks, bait up the traces and drop one either side of the feature the prey fish are dimpling over.  I let the flow pull the braid into a slight bow to cock the bungs.

The 2/3oz Guru leads hold the floats steady, baits parked just where I want them. As I crack open an expresso, a familiar cacophony of honks and squeals sounds in the distance as skeins of geese make their final descent to the beet fields. Autumn's here, no messing.

A bung wobbles and falls flat. The line tightens and falls slack as I pick the rod up. I sweep it back over my shoulder anyway and connect with weed instead of the first pike of the season. Maybe it dropped it as it felt the rig weeding up. They do that sometimes.

I re-bait and drop it back in the same spot. Maybe that's where they are, I decide, so I reel the other rod in and pull off the slightly sorry looking sardine to replace it with something more solid that will withstand a longer chuck.

I sling the sardine in the margins, watching it sink down onto the weed. Then the weed moves as a pike of three or four pounds shoots out, grabs it and does a U-turn in a swirl. Oh well, at least I've seen one.

A run-less hour passes, before there's a swirl that sends the prey fish flying in all directions off the reeds on  the far side. Bigger lead and I could get over there, I think as I debate which rod to reel in and change to a 2oz bomb.

Then a head appears. Then a long shape sets off along the surface - another first of the season. I grab the camera out of my rucker and stand to get a better shot, as the otter heads off along the bank.

The picture's pulled up and sharpened a bit in GIMP but you can see what it is - as in not a mink.

I saw one here last season too - not to mention spraints and smashed swan mussel shells elsewhere on the same part of the system. This time around, the water just goes dead. The prey fish stop topping and if you hadn't been here half an hour earlier, you wouldn't think there was a fish in this part of the river.

It's lunchtime. The sun's broken through and the day's doing its best to warm up. A hobby hurtles up and down the reeds as I pack the rods down. I'm sweating in my bunny suit by the time I get back to the car.

Otter damaged pike from the archives

When the float sailed away on a gravel pit in mid-Norfolk a few seasons back, I found myself attached to a pike which gave up the ghost as soon as I whacked the hooks into it.

As it neared the net, I saw something I'd never seen before and haven't encountered since - the obvious aftermath of an otter attack.

I was fishing with a press photographer on a pit in the Wensum Valley, when I caught this double with fresh slash marks down both flanks.

Graham photographed the damage, as we debated the cause of the wounds on the fish. Fairly obvious, bearing in mind the river runs behind the spot we were fishing.

I nursed it in the margins before I let it go to take its chances.  I've seen otters or signs of otters on most waters I've fished over the last few winters.

But I've yet to see anything quite this graphic, regarding what happens when they bump into a pike.

Unexpected item in bagging area

Must be five or six years since I've fished this bit of drain, I enthuse as we clamber up the flood bank. We need to be a bit further down, that used to be the bagging area.

"How far," asks TLC as our breath steams in the cold dawn air. Another mile or so, I shrug. Half an hour later, we're in what used to be the spot. It doesn't look like anyone's been here all season.

This fills me with confidence, for obvious reasons. We agree we'll give it a half hour, then begin the long leap frog back to the car.

I remember one of Digger's pearls of wisdom for some reason. The one where he reckons he's leap frogged a mile of drain or river for every twenty he's caught over the years. Once we've got the rods out, I have a nose around the bank for signs anyone else has beaten us to what used to be a rated area.

Something has. Down in the grass, there are otter spraints. I look around and find a few more, in varying states of decay. Neglected by the likes of us, it seems Tarka has stepped into the void - very nicely, too, judging by the amount of droppings.

I did see an otter, several miles away, on the same drain earlier in the season. We give it half an hour, get itchy feet, and start swim hopping back towards civilisation. 

We find more otter droppings, here and there. But no fish. After half a mile or so, we began seeing signs of other anglers. Otters aren't renowned for their love of Marlboro Lights, with health warnings written in Polish.

We press on, as the sun starts dropping away to the West. TLC wonders when the mile will be up and we'll catch one of Digger's twenties. Looking back down the drain, we must have covered a mile by 3pm, as we cast the baits into the umpteenth swim of the day.

"I'm in," he shouts, as a float finally shows some signs of life. I reel my rods in and walk down with the net. "Don't reckon I'll be needing that," he says, swinging in the smallest pike I've seen all season, which might just go a pound on a good day.

"Come on," says TLC. "We want yer mum - or yer granny..." As dusk creeps in around us, one of his floats plops under the surface again.

He briefly hooks what's obviously a much larger fish, which comes off inexplicably after a couple of head shakes.

Our mile's well and truly up. That might even have been one of Digger's twenties, if you believe his maths. We sit it out the final 20 minutes or so until the sun sets, before we trudge the last few hundred yards back to the car.

Did we find the only two pike in that entire stretch of drain - or did they just switch on briefly as the light levels dropped. There must be a reason the otters like it so much around there either way. Definitely worth another look.