Peachy perch sings winter's swan song

After catching a couple of jacks and losing what felt like a bit bigger one, I paused to take a lung-full of spring. Winter's well and truly on the retreat, as buzzards wheel over the woods behind the pit and a woodpecker rattles out a drum solo on a birch tree.

Maybe this'll be the last time I go pike fishing for a few months, I tell myself now the sun's well and truly up in a cloud-less sky that rings with bird song. The gorse bushes are alight with the first yellow sparks of flower as I crash through the undergrowth back to the car.

I pitch up on another pit and lose a pike first cast in a shady corner, that comes off as I bend into it. It didn't feel that big, I  console myself. A few chucks later, I feel a succession of stacatto raps on the rod before it kicks round into a fish.

And what a fish it turns out to be. As in not a pike, but a peach of a perch that bristles and flares its gills as I slip the net under it. How big..? Don't ask me, I didn't weigh it. I grab a quick picture on the mat, alongside the four-inch Kopyto it engulfed, before I drop it back.

How big do you reckon this perch was..?

How big do you reckon this perch was..? I don't know either. In the 10 years or so since I caught it, I've even gone back once or twice to try and catch one on purpose.

I caught it accidentally, trolling a spoon over the back of the boat as my mate rowed us home after we'd emptied the battery on the Minn. I thought it was a jack, but when I went to chin it I found a stripey full of spawn the size of a rugby ball with spikes on the end.

I knew it was big, but I slipped it back without weighing it.

It turned and faced the boat, flaring its dorsal fin as I returned it - still guarding its spawning area against two hairy-arsed interlopers - before it swam off to make more perch.

I wish I'd weighed it now. I know the distance from my elbow to my fingertips is around 18", so this was one big perch. I did weigh one I caught on a livebait on the same stretch a week or two earlier and it was nudging 3lbs.

That fish didn't look anywhere like as big as this one. But a float went as I was rummaging for the camera, so I dropped it back without a picture. I found a shoal of half a dozen big perch the following season, tucked tight against a feature.

I tried and tried to catch one, but the best I could manage was half-hearted follows. Perhaps I just got the day right - totally by accident - as this perch and its peers got ready to spawn. As my lure zig-zagged past them, one lashed out to defend its territory.