Frozen Old Bedford

ICE: The frozen Old Bedford, looking downstream from Welney Bridge.

Still cold in the Fens

Snow still covering the banks and several of the smaller drains were still frozen while I was out and about today. Not sure how much of a thaw we're going to get by the weekend either, to make matters worse.

If it stays cold and we're robbed of the chance of a few days on the stillwaters, there'll be just six weeks left give or take a few days. If it stays this cold into February, there are going to be a lot of hopes riding on those last few weeks. 

Time to build an igloo

"Come on," says Malcolm. "You can't bottle it. I mean, it might be a bit cold but that shouldn't bother an old pike fisherman.

"Look, I tell you what. Me and Sid will build it - well, I'll design it (being an architect, obviously...) and Sid will do the actual, um, building as it were. All you've got to do is take some pictures and job's a good 'un."

I waver, while the New Barman at the Village Pub reads my mind and pours me a double shot of Jack on the rocks. I like the New Barman's style.

"Are you, like, um, sure there'll be enough snow," asks Hawkwind Sid. "I mean to build, like, an igloo..?"

It says more snow on the forecast, I shrug. But I'm sure they build igloos from ice, as in, like, where the eskimos live.

"I reckon you might be on for that tonight," says the New Barman, in the first of what I am sure will be many useful contributions to the wide-ranging debates which happen in the Village Pub.

"They reckon that's going to get down to minus eight or nine. And my name's Neil, by the way."

Weather gets cold in winter - shock, horror

That's going to get cold come the weekend. Proper cold, with frost and stuff. I don't know why I still cling to the naiive belief that this season might still shake off the doldrums and throw up something decent, but news the mercury's set to fall has got me re-tackling rods ready to hit the rivers.

I wonder if it will be the last chance to turn my fortunes around. A few phone calls and texts have now revealed one water which does seem to have been producing a few pike. I have a feeling this will be a short-lived thing and I'd be on there tomorrow if I could.

If the rain holds off for a few days, it could be fining down nicely by the end of the week. Then again, a sharp frost could kill it. I don't even want to think about what snow would do to the system - anyone remember the winter of 2010/11..?

Fens struggle to cope as the waters keep on rising

It'll come as no surprise to anyone that 2012 was second-wettest year on record. But rather than some freak statistic, the incredible amounts of rainfall we've seen over the last 12 months look like part of a more alarming trend, when you bear in mind that four out of the five wettest years since records began in 1910 have happened since 2000.

The last thing I wrote in 2012 was the emergency barrier the EA were installing on the barrier bank at Welney. The Delph wasn't just higher than I'd ever seen it, the water was two feet below the bridge span and the road across the washes had six feet of water on it.

Villagers feared for their homes, with more rain on the way. To put it into context, if you know the village and the pair of drains to the south of it, the levels on the washes and what used to be the Delph were getting on for 10ft above the level in the Old Bedford by the Village Hall, with just the barrier bank keeping the rising flood in check.

The waters were nearing the muddy track where you clatter through the gateway to get to Bridge Pool. The Delph, which usually runs between the two lines of trees, had spilled over as the washes rose.

You might well marvel at how Cornelius Vermuyden's flood defence scheme has weathered the centuries and kept the waters at bay. But looking at the trend towards increasingly heavy rainfall over the last decade, you can't help but wonder how much longer it can survive the onslaught.

For while we have new pumps at Welmore and St Germans, the tidal Ouse remains key to moving water out of the system. And with the main river being run off via the Relief Channel to keep levels in the tidal channel down to get water off the Welney Washes, the system is now running at full belt, with little in the way of spare capacity.

Our drains and rivers are struggling to do the job they were shaped for. With big tides due later this month, you wonder how they're going to cope.

++BBC rainfall story *linky*

Water, water, everywhere in the Fens

When I looked over the bridge by the big sluice at Denver, I'd never seen as much water flooding through.

The Relief Channel was up over the banks - that's some head of water, when you bear in mind it's 12 miles long and 80 - 100yds wide.

The Impoundment Sluice (no idea why it's called that...) was also open, meaning water was pouring in from the Cut-Off, as well as the Ouse. I'll normally have a few casts regardless, but words like hopeless don't quite sum up the magnitude of how daft you'd have to be to expect to catch anything in that.

This is why we've been digging drains, diverting rivers and building banks and sluices for hundreds of years in the Fens. It might not do the fishing any favours when the system goes into flush mode, but it prevents the incredible scenes of flooding and devastation wrought by the downpours elsewhere.

Just about the only things that flood - apart from the odd corner of a spud field - are the washes at Welney and elsewhere, which were designed to flood by Vermuyden, the architect of much of the system.

There one or two things the great drainers didn't factor into their calculations. The first was how much the peat would shrink, leaving rivers twenty feet above it and vast tracts of the Black Fen the same distance or more below sea level.

The other was siltation, how the incoming tide would bring in more than the river could scour on the ebb; meaning parts of the Ouse are now badly silted. This hampers efforts to clear water off the Welney Washes, with all the problems that brings for the wildlife.

A little further downstream, it means they can't let water out into the tidal via the "eyes" of Denver Sluice, which in turn means water has to be discharged via the Relief Channel.

I check out several miles of river, which are practically deserted. I look in on a drain that's got a lock which keeps water from the rest of the system out - it's still within the banks but frozen over.

There are footprints everywhere up and down the bank by the one clear spot near a bridge - I wonder how many people have tried there already.

The idea of today was find somewhere fishable for the next couple of days. The jury's still out on that score.

Snow on the way for Norfolk..?

This might well be the scene that greets us tomorrow, with forecasters saying there's a chance Norfolk will awake to a sprinkling of snow. If not, we might well be in for a touch of the white stuff on Sunday, with a band of rain coming from the west hitting cold air over the badlands.

If I'm starting to sound a bit like a weather forecaster, it's because I've been reading through all kinds of websites, charts, satellite pictures and blogs all night. With several days' off ahead, I'm wondering what I'm letting myself in for on the weather front.

We seem to have escaped the worst of the deluge, looking at how the other side of the country's still counting the costs of the floods, with many pikers elsewhere facing a weekend off the water.

Some of the forecasts look quite dire for the next few days, but let's face it - it's winter. And however slow the start of the season's been, you can't catch them sitting at home in front of the fire.

Tomorrow's going to be a drive round and have a look-see at a few places, to see if I can second-guess how they're going to shape up over the week. I know where common sense tells me to fish, but I won't be alone in fancying this particular water so I'll wait until the week, when there's a bit more room on the bank.

+++Postscript - they got a bit of snow in Swaffham and a few flakes in Norwich.

Winter set to blast in early

Here we go folks - it's the first severe weather warning story of the winter, on the front page of tomorrow's Daily Express.

When I saw it, I wondered if it was a spoof splash - a story one of the nationals might lead on for its first editions, available late tonight in London, so as not to give away a much better story and give its rivals time to nick it.

When you check it through, the story's slightly flaky. Yes, it's getting colder <MEMO sub editors, it's autumn...>. Current forecasts also say it's going to rain quite a bit. In fact, the Met Office has issued a yellow weather warning for eastern England for Sunday into Monday.

But the Met Office also says "there remains a large amount of uncertainy at present in the detail..."

And far from the predicted icy blast, we're looking at a westerly gale on Monday. It'll be a bit lumpy on the rivers, but if the predicted downpour materialises, it might colour them up a bit and kick start the pike fishing in the Fens by the middle of the week

So can anglers now trust the weather forecasts..?

This was the scene back in February, when show covered the Fens and the River Ouse froze from bank to bank. The cold snap only lasted a few days - unlike a couple of years earlier, when the freeze-up lasted for weeks.

After that winter - which came after forecasters said it was going to be a mild one - the Met Office stopped issuing long-range forecasts. Now it says new technology means it can make more accurate predictions.

Wouldn't it be great if you could actually trust the forecasts more than a day or two in advance..? This summer's widely-touted drought, which had the water companies imposing hosepipe bans, turned out to be a damp squib. Damp being the operative word.

Perhaps the real story when it comes to winter is just how briefly it's lasted if you average things out over the last decade or so. And just how volatile our weather's become in that time.

Yesterday, it was slightly warmer than the average for this time of year. Yet in the Fens, it was 16C - not the 20C predicted as the maximum temperature on local radio. Once the brief cold snap ended, it was warmer than that in February in the badlands.

Go figure.

Whither the weather

The weather swings the other way in the Fens, as in back towards the 20s. Wednesday looks like it might be colder, looking at my weather app thing --> so I'll probably squeeze a sneaky one in then on the off-chance the northerly wind and a bit of ripple get 'em going.

Scope for days off is somewhat limited for the best part of a week after that, so no point window shopping  the weather for now. I know what I want longer-term, which is more rain. Preferably while I'm at work, as I hate fishing in the stuff, but like what it does to the rivers and drains when it buckets down in the autumn.

This summer has been the wettest since 1912 and the second-wettest in a century according to the Met Office website. Not enough to bring flooding to the badlands, which requires a set of variables which rarely occur together.

You wonder how much water that would actually take, looking at the markings on the porch in the Minster in King's Lynn.

What's the best weather for pike fishing in the Fens

I know people have different ideas about the best conditions to go pike fishing in the Fens. In recent years, one theory which seems to have become accepted is that pike feed hard when a cold front's approaching.  Some reckon the day before, others the day it actually arrives.


One of the best days I ever had was when there was a westerly wind with a lof of high, fast-moving cloud, when two of us had more than 20 fish between us to high doubles and a couple of other guys on another bit of the same water enjoyed similar success.

I study the weather avidly before I go fishing and sometimes take a day or two off on the strength of the medium-range forecast. I've started linking to some of the weather sites I use below the weather widget thing half way down the sidebar. This will grow as I get round to it. Underneath it, you'll also find a collection of EA river guages for some of the main river systems.

These are a little limited. There's only one for the Ouse, for example and none for the Middle Level, Cut Off, Relief Channel or any of the Cambs or Lincs drains.

Autumn might come early if that rain keeps on

I had a strange feeling, looking at the land drain flowing off as the gates in the tidal opened a mile or two away.

What if it rains right through the rest of August, bringing an early autumn instead of the prolonged mild spell which seemed to drag last summer out into October.

Somewhere - I can't for the life of me remember whether it was on here or in one of the papers - I wrote that we were in uncharted territory at the time as far as the weather was concerned.

This was my stock excuse when we weren't catching much, until a couple of bankside debates later in the season, when we agreed that there were a lot less smaller pike around than any of us remembered.

Some people have built up quite complex theories on how things like changes in pressure, weather fronts and even moon phases affect the pike. Many of them seem to contradict one another, while few include the direction of the wind, which can often drive the weather in the Fens, or the condition of the water.

The Ouse and some of the main drains have some flow at the moment. Two weeks ago, hardly anyone was catching. Now they're fishing well for bream and roach, which seem to be shoaled up in one or two areas.

I wonder if this will have the knock-on effect of making the pike fishing easier in terms of predicting where the pike are going to be. I can't pass a river or drain without stopping for a look at the moment.

Spare a thought for the pike amid the downpours

Poppies dance in the wind as the clouds thicken, ready for yet another downpour. It's mid-July and it feels like September already in the Fens. Autumn never comes soon enough for me most years, the time all pike anglers yearn for as the geese sing Summer's swan song and we make our plans for the winter ahead.

While I've long given up pondering the vagaries of the weather, I can't help wondering what this autumn's going to bring when we get back on the rivers. You never know, the brief heatwave widely tipped to happen as July gives way to August might not be enough to bring them to a weed-choked standstill.

But the last couple of winters have shown there are a lot less pike, particularly smaller fish, in some of our waterways. It'll be a season or two before we know whether this year's spawning was a success.

Yet the summer's downpours might just have been what nature needs to start restoring the balance, after two dry years. Spare a thought for that, as long as the rain lasts.

No lure rod..? Then best make a run, Hun

You can smell the ozone as we take the winding path down to the beach. I was going to bring a lure rod, tackled up with one of those tiny krill things you can cast miles, but I've decided to take a camera instead to capture the storm clouds massing over Mussel Bay.

The sea's almost flat calm, as we walk along the foreshore, clouds shrouding the last of the sun. A few pictures, then the thunder echoes off the cliffs as the first drops of rain fall. Time to make a run, Hun, I tell the wife.

As we turn for home, I see terns diving for whitebait a few yards off the shoreline, accompanied by the odd swirl. Bass...! Should have brought the lure rod after all, with that krill thing you can cast miles. By the time we get back to ours, 10 minutes later, it's raining so hard our road's turned into a river.

Crazy weather by the time pike fishing starts

This is one of my favourite newspaper front pages of the last few days. Lightning, hail, gales and even heatwaves, says the strapline.

My guess is that over any period of six months, it's a fairly safe bet we're likely to see all four - not to mention rain, snow and ice. And by the time pike fishing begins in earnest again, it could well be a bit colder than it is now.

Those whose working arrangements have a degree of flexibility - or recurring bouts of mystery illness, requiring spells off work when their local waters are fishing well - fastidiously pore over the forecasts.

Sometimes, I compare notes with co-conspirators. When you out next week..? Tuesday, Wednesday or Thursday - or maybe Friday, depending on the weather.

Reckon it'll be best before that cold front gets here on Tuesday, Wednesday while it's still here or Thursday after that's blew through..? Um, I'm not sure I buy their conclusions on how that frontal system's going to develop once it crosses the Azores. I mean, that could easily stall when it hits that trough of low pressure over the Irish Sea and be delayed by a day or two. So you reckon that'll be better Thursday then..?

+++Weather Update... Met Office now saying we've had the wettest June since records began, more stats here.

Pike fishing when it's black over Will's mother's

It rained all the way to the far-flung broad. By the time we'd made it up the river and turned off down the winding dyke, the clouds scudding in from the North Sea seemed so low you could stand on a thwart and touch them.

Many years ago, in the pre-internet era, there was a lively debate in the letters pages of Pike and Predators about the weather. One well-known pike angler said he'd never caught a decent one when it was raining. Another had a list as long as your arm of pike caught when it was pissing down.

My catches - or lack of - fall into the first category. I remember one twenty from the Ouse on a wet day nearly 10 years ago, and a picture where I look like I've given up the will to live, despite a decent fish on the bank.

On the day this picture was taken, a few winters back, we didn't catch until the skies lightened as the sun began to sink.When I say we, my podna had four or five in quick succession, while I sat run-less. Podna changed his rigs and tried popping up his baits against the weedbeds, balanced by just a couple of swan shots on the trace.

He took a few casts to get this right, with rods held high and the wind on the braid pulling the lightly-anchored rigs against the weed fringe.  I was so wet I was past caring, so I just threw them out and sulked over the rods.

Therein lies the lesson, perhaps. If you keep thinking you're going to catch, keep trying different things and you might be in with a shout. Lose all interest, sit there moaning about the weather and you probably won't.

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. 

Sump thing sure has changed

The first run comes minutes after I get the last rod in. A screaming take from a 3lbs jack. As I drop it back, another one's off. 

A plan was forming, as I loaded up the car. I'd try a pit I haven't fished seriously in years, where a stretch of bank offers a gentle increase in depths from a couple of feet to the deepest part of the water.

The idea was start in the shallows and move the rods into deeper water until I found the pike. This lasted until I got out there and found most of the swims were too overgrown with alder to fish.

Water levels were down to the lowest I'd ever seen them too, with barely a trickle of water through the outfall. This meant there was enough exposed bank on a corner which was usually underwater to get the rods out over the reed fringe, so I decided to give it a go there.

I like corner swims, because you can cover a lot of water. I put one up the margins on either side of me, in five or six feet of water,  and one out into the deeper hole. First the right-hander goes, followed by one cast along a reed line as I'm returning the first fish.

Two jacks becomes three almost as soon as I get the rod along the reed line back out. I recast and one takes it almost as soon as it hits the water, but comes off as I bend into it. I miss two further runs, one after another.

All the action's on the reed line. Or rather it was, as the swim dies on me.  Six runs in an hour adds up to a pack of jacks. This is the part of the pit where you used to find the bigger pike in the winter.

For the reed-fringed corner hides a secret in the shape of the sump - an area dug down to collect the water while the pit was being excavated. When it gets really cold, this is where the pike get to.

But it's not really cold today. It's as mild as anything. The westerly's lost its wrath overnight and it must be 10 degrees by 10am. There's a mackerel sky forming, like I haven't seen in years.

When I twitch a bait, it fouls. I reel in and find it covered in Canadian pondweed. Bright green Canadian pondweed - not the black, rotting stuff you sometimes collect on your hooks on gravel pits in the middle of winter.

The alder bushes behind me are in bud. When the next fish takes the bait, the penny drops. I sweep the rod back and find something slightly larger on the end. Not quite a jack, not quite a double - a jouble maybe.

It's one of the most vividly-marked pike I've seen in ages, so I snap a quick picture or two. I'm struck by the line of scales behind its eyes. This is no young eight pounder. I'm guessing it's a slower-growing male pike, few of which ever get to weigh over double figures.

This is so that during spawning, when they swim eye to eye with the female, their milt reaches the eggs as she sheds them. Male pike usually gather before the females arrive in the areas where they spawn.

I return it and when I get another run half an hour or so later, it's the same fish. Up the road on the Norfolk coast, there are daffodils already in bloom. An idea forms as I slip it back for the second time - is the weather now so out of kilter that the male pike on this pit are already gathering ready to spawn.