Monster pike mystery solved at the Village Pond

It's 5am and no-one's about, which is just as well when you're about to try pike fishing with a sausage roll for bait. But I've done my research and thought long and hard about this, fine tuning my approach down to the last detail. As I creep across the Village Green, I feel the hand of history on my shoulder.

I've sliced up a sausage roll ready to throw it in the Village Pond to see if there's really a pike called Mike in said water, which has developed a taste for pastry products from the Village Shop over the road.

When I scoffed at the last pike in village pond story which hit the Parish Magazine - distributed by the parish council on the last Wednesday of every month, with a foreword from the Vicar - I got it badly wrong.

There really was a pike in the village pond concerned. And someone caught it at over 28lbs. So this time, the gloves are off. I have a steer on where it knocks about. I know it's been devouring sausage rolls like they're going out of fashion, mainly thanks to the Bread Man and the Village Shop Lady.

As I sit back on the Memorial Bench with a double expresso from Starbucks in a can, I feel quietly confident. I have brought three sausage rolls with me, for the benefit of those who may be wondering how the sausage roll method pans out in practical terms.

Those who fish on a tight budget may care to note that it is cheaper to buy sausage rolls in threes from the Village Shop, with a triple pack weighing in at £1.99, as opposed to 99p each for single sausage rolls.

This clearly represents a considerable saving over the course of a season. I also once found a pubic hair in a sausage roll from the Village Shop, back in the days when I bought them one at a time, but have never to date experienced this problem with triple packs of sausage rolls.

Sausage roll one, as in the first sausage roll out of a pack of three, is for baiting up with. Sausage roll two, as in the second sausage roll, has been attached to a trace via a pair of size four Owner ST36 trebles. Sausage roll three, for those who like to keep count of their sausage rolls, is in case this turns into a longer session than envisaged and I require food to see me through, although I may inspect it for stray body hair of the short and curly variety first to be on the safe side.

I have attached a two ounce lead to the trace clip, which you need to sink a sausage roll from the Village Shop. This is owing to the highly bouyant nature of its folds of puff pastry which is made by Marnie, who works at the Village Shop on Tuesdays, Thursdays and Saturday mornings.

I am not sure what Marnie does to the puff pastry which encompasses the sausage rolls they sell in the Village Shop, not to mention whether she was the cause of the pubic hair issue I once had with a sausage roll from said outlet. But they are so bouyant that you could probably get away without a life jacket if you ate one or two before you went out on a boat and stuffed a couple more in your pockets just in case. 

I have also tied a poly ball to the bottom hook, so the sausage roll will sit just under the surface, as I twitch it back. The pike will see this as a silhouette, but should hopefully be able to ascertain that this is a premium sausage roll, made from organic pork with extra sage and onion without added preservatives,  from the Village Shop.

Presentation counts, in my experience. And details like this can sometimes make all the difference.

The chances of anyone I know coming along are fairly remote at this time of the morning. This is fortunate, as I am doing my best to keep the Village Pond off the radar, to spare Mike the inevitable attention that speculation in the weekly angling papers might bring.

I am wrestling with the dilemma of whether or not to go public in the Parish Magazine, with the background to the pictures blurred in Photoshop, when a chunk of sausage roll disappears in a swirl. I reach for the rod. It's game on.

A gentle overhead lob, past the free offerings, and the rig lands in a straight line just shy of the reeds on the far bank. As I twitch the popped-up sausage roll, a bow-wave appears as a long, dark back scythes through the water towards the puffs of silt kicked up by the lead and the bouyant pastry snack on the end, made by Marnie from the Village Shop, from organic pork with added sage and onion - not to mention the occasional public hair.

I can see the headline in the Parish Magazine, which generally comes out around the last Wednesday of every month, with a foreword from the Vicar.

EXCULSIVE - Pike Ace tames monster in Village Pnod

Veronica, the Vicar's wife, does not always use spell-check. At times, this has been the source of some controversy, such as the occasion when the Count of Monte Christo led the bill at a film festival at the Village Hall. But I understand the pressure the modern media often find themselves under and am sure she will do the story justice if I supply her with quotes and pictures.

It may even make the front page, and rival talking points such as the lack of bins for dog mess on the Village Green, or the day the bell ringers smuggled a sheep home on the bus after their annual outing to Fakenham and released it in the Village Pub, where it now works behind the bar.

I see the sausage roll hovering in the margins, as I give it one last twitch. A shape glides into sharp focus from the depths, long and dark, with piggy little eyes. I strike the bait off just in time and the fish devours it as it floats to the surface.

Mike the Pike is no pike after all. It's a sodding great grass carp. As I pack up the rod and net, I see the Bread Man's van coming down the hill, as the lights in the Village Shop go on.

To Coles of King's Lynn, for sardines

I've always been a big fan of Coles of King's Lynn. Tucked away on an industrial estate, on the way to Wisbechistan, it's well worth the trek for one reason. Their bags of sardines appear to have side-stepped the recession and still cost less than £2.50.

For this you get 10 glazed pilchards - as sardines are known in the part of the world where I come from, which have an almost metallic sheen to them when they thaw. I think they're just that bit fresher and oilier than the ones you get from bait companies - probably because they're good enough to eat.

Take them out still frozen and they're a great bait. Hardly anyone else seems to share my fondness for them, so maybe that adds to their appeal to the pike. You can also get a few casts out of one if you're careful, and make sure the top hook goes into their backbone before you sling 'em out.

There are other reasons Coles has a bit of a cult following, mainly among people who are fond of fish. They sell just about everything the sea throws up in this part of the world and beat the pants off the supermarkets when it comes to quality. Well worth a look next time you're passing - especially if you're into fish.

John Roberts run rings reviewed

These might not look like the most exciting bit of kit, but two quid's worth will last you a season and enable you to make what's probably the perfect rig for legering deads. Thread one of the rings up your line, followed by one of the rubber beads and that's it - job sorted.

The bead will snug down over a size eight swivel or a Breakaway clip. Tie a link to the run ring and attach your lead to it. Simples.

Some people like a lead link longer than the trace. This looks all wrong to me, surely the fish will foul it with a hook point when it picks your bait up or get the link in its laughing gear, ergo lost lead or a pike with a headache after you smack it on the nose with your lead.

Mates tell me this is my usual paranoia, don't worry four eyes tie the lead on a three foot link and hull it out there. I tend to ignore this and have a link shorter than the trace, so the lead is just ahead of the bait.

Either way, you can cast a lot further than you can with a bomb running on the line straight off a bead or clip, with no link. You also get less tangles.

If the link wraps around the trace on the way in, get your scissors out and do like what we do - cut the tail off the bait, which is what makes it spin on the way back when you're reeling in. It also stops the tail masking a hook when you pull into a fish, so the ironmongery goes into the pike's gob, not the bait's tail.

The rings eventually groove if you use braid. I chuck them when this happens, as they're only 10p a throw. I've never had one break on me, even when using 4oz leads for distance or when the Ouse is flowing hard.

John Roberts make several other little bits and bobs that are usually a couple of quid for enough to last yonks.

Pike fishing's Royal connections

Maurice Roche - better known as Lord Fermoy - was the MP for King's Lynn in the 1920s and for a brief spell in the 1940s. He lived at Park House, on the Royal Estate and as a friend of King George V and keen angler could fish the lake at Sandringham.

This caption accompanying this undated picture in his autobiography says he's fishing for pike. There's no mistaking the building in the background.

I wonder what happened to the pike - or if there are any still in the lake, a stone's throw from the Queen's Norfolk retreat.

Could weevils be the answer to dreaded weed..?

Here's a familiar early season sight on some of the drains and rivers in the Fens. They call it blanket weed, but it's actually a species of fern called azolla, which can reproduce so fast it doubles in size in days and forms a thick blanket across the surface.

It comes from Australia and SE Asia, where it's grown alongside rice in paddy fields, to fertilise the old basmati and keep mosquitos at bay. When it gains a foothold in a drain, it soon ends up looking like this one.

In bad years, it can cover miles of waterway, making it impossible to fish. Now the Environment Agency is experimenting with a natural cure, that might nip the stuff in the bud.

Scientists introduced a load of weevils - bugs which feed ravenously on the stuff - to one of the Boston drains today. They're hoping it might be the answer. I know a lot of pike anglers who'd drink to that.

Last 20lbs pike from the Fens caught on film

Talking about the Ouse and my miserable failure to catch a twenty downstream of Queen Adelaide had me rooting through my old pictures to find one of a 20lbs pike from anywhere on that part of the system. I knew I'd had a few back in the dim and distant, when the river was throwing up a lot more of them than it has in recent seasons.

Here's one from - struggling to remember exactly when - the back-end of the season some years ago. After poncing about here and there all day, my partner in crime and I adjourned to an obvious feature where a degree of stealth was required.

I can't recall much else about the capture, other than it was probably the last fish of any size I caught which was photographed on film. Nowadays, thanks to digital cameras and phones that take pictures, we happily snap away all day.

A few years back a film would often last me half the season. Despite the fact I was once a photographer, this did not guarantee a clear, sharp shot of your latest twenty.

There would also be a nervous wait to see whether the pictures had come out, or whether they'd be fogged, wrongly-exposed or fall victim to some other catastrophe, like your mate cutting your head or half the fish off.

Worse still, if you used slide film, you had the added possibility of the pictures getting lost in the post to and from the lab - or, as once happened to me, getting someone else's slides instead. I can remember pictures of a low-twenty, that morphed into someone's office Christmas party by the time they landed on my doormat.

The girl photocopying her, um, charms brightened up my day. But I'm guessing the person who took them wasn't too impressed when he opened the envelope and found pictures of me with a fish. When I wrote and complained, I got a free roll of slide film.

Tornado risk 'high' in Fens tomorrow

Regular readers will know I'm well into the weather. Tomorrow could turn out to be an interesting day on that front, as a forecaster's just told me there's a high risk of a tornado in the Fens. Give me a shout if you see one.

Best river for pike fishing in the Fens

One thing that never ceases to amaze me is how different cliques of pike anglers view different waters in the Fens. Their experiences sometimes lead them to draw conclusions which are completely at odds with each other's - how one man's meat is another man's poison, if you like.

Take the Ouse, a river which has been good to me on a handful of occasions over the 15 seasons I've fished it, dealing me a bum hand far more frequently than a decent fish or two.

I've never caught a twenty downstream of Queen Adelaide. What few I've ever caught from the river have come from one or two areas with little in common, other than they were throwing up a few good fish at a time when I was fascinated by the Ouse and spent a lot of time trying to get to to grips with it.

Just as I started thinking I'd got my head round the river, it went off the boil for me. Some big fish came off another stretch I was targeting a few seasons back. I knew I was fishing bang on the money, right swims, right method. But could I catch it - the fish nudging 30lbs that was knocking about the same area..? Sadly not.

We wrote it off in the end, my mates and I. One big fish in one big, daunting river, we seemed fated not to catch. To add insult to injury, I lost a big fish off one of the few runs I ever managed on that part of the Ouse one freezing February afternoon, as ice formed across the river.

Yet others were quietly catching with a different approach, completely at odds to ours. It seemed so obvious I kicked myself, when one of them candidly explained it to me after I quizzed him about pictures I'd seen that looked like the area we'd been fishing.

The first time I tried their method, I had seven or eight fish to mid doubles from a stretch I'd given up on in a single morning. No monsters, but I thought I'd cracked it all the same.

I told a mate, we went back the weekend after and blanked. I tried the same swims several times as the season wore on without success. At the start of last season, I had a lanky double on the bank first chuck doing it their way. That turned out to be the only run I managed in half a dozen trips up and down that part of the river.

By then, another water was screaming fish me, fish me. That turned into another long haul, but at least we finished the season with a couple of twenties each.

Towards the end of it, I bumped into one of the guys who'd done well on the Ouse. He hadn't had a run on the water we were fishing. But he'd had a couple of twenties on the river - from the bit we'd long since given up on.

You should try down there, he said. People say it's hard, but it's loads easier than here.

Click here for a 20lbs pike from the Ouse caught on film.