Barrie Rickards' Angling - Tabloid Pike

By the time you read this I shall not long have returned from sunning myself on South Australia's beaches, and fishing. I've got a new travel bag into which I can comfortably fit a twelve foot (telescopic) beachcaster, as well as a small spinning rod and a light fly rod. Plus reels of course. Telescopics get better and better, and I am currently doing my piking with a pair of telescopic carp rods with test curves of 2½ lbs. It has certainly cut down the length of my quiver. I'll report on all this in due course - the Australian fishing as well as the telescopic carp rods.

Immigrants plundering our waters

The business of immigrants plundering our waters for food does seem to be getting worse now. Almost daily in the fens we hear of new confrontations. A lot of them are after pike, which is not good news. If you come across these people it will pay to be careful. Phone the police and the Environment Agency. The latter will get there before the former, but neither will be quick off the mark, so try to get some car numbers and descriptions. Anyone who has travelled abroad much knows that in some countries this kind of 'fishing' is not unusual, which is why some of their waters have no fish. What is such a pity is that the appropriate authorities are not issuing guidelines, in the appropriate language, telling people how to behave in this country. The only reason there is anything in our waters worth plundering is because anglers have looked after the waters for the last hundred years, aided more recently by the EA.

The Pike Anglers Club has been chasing this issue, strongly supported by the Specialist Anglers' Association, but all anglers will benefit, not just pike anglers. At a recent SAS a representative of the EA was present, and he had matters explained to him in fairly succinct manner by both Colin Goodge (PAC chairman) and myself. I'm sure he took back to central office a clear message. In the meantime, should you bump into these menaces (the fish plunderers, not the EA!) then please let Colin Goodge know of the circumstances (2 Barton Close, Witchford, Nr Ely, Cambs). He will prepare a list of incidents and use them to add pressure to those who should act on our behalf.

Those monstrous and savage pike

Just been reading Tom Quinn's book on ancient angling “unlikely” stories. A lovely read, almost in the sound bit mode though, with many short stories re-told. As you might expect there are stories of aggressive pike, and monster pike. All anglers know that most of these stories, which hit our own presses today about once a year, are really nonsense. The public doesn't know that and if our investigative journalists, who pen the pieces, know then they are not saying so. It's all a bit of fun really unless some anti-angling body like the RSPB starts killing pike on the grounds that they are supposed to be eating their birds. (Even if they were, which I doubt, haven't they always done so?).

In the past I have knocked all these stories, as they truly deserve, but for reasons of brevity and punchiness in the article I have not enlarged on the extent to which a pike will have a go at things.

My mind goes back many years when Ray Webb and I were catching a few big bags of pike on Hornsea Mere in East Yorkshire. Big fish came very close indeed to the boat, following lures and baits. Not infrequently they went under the boat too. Everyone has experienced this, of course, but I remember saying to Ray that I wouldn't fancy trailing my fingers in the water when we were rowing from A to B. Or my toes. After all, we'd had unhooked lures attacked as we rowed from a to B, so why not a wriggling finger or toe?

I was reminded of this in Tom Quinn's book when there is a story of a small boy having his foot grabbed by a pike when he was paddling out into a weirpool. I can think of circumstances where this might be possible. For example, if there is a bit of bottom weed and debris around and you are feeling tentatively forward with your lead foot, and you are a small boy, not overshadowing the water, the laired pike sees a wiggly toe come round a corner, into its strike zone, and… wham, it has it just as it might have a very unfish-like lure, the pike would not have to be big, would it? A 3-4 lb fish could do that.

Thereafter, naturally, the story would grow by the minute. There's no credo in being attached by a 3-4 lb pike so it would change quickly to 34lbs - or bigger - or monstrous - or big enough to have pulled a carthorse in)(or milkmaid). Disreputable lot milkmaids were.

Talking of funny things grabbing funny things I cannot remember whether I told you my experiences with the predatory crow. It was Hornsea Mere again, but in recent years, when I was out one day with Bill Winship, now PAC President. I was working a large pike-like Bermac lure across the surface, right out in the middle of the lake in maybe a metre of water (sorry a yard of water). I was hoping a big pike would object to a small pike invading its bailiwick. Suddenly a carrion crow swooped down on the lure, grabbed it in its 'talons' and flew up about thirty to forty feet into the air! I was struggling like buggery to get the camera out of the rucksack, when it dropped it - from a height. I put the camera away and the damned crow did exactly the same again! A would-be Osprey no doubt. Or perhaps it had ideas of filling a niche long vacated by Ospreys. There's something odd about Hornsea Mere! It was there, too, that after three days on the water without a deadbait run I had a screamer on whole herring. As I struck the line arced upwards and there, sixty feet up in the air, was that seagull with my bait in its beak. (I nearly said jaws!). I even missed that run.