A Fenland Piker’s Tale
My love affair with the Cambridge and Norfolk Fens began many years ago and I’ve spent many hours, days seeking out monsters. Sadly it’s never really happened for me; however I have put some mates onto the odd monster, including a 31lb pike on a venue I had fished for 20 odd years and never had a 30 from it [or anywhere else even now]
Enough of monsters this is a tale of much laughter, well it was on my part.
I was fishing a nice little very steep sided fenland drain, with my long time fishing partner, Alan. Alan and I have fished together for 30 odd years and have shared some remarkable catches over the years. This particular day I had picked Alan up from his just in Norfolk home and we headed off to the aforementioned drain. Parking up beside some farm buildings out of sight of the nearby road, the idea was to have a quick sprint across a couple of fields and drop into the drain without attracting any suspicion from any passing anglers.
This was the start of the problems as the fields had just been ploughed and ploughed very deeply, so deeply that the plough had pulled up some mega sticky clay from way down towards Australia. After staggering across the quagmire we finally made it to the drain and slid into it. Normal practice was to slide down on your backside and dig your heels in as you got down to water level. It was then just a case of slowly edging along and casting around with various lures.
This method had in the past produced fish of 21 and 25 pounds to us. Spinnerbaits were pretty good but I found a completely white alphabet lure was the bollocks. If you didn’t always catch, it did attract loads of follows in the crystal clear water producing much swearing and excitement.
It was while I was getting a few follows that I heard a splashing from Alan’s direction and it was obvious he was into a small fish. I in the meantime had managed to get a bit of an old tangle as some loose line fell off my spool. As I tried to untangle it Alan called out and asked would I go and help him, I replied ‘in a minute, I’ve got a bit of a tangle’

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