It's the pits

This Christmas, for the first time in 20 years, I did not go pike fishing on Boxing Day. It’s pretty depressing.
There are two reasons why this great tradition – which I share with a few friends – didn’t happen. The main reason was the weather. In common with many parts of the UK, we’ve had a long period of rainy days, and the rivers are bank-high, flooding the meadows with ochrous water. It’s raining down now – huge drops clattering on the conservatory roof.
We always lay our plans late to take the weather into account. We’ve had a couple of years when stillwaters have been frozen and the more active Fen drains have been the best option. This year, I had in mind some messing around in boats on the Broads.
Those plans were scuppered partly because the two boatyards which rent angling boats were closed but also because, as the Christmas week approached, it was plain that the rivers which give access to the Broads will be in full flood; it was academic in any case with the lack of boats. So we were running out of options in the final days and out attention turned to gravel pits.
When I worked on Angling Times, the choice of waters around me was astonishing. Throughout the Nene, Welland and Ouse valleys, construction had led to literally hundreds of gravel pits being dug; the problem when I went fishing was always deciding which pit to fish. Many of them were untended and unpoliced, so free to fish. A few were being run by angling clubs on a day ticket. But only a very few had the ‘Private fishing’ signs up, run by syndicates.
Now, 30 years on, the reverse is true. One by one, landowners have signed their gravel pits over to syndicates and now there is virtually no local gravel pit remaining where I and turn up and fish. To make things worse, the syndicates are almost exclusively formed by and run by carp anglers.
Now, I have nothing against carp angling per se, but there are a great many unsavoury individuals among their throng; somehow, along the way, carp fishing has achieved a ‘well ‘ard’ reputation and attracted the men who now run many of these syndicates, as I have found out to my cost. I went blackberrying with my wife and small daughter around one I used to fish. On leaving, we were confronted by a carp thug bailiff, who only just fell short of the quota of swear words which would have earned him a punch in the face.
Something similar happened when a friend and I walked on to a fishery to ask two anglers there (in the absence of a useful sign) who ran the syndicate. The syndicate head was, in fact, this man; the other a man I suspect was the landowner. The sheer affrontery of us walking on the grass had the syndicate thug’s face glowing red, and to say he was abrupt would be an understatement. But what he really wanted to say – but didn’t because of the landowner’s presence – came to my mate at the specimen group two weeks later; a torrent of abuse and physical threats.
So we have handed fisheries over wholesale to a variety of people – not all thugs, I might add – and increasingly lost them to the wildlife trusts and water skiers. From the many hundreds of gravel pits within 30 miles of my home, there are now virtually none I can fish on a Boxing Day day ticket when the river’s in flood. Even if I had joined one of the syndicates, I still would not be allowed to enjoy a day’s semi-serious fishing with friends; and they live too far away for buying a £30 club book on one of the others to make sense.
It strikes me that a great many ordinary anglers – especially new recruits or late returners – are in the same situation. They have only one real option in flood conditions, and that’s to head for the nearest commercial carp pond and catch some suicidal and starving stockies. No wonder angling has turned the corner towards what I view as the wholly artificial experience of pastie bashing. It’s the only game in town. The owners aren’t abusive.
I fully understand why syndicates are seen a preferable by riparian owners to the free-for-all of day ticket fishing; a lot less work, a great deal more control. But this has just cost me my Boxing Day piking. And on the horizon, I see many more occasions when an occasional social gathering of anglers becomes more difficult than it is now. Discuss.