There’s no point having a birthday if you have to go to work...so I always take my birthday off. Having had a horrendously long day on Monday I needed some relaxation so the plan was to get up at a reasonable time, see the girls and then head for Hopton for a spot of codding. I wasn’t too optimistic as the weather had been atrocious on Monday but as it happened it dawned reasonably well and with the children duly deposited at school I headed for beach road.
I parked up and started unloading. The Scupper was (already) rigged for fishing and sailing and so it was a case of getting dressed, including my new home-knitted socks that my wife had given me that morning and tackled up. In the mean time somebody wandered up the ramp in a drysuit...
“Snapper?”
“Yes, Hi!”
“I’m John’s brother”
Aha...this made sense. It looked like he’d beaten his brother down here. Justin had been out and had a nice (first) trip downtide before coming back to the beach again and had caught a codling too. So we went back out together.
I didn’t know quite what time the tides were doing what so ended up in the exact spot I needed to be before deciding I was the wrong side of it, paddling south and being completely off the mark as the tide was still running. Bugger. Anyway, life’s too short to worry about such things and so I baited up and got the lines out. A few small nibbles on the 6/0 pennel kept me awake but frustrated.
The sea was a bit bumpy and t was both damp and misty out there but nothing to be concerned about. The 25mph south westerly was a pain in the arse but still okay and the pair of us sat it out. Then it started to drizzle. I headed in at slack to fetch something from the van and picked up a lovely wave and surfed the last fifty metres inadvertently (but nicely). I then had issues getting out again and had to let go of the yak before mounting it. Funnily the sea had changed in that short time.
I sailed out to Justin and clipped back up to my anchor reel the tide had now turned and we were wind over tide. The current was picking up, the wind was picking up and the waves were picking up. I concentrated as I rigged up, figuring that my decision to stay or go would be made over the next half an hour – if it got any worse we were going in. As it was, it eased as the tide picked up. It was still snotty but fishable.
Then I got the first bite since coming back out. Hesitant it was. Ten again a few minutes later. Then a monster bite and the rod tip bounced around like crazy – I wound down and up came this:
My PS codling! A good sign this, a year-old youngster. It went back of course and I continued to fish to no avail although Justin had one of a similar size.
After a bit more inactivity I started to run low on bait and decided it was time to head in. Bites had dropped off and the tide was still increasing so in we went, recovering our anchors with surprising ease and landing on the beach with no trouble at all. After a good natter with Justin it was time to head home to prepare sushi and barbecue.
Saturday morning was forecast to be windy and wet and being wasted anyway I decided against sitting on my arse in the rain so cancelled and had a lie in. I regretted it all day as I woke up to a pretty fair spring morning. Ah well, there’s always tomorrow...
Tomorrow dawned nice, probably. I couldn’t face getting up too early so arranged to meet Steve down at Hopton for 7. I had all kinds of good intentions in the meantime though, namely sorting the van out, rigging my rods and so on. But no, I just really couldn’t be bothered. So, I went to bed.
I arrived at the beach at 7 and it was glorious – a beautifully sunny morning, not too much wind and the sea was pretty flat. Granted the tide had turned and the flood was starting but that’s no great issue really on such a beautiful morning. Even if it was one day after the vernal equinox ;D
I was really slow getting sorted out. Everything was in disarray as I’d not hit the salt in a fortnight and that hadn’t been for fishing. Still, eventually I got down to the water’s edge and paddled out to the mark, guided by GPS. I dropped anchor just up from the mark and settled down to fish around the sides of Steve who ended up in front of me ;D Usually it’s me cramping his style but we’re mates so it doesn’t matter. The tide was already pretty strong as we baited up and started to fish. Two worms and a squid head on a 6/0 pennel and 1 worm and a squid head on each hook of a 2/0 triple flapper.
It only took about half an hour before the bites started. Both of us missed one in the first instance – I lost the squid off my pennel, the only bite on it as it turned out. Then, a minute or two later a bite on the flapper rig and as I wound tight the rod arched over. The combination of the current and a pissed off fish gorged on sprat and herring ensured a cracking scrap and it took a couple of minutes to get the fish in – first post-spawning codling, weighed in later at a shade over 5lb. The day was a happy one!
Another half an hour passed before the next bite. P.N.Gwin phoned up and we had a chat and, moments after he rang off the rod banged down! The fish felt heavier and stronger than the first but this was purely down to the current picking up – it weighed in at a shade over 3lb. Steve had landed a small whiting by this point so I was chuffed to be outfishing him – not a common occurrence I hasten to add.
Another whiting came aboard and then shortly after it became too fast a tide to hold bottom and my yak was starting to yaw a bit. It was getting difficult to relax and so I made the decision to head in. Unfortunately Westie had just arrived and as we started in he started out ;D It’s not that you smell or anything Tim...
Anyway, we hung around on the beach chatting, being chatted up and photographing women holding my cod before saying goodbye to Tim, who was heading out again now that the tide was due to slow and headed home for the rest of the day, chuffed that the codling were coming back.
This tale will necessarily cover 21 years, so forgive me my meanderings as I fished a very special and personal place today and feel like relating the precursors to it:
Back in the old days ‘when I were a lad’ I used to fish a particular spot a couple of miles from my home. We never met with any success, using as we did garden worms, cheese, bread and bacon rind but would occasionally spot the odd roach or rudd swimming about. All this changed when my Grandfather came to stay with us for a few weeks shortly before my sixteenth birthday, having been diagnosed with a serious illness. One day he related a tale of his courting days when he had borrowed his fathers old rod, wicker fishing basket, reel loaded with cat-gut and went down to the water’s edge with my grandmother-to-be. Now, no fishing was done that day by my Grandfather but he did spot someone returning home with a pike that had been caught and so he decided to buy it from him and take it home for dinner.
My Great Grandmother prepared this fish for the table that my Grandfather had brought back from his fishing trip and they all ate their fill. It wasn’t until later that my Great Grandfather stated that, nice as it was, he didn’t believe that his son had caught it, not least of all on his rod, to which my Grandfather replied:
“I never said I did”.
Now, my Grandfather then told me that he had never eaten Pike since. Personally, I had never caught one and had seen very few BUT I figured that I could at least try and catch one for my Grandfather to eat and so, armed with frozen whiting from a previous trip to Gorleston pier I duly tied my rods to my racing bike that weekend and cycled across the marshes to my old fishing spot. I had no idea whether there were pike there or not but my Grandfather (although he didn’t know it at the time) was dying and my aim was to bring back a memory.
Well, from memory I was using a bamboo boat road and my beach caster, possibly my lucky green rod too. Line was probably 25lb mono and the traces were whatever old shitty pieces of wire trace that had lurked unused and inherited from God-knows-where in the bottom of my and my brother’s tackle boxes. I cast the baits into the dyke and waited for the floats to disappear. Impatiently, being fifteen!
Eventually one went down and I fought the fish for a little while – it was strong, easily the strongest and largest fish I’d ever hooked...but I didn’t know about drag settings and straight-lined it...it crash-dived and snapped me off. Crestfallen, I failed to get another bite in the remaining hours of light and wandered up towards the road to break down my rods and go home. I dropped the one bait in by the end of the dyke and proceeded to dismantle the other.
I returned to the rod and was curious at what was going on – the float was right up to the bank a few feet from where I’d dropped it. Funny that, oh well, reel in, break down and go home...but it wasn’t that simple. Darkness had fallen and the pike were feeding – and I had another on! Don’t mess around Mark, this one is for Grandpa...I fought it to a standstill and brought it ashore – my first pike, all 3lb 10oz of it. I’d done it!
Now I apologise for such a dreadful photograph of an obviously dead pike but this one I will never feel ashamed of. I had no camera of my own so it had to wait until I got it home, in a carrier bag, before having its photograph taken. I can clearly remember the pandemonium when I returned – my brother declared it was a monster (he repeated this some fifteen years later, but that’s another story), and that we had to be careful because somebody kept one in his empty bath once and the next day it jumped up and bit him and everyone else crowded around to look at it. Nobody could believe that I’d caught it, least of all me! Well, the next day we ate it, baked somehow and while all remarked how lovely it was it would seem that there wasn’t 100% honesty about that. Grandpa was pleased though, I think, and I really felt as proud as any teenager possibly could.
Of course, I had the bug now. I was going to become a piker, no more messing around with tiddlers; I wanted to feel a fight from a fish! The following weekend my mate and I went back to the same spot...this time my beach caster had half a whiting attached to a trace made up from a 2/0 single and a size 6 treble when it was taken.
It was a long struggle before I saw what I’d caught and using my brother’s old (gifted) landing net my mate and I scooped it up, unhooked it, jumped and danced and then, with him holding the net in the water I ran to the nearby train station car park and phoned mum to bring some scales and a camera...
My mum grabbed the bathroom scales (!) and jumped into my brother’s car which he proceeded to cross the marshes in at break neck speed as I’d said the fish was bigger than the previous week’s capture. They got over the gate to the field we were in and came down to have a look at this poor pike that had suffered the ignominy of being bested by a teenager and subsequently been forced to hang around for an age to be weighed and photographed by someone unable to even hold it properly...I cringe when I view this photograph now.
22lb 4oz...My second pike a specimen! It made the papers.
I continued fishing this dyke once the season restarted, spending a fair bit of the summer of 1989 on its banks and continuing to visit it over the next few years and although I had a few fish out to double figures it never really seemed to fish brilliantly. Summer was weedy, winter was murky and bait choice seemed to be the key – Smelt was best. Lures occasionally worked but I never had that much success on them here and found it difficult to get them in the water at times and although I sometimes saw good pike in the dyke they seemed very sporadic in their feeding. Looking through an old box of photographs these two are all that I can turn up from the time before I pretty much put one type of rod away to dedicate my time to putting another rod away ;)
March 1993...I was about to head off to Miami to join a ship and begin a new career as a cruise ship photographer. I decided that what my girlfriend really needed before I went was a fishing session and so at first light just before the end of the season we went, unlicenced, to my old spot for a piking session. Other things would also have been on the cards of course but unfortunately others were fishing there too. Well, there was nothing for it but to fish and so my KP Scarborough centrepin was put into action with a Smelt on it and a wait ensued until finally I noticed that I’d got a fish on – within feet of where the 22lb 4oz one had taken the bait five years before...
23lb 6oz. A belter of a fish and still my biggest pike...I pretty much stopped fishing that year and so rarely managed more than a glance at the dyke as I passed by now and again en-route to doing something else. Then I started to fish again, discovered kayak fishing and it seemed somehow ridiculous to launch a 15ft craft into such a small water. I wanted to beat that fish but somehow I didn’t feel it’d count if I wasn’t on a yak and so I didn’t get around to fishing this water again...until this morning.
Last weekend saw us playing in the waves at Gorleston and I realised that the coarse season was about to end. There was nothing for it but to plan a session to finish it on a pike and why not hit the old spawning ground again after so long? Being a slightly secret location I figured that a general invite was not ‘right’ and so politeness saw me asking the guys I was with when I thought of it. Of those one was unable to make it, one decided filming would be more productive and one fished non-comittedly from the bank as I got myself afloat on my old stomping ground.
It was a pleasant enough morning, dry and reasonably mild with little wind (at least below the level of the bank) and once afloat my feeling of overkill left me – in fact I now fancy trying to find small waters to fish from the yak for the challenge of it. I set out on the long paddle to my twenties mark – around a hundred yards up-dyke ;D
Out went two rods, both with float-fished smelt, and I sat back to wait while chatting to Steve and, later, Jason. Nothing was really happening but this isn’t unusual for this water, I’ve blanked here so many times. I guess a good hour and a half had passed by the time I’d had enough of the lack of action and so I decided to paddle to the other ends of the dyke where they are cut off and cause a bit of disturbance, perhaps driving the fish down towards my spot with my return. It was fun going beneath the bridge as flat as I could get and, of course, doing a 33 point turn at the end before returning to my original spot.
The disturbance worked. A pike took my smelt. I reeled and it thrashed, not the hoped-for twenty, a mere tenth of that, but a very welcome little jack graced my yak. The markings were perfect and it was a beautiful example of the species with which to begin my freshwater tally for the year and with which to reacquaint myself.
I called it a day straight after and off we went to Jason's for breakfast. It just shows really, some things never change and this area of Norfolk certainly hasn’t. It’s still an area where fish can be had in the least likely of spots and I will make the effort to pay attention to it in the future.
