Fishing. I don’t really remember my very first session but I know exactly where it would have been and who with. It would have been in the late Seventies and I’d have been five or six at the time. My teacher would have been my Grandmother and we would have been at the saltwater canal a hundred yards from her house (top right) in Ampuriabrava, Spain.
The first fish that I can remember catching was a Goby or Blenny, still to this date my biggest! It was a good 4-5 inches long and I remember being leant over the stone canal wall, flat on my belly, with a net. I’d spotted a crab and was trying to scoop it up – maybe it was a crab, maybe I was mistaken but this fish was in and I ran back to the house to show everyone. It stayed in the birdbath for a while until presumably being returned.
The net was a great pastime for a little boy and, along with my snorkel, mask and flippers, hours of fun was had in the two weeks we used to spend with my grandparents most summers. Mornings were spent on the beach and after lunchtime came the siesta for my grandfather and parents while Granny and I went to the canal. The afternoon would again involve the beach generally and after our evening meal we’d walk into own for an ice cream and to walk along the shopfronts, looking at the Toledo swords and humorous T-Shirts etc while indulging in my passion for wanting to shoot the Germans who formed around 80% of the population here in summer. Germans, as any 1970’s child would know from reading Battle, Warlord etc were our enemy and as nice as the ones my Grandparents were friends with, and as nice as the chocolate they gave me was they were still Jerry. Gott im Himmel! And sometimes we’d go out in my Grandparents boat...
As time moved on I began to use rods. These were sticks of bamboo with line tied to the end with a sliding bung float and a hook. These could be bought in quite a few places locally although Rodrigues was to become my preferred place to buy pre-tied hooks on arrival each year. Granny and I would sit by the canal trying to tempt the mullet. I can see her now – not one of those stuffy old blue-rinsed housecoat and comfy shoes Grannies, no way! Denim shorts, sandals, bikini and baseball cap was what she wore, her skin brown and freckled and her hair lightened by the sun. We’d sit there, putting tiny balls of bread paste onto the hooks and letting the mullet take them amongst the bits of baguette that we threw in to attract them. And we caught!
My brother was four years older than I and this meant that he could go out on the boat with my Grandparents after mackerel some evenings. It seemed that their method for catching mackerel was to drive Tuk-Tuk through the canals to the harbour and then spend a few hours motoring around the bay trolling feathers. There were a few stupid fish about and so some success was had and I would look on in envy when they returned.
This carried on for a few years with me mostly handlining, using bamboo or borrowing my Grandparent’s rods. Then, one birthday (I was maybe nine or ten) I received my first ever fishing rod and reel. A Woolworth’s special, about 5ft long, it lasted me for years! My brother took me outside with an arseholey bomb tied to the end of the line and taught me to cast...I did a lot of that, as well as using it as a toy to catch imaginary sharks ;D Then came the summer and it was off to Spain once more...
Well I confess I didn’t catch that...but it’s the only surviving picture of my rod. That’s the bird bath the goby/blenny was in as well those few years beforehand. Nope, they’d been out that morning or the evening before and had a few fish in the boat, some of which were destined for the smoker which now resides with me where it is still in use.
I remember very well the first time I went out on a mackerel trip. My grandmother was driving while my grandfather, brother and myself were in the back of the boat. We had a couple of rods out and were trolling along when we saw something a bit different – and a bit big! We were in the Bay of Rosas and there used to be a commercial bluefin tuna fishery here many years before apparently. This was long since closed down as all the tunny had gone, fished practically to extinction here. I say practically because there was one here right now and it wasn’t far from us! My grandfather leapt into action and we did all manner of manoeuvres around the area trying to get this fish. Grandpa picked up a rod and started to reel in at one point...my brother asked what he’d do if he hooked the big tunny...he replied that he’d fight it hard as he pumped the rod, reeled, pumped, reeled, pumped, reeled and brought in a mackerel! If only we’d had the forethought to rig the bugger as a livebait!
Another time we bottom fished. From memory we managed a mackerel and a Gurnard. This gurnard went into a bucket and the beautiful colours and markings with the splayed out fan-shaped pectoral fins got the better of my grandfather and he decided to return it alive to the water. A very lucky fish and I’ve always said that my first Gurnard will get the same treatment.
As I got older the boat got replaced with Skelm (Afrikaans for rascal) but didn’t seem to get taken out so often. But we did go out in it on occasion, either to swim or to fish and my nearly-blind grandfather had an uncanny knack for anchoring near the nudist beach...
On one occasion, anchored here with my parents and grandparents I decided to go snorkelling. In the best tradition of the divers I’d seen on TV I sat on the gunwales and tipped myself backwards off the boat. If you’ve seen the film of Dad’s Army you’ll be quite familiar with what happened next. Mainwaring stripped down, held his nose and jumped in off a piece of bridge that had come adrift to come to the same conclusion as I – both of us were knee deep. Ah well...
It was in 1990 though that finally, off Skelm, I caught my first mackerel.
Though Grandpa’s was, of course, bigger ;D
Sadly I don’t recall this particular trip!
As I reached my teens I’d go off and snorkel or fish on my own either in the canal, the harbour or the sea and used to do reasonably well. Fish to catch were gobies/blennies and mullet although I did manage a two inch long bright red wrasse on one notable occasion. The mullet were always fun – within a few minutes of throwing some bread in they’d appear and the little ones would play volleyball until some bigger ones came up to take the bait. I never had a decent one but up to a pound wasn’t impossible. One time I even saw one swimming in the harbour – slowly – with no tail. Propelled only by its pectoral fins I was quite amazed. I snorkelled that same afternoon and saw some nice-sized bream in catch bags belonging to some other fishermen on the rocks – these were the only decent sized fish I ever saw landed there.
There is a tale that needs telling. It was a year in my late-ish teens when only my mother and I were there and it was our last day. It was bloody hot, roasting in fact, and it was the middle of the day with the sun at its zenith. Both grandparents were having a siesta, my mother was sunbathing and dozing in the garden and I wandered down to the canal with an all-in-one telescopic rod and closed-face reel combo that my grandfather had brought back, I think, from the Belgian Congo when they’d left to come to Spain. Oh, and some bits of bread...
...I sat on the central jetty and started to bring in the mullet. Sure enough the small ones came up and then – holy nuts! – the biggest mullet I’d ever seen! I had to fish for this one and so I put a ball of bread onto the hook, put this inside a largish piece of baguette that could be nibbled but still allow enough time for the big one to come up and take it, cast in and waited...the tiddlers nibbled, splashed, circled...and then, gliding up, lazily, from the depths like a submarine with eyes came this mullet...mouth open...and sucked in the bread! It turned and was gone. I struck...wrong piece of bread! I tried again...and eventually the same situation arose as it glided up and I slowly moved my hand over to the rod, hovering ready to grab it as soon as it took the bait...but again it was hovering up the wrong piece so I relaxed over so slightly...
...as the rod/reel combo shot into the water as the fish turned!
Fuck!
I was in the shit now! I ran back to the house, grabbed my snorkelling gear and told my mum – her reaction mirrored mine! I raced back and went into the water (the only time I ever swam in the canal) in the vain hope that I’d see the rod swimming past me ;D I didn’t...but I eventually managed the next best thing and found it lying on the bottom. Luckily the same line that had been on in the Congo twenty-plus years before had been on and the mullet had snapped it off. Saved by bad line! I took it back, sprayed it down and dried it off, returning it to the rack. Granny was informed and promised to not say anything until we’d gone as it’d need stripping to remove the salt.
That was it as a teenager really. It was many years before I returned to Spain, driving my Mini down just after New Year with a friend when the top half of France was snowed in and people were being airlifted from stranded vehicles in the Pyrenees. Luckily by the time we go to Limoges the roads had cleared somewhat and we got through. We dangled some hooks down and got some gobies/blennies too!
Of course I couldn’t keep it up and the last few days saw me blanking from the bridge by Castello but my mate James managing a roach and a good wild carp.
The following summer I went again with my now-wife for my last visit to Ampuriabrava. We had only a few days but I was able to recapture some of the boyhood magic of snorkelling, spearfishing (finally managing to get something!) and revisiting the places I’d known so well, especially that canal. And my last fish there? Easily the biggest...a wild carp under the bridge at Castello on a handline with freelined baguette.
A year later my Grandfather died and soon after my grandmother went to live in South Africa. That’s a country with whole other bunch of stories ;)
A Snapper's Tale. Part2. Norfolk and Suffolk Kidding
Apart from my Spanish holidays as a child I didn’t really get much proper fishing done until I hit my early teens. It’s kind of difficult when one’s parents don’t fish even though health and safety wasn’t quite such a feature of life in those days. This didn’t mean, however, that fish were safe from my attentions however and I can certainly recall catching plenty, unsupervised, whilst at primary school...
Mine was an idyllic childhood...but only because I liked the outdoors. Drawbacks to growing up in a Norfolk village were a lack of playgrounds, shops and activities plus a very limited selection of children with which to be friends with. We made our own fun because we had no other choice. We were lucky in that we had space for our games with the surrounding fields and marshland as well as the two old gravel pits with their attendant woods. Playing war or cowboys, riding our bikes and go-karting down the one hill we had comprised most of our fun, the rest being found in each other’s gardens or houses.
My first memory of going onto the marsh – a walk of maybe a hundred yards from my front gate – was to look for frogs. These were small – a centimetre or two long and caught by cupping our hands over them. As with most childhood pursuits this was really competitive and only actually done to look at them with great curiosity. Next came the climbing of trees, jumping of dykes and even walking via the dykes across the marshes to the river when frozen over.
Sadly no photographs exist of the fishing that used to happen in Haddiscoe, carried out by the kids down Thorpe Road. You see Thorpe Road, on which I lived, faced the marshes and these were criss-crossed with a network of drainage dykes. This marshland was used for pasture and was a haven for wildlife of many types due to the lush grassland and occasional leafy trees fed by the rich soil and availability of water. Apart from the cattle and occasional sheep or horses we would see pigeons, pheasants, ducks, herons and swans as well as rabbits, hares and grass snakes, all of which were around in numbers and in the dykes themselves could be found newts, frogs, small fish (assumed to be minnows) and even coypu which have since been eradicated. I can recall seeing the cage traps used to trap these floating on the dykes and a Coypu Control van was often seen in the village. I even remember seeing these creatures when we first moved to the village in 1979.
So, what about the fish? Well, our tactic was not that of millions of other children who, like Topsy and Tim (yes, I still have my well-loved copy of Topsy and Tim go Fishing) used nets and jam jars trailed in clear, bubbling brooks. No, we instead would wander down to the marsh with a bucket in each hand and a pair of wellies on our feet. One bucket would be left at the top while we’d slither down the bank and, without falling in, scoop a bucketful of dyke water and bring it back to the top. We would then pour it through our hands, sieving out the fish, which would go into a bucket with cleaner water in. there was always the scent of stagnation in the water and we’d have newts, snails and leeches and the occasional frog as well as fish. To gather fifty or so fish would take little time and with luck we’d avoid disturbing the bottom too much as this would release clouds of foul-smelling black mud into the water and make our hands stink for hours...even worse was when we’d slip and our feet would go into it!
Happy days. I guess I was around seven or eight years old on the one Saturday morning when I went for a wander on my own on a beautiful summer morning. Whether both things happened on the same morning I cannot tell now but it seems like they did – and both happened within a very short distance. I am talking of my first sightings of two beautiful Broadland predators.
The first I spotted out of the corner of my eye – a flash of iridescence moving speedily to the reeds at the side of the dyke...I turned my head and caught sight for the first time of a Kingfisher in all its glory. Such a stunning bird to look at, it didn’t stay around for long but remained in my mind from then on and amazingly it was more than two decades before I was to see another. The second, just around the corner and slightly out of reach of bucket-dipping range was almost missed, hovering as it was with almost perfect camouflage...my first ever sight of that favourite fish, the pike! This pike was maybe six inches in length and finning just below the surface in a clear patch. Of course, I tried to catch it with my bucket and, startled, it dashed away with such a rapid acceleration I had no chance to see where it went. I can still visualise it now, exactly as I saw it on that day thirty or so years ago.
My cousins lived out near Peterborough and I was dispatched there one summer, at the age of around nine or ten, for a week or two. It so happened that the Nene ran through their village and there was a derelict mill and weir within easy walking distance from their house. Being by now a seasoned ‘bucket-boy’ I taught them what I knew and we were soon catching a multitude of fish from their local water too. Some were even bigger than the inch long fish I was used to, with the occasional 2 inch fish succumbing to our attentions. It was here that I had my first very memorable sighting of another species. We’d been scooping from the mill race for a while and were moving slowly upstream in a foot or two of water when I decided to scoop into some thin weed that was lining the gravel bed at this point. It was like long, thin grass and my bucket was drawn through it in one quick sweep...and, lifting it out I nearly shat myself! Three-quarters inside my bucket for about a second or two was a long, thick, slithering eel! I almost definitely shrieked at the surprise of seeing this thing and to be honest I doubt a fifty pound conger would give me as much shock now as that eel did then before it made good its escape and swam away downstream. Bugger that for a laugh!
That same ‘holiday’ saw me crabbing off the harbour wall at Well-next-the-Sea in North Norfolk as we went caravanning for a few days. Crab lines, bought from the local seaside shops, featured a fine orange string with a 2 oz watch lead and a size 6 hook hanging off a boom. With a bucket at the top of the harbour wall next to us and a whelk on the hook we’d while away a few hours bringing shore crabs up in varying sizes before piling them up in the bucket to be unceremoniously poured back at the end of the session. Cracking fun and something I did at other times as a child too, including on the day of my Grandmother’s funeral, being judged too young to attend. We also used to go crabbing on the rocks at Cromer, turning rocks over to see what we could find...i still love this now. I say i'm looking for peelers... ;)
There was a kid down the road from mine called Tony at one point. He was a few years older than I, maybe thirteen I guess, and we were friends. He would have fished with us with buckets and also at the dyke across the marshes that we used to occasionally visit in the holidays (a whole day of peace and quiet for our harassed mothers!). On this one particular occasion though I can recall my mum driving Tony and I to Beccles quay for a day’s unsupervised fishing. I have a nagging feeling there was a third member of our party which would probably have been Ben (two years younger than I) or perhaps even Grimmy (the same age but a bloody cretin). Anyway, there we were, dropped off at Beccles Quay with our rods, tackle boxes and a bucket. We began by the small wooden bridge that leads over towards where the playground is now and Tony beat us all by actually catching a fish! Not just any fish either, it was twice as long as any that any of us had ever seen...it was also the first Chub I ever saw and would have probably have weighed in at around the pound mark. Amazingly it was twenty years or so before I’d get my first one and they are now ten a penny in the Waveney here. Well, into the bucket it went and proceeded to spend a fair bit of time being gawped at and swimming amongst the bits of bread and multitude of maggots helpfully thrown in to feed it! A cracking fish it has stayed in my mind all this time while none of the rest of the day has.
Now, that was bigger than any other fish any of us had caught...so what had been the previous best? Well, my first Roach as it happened. There was a locally organised event each year organised for the kids in our parish which was called the Frolic. This was three days in the summer holidays during which parents could offload their energetic little spawn onto a plethora of assorted volunteers to do all manner of things with. There were various choices in the mornings and the afternoons and my afternoons would consist of either swimming in the pools of the local people who had them (Mr and Mrs Mears, Mrs Pope and another well-to-do family beginning with F I think) or fishing in Mr Mummery’s lake at Haddiscoe Hall. This was a mature lake of a respectable though not large size and was set amongst trees, shrubs and rhododendrons .The Mummery family were – and still are I believe – fish merchants at nearby Lowestoft and back in the early eighties there was still some semblance of a fleet here unlike now when there is just a smattering of inshore boats.
The time in question was the first time I went fishing here. There was an old boy along who volunteered to assist with the fishing every year. I think he was Italian – certainly a European of some description - and probably wasn’t as old as I remember. His job was to tie hooks on for us kids and make sure we behaved and didn’t drown. It was to him that I showed my first fish from the lake – possibly my first hook caught fish in the UK too now that I think of it. I sat on the end of a little piece of staging and cast my float into the lake and waited. It was actually not that long a wait before I got a bite and hooked into a fish. I reeled in and was treated to the site of a glistening silver Roach with bright red fins that probably weighed about four ounces. I was over the moon! I don’t think I caught anything else that day (or possibly any day in that lake) but I do recall getting admonished for running. To this day my children are familiar with the phrase learnt back then: “You don’t run on a riverbank”.
I can’t recall the last time I walked around the lake. We fished it every year at the Frolic and once gained permission from Mr Mummery to fish it as a one-off as long as we behaved ourselves but eventually the property was sold and I think the Frolic probably fizzled out – certainly we grew too old for it and so that part of my fishing life receded into the background.
Now I wouldn’t ever admit in writing that I’d done any poaching in my life, but I will say that that lake wasn’t much of a walk from my home.
A Snapper's Tale. Part 3. South Africa, the first time.
It was in 1983 I think that my parents decided it was time for us to head to the airport and fly on Trans Air Portugal to Johannesburg, South Africa, to visit my mum’s family. It was all planned to happen for Christmas and, with my Grandparents flying over from Spain as well it was to be the only time when the whole family would be together at the same time and my father saved all of his annual holiday for the trip.
The flight was LONG. We had travel Yahtzee! to play aboard the aircraft though and I was able to sleep under the seats and get free drinks all the way through the flight so it wasn’t too bad. A brief stopover in Lisbon before the second leg is remembered as being full of bustle and bright lights later than my normal bed time. From memory we were routed over Namibia where the South African Defence Force were engaged in a war at the time and finally landed at Jan Smuts International Airport as it was then called. From here we were picked up by an old friend of my mother and spent a day or two at her home, a home with a swimming pool and something I’d never even heard of – a Jacuzzi!
And then it was down to the south coast in the hired VW Jetta, a trip of a couple of days that had the added bonus of my first KFC on the way. Now, being summer time it was really hot and I suffered from an unfortunate problem by sitting on the right-hand side of the car. The problem was third degree burns from the sun that required dressing with paraffin gauze. Of course, we just knew I was sunburnt so I swapped sides for the second day of the trip and guess what? I can still just about see where it was now, although it isn’t generally noticeable.
On arrival I got to meet aunts and cousins for the first time. I’d only previously met my one aunt, Denise (more of which later) so it was all quite an amazing time for me. We’d left Zambia when my brother was four and I was only ten weeks old so he didn’t remember anyone either although my eldest cousin and my aunts and uncles all knew my father. We stayed with my mum’s eldest sister who had a swimming pool in the garden and a troop of monkeys, a lychee tree and God knew what else in the jungle behind the boundary!
I can’t recall the moment I met most of the family but certainly remember when Uncle Peter turned up. He was just back from fishing! Cigarette hanging from his mouth and his ‘Rubber Duck’ inflatable on the roof he had a couple of fish with him.
He’s what might be best described as a character ;D Imagine a mischievous child that’s aged and you are perhaps in the region of what he’s like. I was enthralled...even more so when that evening he took my brother (12) and I (9) ‘fishing’...the plan was to catch some mud prawns for bait for the following evening...
Now, my mum had clearly forgotten what her brother was like and agreed to him taking us fishing. I guess the lack of rods should have warned her though.
On arriving somewhere in the dark we were told to stay put and off went Peter. Returning shortly afterwards we were told to get out and he told us that we were okay now as he’d arranged things. Now, it seem like a cliché or a bad joke but I’m telling you it’s not – I saw a bloody pair of white teeth break into a grin and caught my first site of the security guard that he’d bribed! Bucket and cast net in hand we went off to do a spot of poaching by moonlight ;D
On our return to my other aunt’s house Peter’s sense of humour deemed it necessary to place our one prawn, largest mullet and a couple of other fish into the swimming pool. He really did know how to piss ‘Sis’ off! Of course, we then all ended up in the pool trying to remove them. If only my UK relatives were as much fun...
The next night duly arrived and off we went with our new hero, Uncle Peter. We parked up and scrambled down the side of the road and through to a spot on the bank of the Umzimkulu river. This is a pretty big river and is brackish so has a mix of fish from small freshwater species to Bull sharks and quite possibly crocodiles – almost certainly in my mind, having seen Tarzan ;D One rod was set up with the chlorinated prawn, the other with some other bait and the rods were cast in as we settled down for some fabulous stories while we waited for some perch. Peter is an excellent storyteller, as was my Grandfather and we were enthralled. And then, a bite! My brother took the first rod and reeled in a perch that was probably in the region of a couple of pounds which was kept for the pot – super eating these, ‘lekke’ as they say! Second one was mine, same sort of size, but somehow it got stuck in a tree. Now, to be fair the river has a bit of current and the tree was down in the river so it wasn’t really my fault! Anyway, that doesn’t worry kids and so peter waded in up to his chest and untangled the fish from the branches while we kept the torch on him! That’s possibly the clearest visualisation I have of that whole trip!
That was all we had that night and I have no idea when we returned home but the next day Peter turned up with these river perch deep fried in batter for us to try. We were informed that they were supposed to be cold, that was how they served it here and tucked in – and they were most definitely lekke!
The next fishy tale relates to bass fishing in the mountains. The South Africans love their Dam fishing, these being a kind of pond or lake, and they are stocked with Bass of the American type. I don’t recall if Uncle Peter was with us but my brother, father (Peter), Uncle Peter-Michael and cousins Grant and Michael (later a Springbok bass angler) came with. I don’t think Uncle Micky came but a friend of Peter-Michael, Hannes, came with his son Johannes. I think I’m right in saying that we started with flies (which were no good for me) and then rubber worms (I had one straight away, it weighed in at a kilo and was the biggest we caught that day).
It was brilliant fishing and we had another try later in the stay, just my brother and cousins, but we blanked. We did, however, see a bushbaby on the side of the road that my cousin tried to catch for me to see closer but unfortunately it had other ideas.
I don’t think I did any other fishing during that trip. We may have been to the beach one evening, surfcasting for shad or garrick but I would have been too small to be anything other than a spectator so perhaps why there is nothing more than a slight inkling in the back of my mind. It wasn’t the only fish-related thing that happened though.
We went for a day out in some valley during our stay, a family picnic and barbecue and with Peter’s ‘rubber duck’ towing me (I’d let go by the time the camera was retrieved so had to pretend to hold the tow-rope!) I had my first ride on the water on a Sit on Top! Not quite what I’m used to now but what was called a paddle ski. There were various versions of these, some designed for playing on such as this and some, like my cousin’s other one, designed for fishing from. Yes, although it’s still a very new sport in the UK the South Africans have been doing this for years! It took me twenty five years to rediscover it, how crazy is that?
Anyway, coming back from our trip we called in at Shelly beach. There had been a competition at the Sonny Evans Ski Boat Club and my aunt, Denise had been fishing it with her husband Micky and their friend who owned ‘Happy Hooker’. They had some tuna. I posed with my cousin Melanie for a quick photograph.
There’d also been a shark competition and I had a look at the carcasses, jaws removed, that had been left ready for disposal. My brother and I held one for a photograph and this was a treasured snap for many years. It needs to be borne in mind that neither my brother and I nor any of our friends had ever seen a real shark.
We returned to the UK after a month but I never forgot what I’d seen. I wasn’t to know at the time but I’d be back on Shelly Beach with Denise at the age of eighteen...but that comes later.
A Snapper's Tale. Part 4. Teenage Kicks.
My early teenage years were marked by a bit more independence due to having a bike which I was able to ride a lot further and being of an age when I could go off for the day without it being an issue. A lot of my time was spent in the local woods building dens, making campfires, carving initials on trees and that kind of thing but there was also the opportunity to go fishing and this was something that used to happen on occasion, mostly further afield than before.
It was my brother who first discovered the spot at Gillingham, or first heard about it. Gillingham was about five or six miles from home and access was across the marshes once leaving the main road. I often paddle past there now and can appreciate the changes to the bankside. Basically, the Waveney is reasonably wide here and the bank we fished from was on the outside curve. There were plenty of trees to provide shade and avoid us being skylined but they were set far enough back and apart to avoid too many tangles. We thought it was great!
The first time I went there were a few of us. My brother, of course, and his friend Toby and I think also myself and Tony. Perhaps one or two others too. The trick here was to fish completely differently to the way we had before – here we were to leger our maggots on the bottom. Interestingly, we would watch out rod tips (until bored) until they moved...but none of us had quivertips or even particularly fine rods. My main rod was an 8 foot sold glass rod that got used for everything from floatfishing to beachcasting – it seemed the pier fishing was its ideal use! It still shook with the odd bite. Another method of bite detection was to leave the bail arm open and have a piece of toilet paper on the line, the idea being that it would move once a fish ran off with the bait. The fact that we never caught anything more than 4 ounces here negated the use of this system pretty much. The rods were stood on rod rests made out of sticks found lying about on the bank.
It was a great mark and we would catch quite a lot of fish of various species. Gudgeon, roach, perch and of course the very common (at this time) eel which would always cause annoyance, bootlacing or twisting traces into a complete mess and taking the hook right down. Eels...I haven’t caught one now for at least three years. The other problem we had at this location was passing boats. The Broads Authority would motor past and we would let them know that we were all too young to need licences (apart from those of us hiding in the bushes) and Broads cruisers would regularly come past on their way up to Geldeston, the limit of navigation and a decent pub with free moorings. The trouble was, we would get our lines taken if we didn’t bring them in quickly enough. I remember one occasion when, larking around, nobody noticed the boats come past. The first we in fact knew of it was when one of our number couldn’t find his rod...
I went on one of these boats once. We made friends with a German couple who stayed with us for bed and breakfast one year and they took me, aged thirteen, up the river one weekend when they had a boat hired for a week or two. I remember quite clearly trolling maggots at 5mph up the Waveney in between driving the boat...needless to say I never caught anything. I did fare better from the bank at Geldeston Lock though, even though it was a week before the season opened as I found out during the session. Oh well. I had a few fish here but nothing of note. One thing that was of note, however, was it being the first time I went to The Lock Inn, a pub that I regularly paddle to now. Back then it was still the pub it is famous as – a single room with no electricity at all. All beers were hand pumped, lighting was by candle and oil lamp and a piano sat in the corner, being played most of the time. The beers were served with the glass overflowing and the whole place was like a time warp. It was only open in the summer too as it flooded every winter and was accessible only from the water or via a mile-long dirt track that ran across the marshes (taxi’s wouldn’t drive down there). Although it has lost a lot of this charm in the ensuing quarter century, with extensions and popularity, it is still one of the most pleasant pubs to visit in the area.
A couple of miles upstream from Geldeston (which is the limit of navigation) is a place called Ellingham. Here there is a weir and a mill and plenty of fish. On a few occasions one summer my parents and I came out here for a picnic lunch and to bask in the sun and I would, of course, bring a rod to try and catch a few of the fish that could be seen darting over the gravel in the clear water. A few were caught, again nothing of note, but still we returned on occasion.
When I hit my mid-teens a friend and I got season tickets for nearby Fritton Lake. This lake was only three or four miles from home and had a very good reputation for fishing. I’d been now and again to the country park over the years but had never actually fished it but this was rectified over the course of one school summer holiday.
Michael and I would generally get dropped off and picked up by either my mum or his grandfather and spend the rest of the day on the bank with our kit spread around us. We chose a bay on the edge of the main park area and would cast about fifty yards out into a corener wehere there was always a lot seemingly going on, with occasional shoals of small fish darting out of the water (pike activity no doubt). A few roach and perch would be caught but the bulk of our catch was made up of bleak, one of the very few areas around here that holds these fish. On one occasion however a pike snatched Michael’s fish as he was reeling in so we decided to lay a trap for him in the form of a small fish that came in to one of us. This was plonked in the margins. Nothing happened for an hour or so when suddenly line started to shoot off – we’d got him! Alas we hadn’t – a perch had instead taken the bait. Oh well, this made for a bigger bait in our eyes and out it went again and we waited, continuing to fish for the various silvers.
Eventually the line started to peel off the reel again and as Michael picked up the rod a commotion started near our feet – a pike had been hooked and was going mental! I ran up the bank trying to scrounge a landing net but couldn’t get one and as I came back I saw that Michael still had it on...but not for long as finally it bit through the line (we had no proper piking gear) and was gone. That was the first pike either of us had got that close too and of course it fired our imaginations; the next day we returned with a lure, wire trace and a livebait trace, beachcasting gear and so on...but to no avail.
Michael was my best mate and also the one most keen on fishing. It was around the age of fourteen or so that we were dragged into sea fishing via my brother. He was now working and had got into beach fishing from Gorleston pier...of course this was something we joined in with and soon every weekend would see us standing around on the pier with mackerel (couldn’t afford lugworm) trying to catch some monster cod. We used to get a few whiting and the odd rockling or dab but cod never appeared on the end of any of our lines. Michael’s father and Grandfather would also join us from time to time and on one occasion something went wrong with Grandad’s line. It was tangled really badly and in the end I cut it of and tied the end to the rung of one of the ladders that went down to the water. By the time the snarl-up had been cleared off the reel Grandad was pissed off. I got the blame for some reason, probably deserved, but pointed out that he hadn’t actually lost his gear at all as I’d tied it on...and on the end when it was hauled up was a plump two pound whiting! This was the best fish any of us ever had from the pier and the best whiting I’ve seen so all was not lost! The photo below whows my brother and I with our best ever haul...I was around sixteen when this was taken.
Come Christmas and it was easy for my parents to choose a present for my brother and I – I got a 12ft Daiwa beachcaster and a Daiwa beach reel, about £50 worth all-in from memory, as did he. I no longer have either of them but we certainly made good use of them, mostly from the pier but also occasional forays to Corton and elsewhere.
Another place that Michael and I used to fish was on the New Cut, under Haddiscoe bridge. This was apparently a phenomenal bream water back in the sixties but all we ever caught was our target species – eels. Now, as mentioned earlier, eels were felt to be a complete pain in the arse so the question really was why did we specifically target them? Well, quite simply because we heard that they turned themselves in the pan. We also subsequently found that they tasted good fried in butter and, with it being a quick and easy cycle ride (with rods tied to our bike frames) we were able to fish for them easily. In later years we’d take it in turns also to wander over to the pub to get a round to bring back and drink by the river.
We’d have reasonable success and, providing the eels didn’t escape and slither away in the grass (which happened on occasion) we’d find it easy enough to prepare ourselves a meal out our catch once we’d managed to skin them with a mixture of Stanley knives and long-nosed pliers! One occasion that springs to mind was a summer when I was fishing alone one afternoon. I’d not had a bite at all for ages when finally my rod tip quivered – I’d invested in a pair of 2.5lb test curve leger rods with quivertips by now, with my birthday money – I wound in and was greeted, amazingly, with a prawn on the hook! I considered taking it home to eat but figured one wouldn’t be enough so decided instead to hook it on as bait and promptly cast it in. Say five seconds or so later and my rod tip slammed down as I got an almighty bite! I struck, reeled in, and found the head half of my prawn only...this went back in and with a similar wait I got another cracking bite that again left me empty handed. A worm was put onto the empty hook, cast in and I waited. Nothing. This was strange, we were a long way from the sea so what was happeneing? I went for a walk to the marina were the shallow water was – and sure enough I could see some prawns on the bottom. I spent the next few hours trying to catch these and managed a couple which again resulted in takes but no fish.
Soon I started piking as previously related in the tale of the Pike Dyke. Soon though I stared to roam further afield with my plug, a red Shakespeare Big S with glitter stuck to it. A couple of quid it cost and it produced plenty of jacks from the banks at Beccles over the couple of years before I lost it. It proved hard to lose however as I’d often swim across the river to untangle it from whatever it had snagged! Beccles also had the advantage of being where I went to school and, later sixth form, and so when it came to exam time my rods came with me and stayed in a corner while I did my A Levels before I headed to the bank to get a few hours fishing before the bus came to take me home again. That’s the way to treat academia!
A Snapper's Tale. Part 5. School’s Out!
Alice Cooper may have been excited at the prospect of school being out for summer, but as far as I was concerned I was on the second line – school was out FOREVER! My A Levels had been sat; I’d spent the summer doing a bit of work, a bit of fishing and a bit of hanging around with girls and it became clear that it was time to get on with growing up and facing life in the workplace...in a typically odd Crame-style kind of a way...
I was very fortunate in my timing. My hero-worshipped Auntie Denise had stopped sending postcards from around the world (America, Japan, Korea...) and had stepped ashore leaving Uncle Micky to carry on working as a Chief Electrician on a Safmarine container ship while she went to the beach with their new boat and started up a Game Fishing charter boat business which would allow him to retire from sailing the world...and with my parents wanting me out of the way they stitched her up good and proper by sending me out to help her get it off the ground ;D It was obvious to anyone why she was my heroine mind you, after all, how many aunties do this?
Pictures like this would regularly arrive from her or from Granny so you can imagine what I thought of the prospect of three months in South Africa! Another she’d sent previously was of her first record – the third of its kind caught off Africa, a Tigerfin Rock Cod:
It was November when I flew out from Gatwick, my last meal being fish and chips served by a delightfully-voiced Irish girl at Harry Ramsden’s in the airport. The flight was a bit quicker than the previous trip although there was a from a stopover on the runway at Kinshasa in Zaire...or rather Leopoldville in the Congo Belge as far as my family are concerned. A second stop was taken at Johannesburg too in order to let some of the passengers off before we carried on down to Durban where Uncle Peter was waiting for me.
He hadn’t changed ;D We drove the 120km’s south to Umtentweni and we chatted about all kinds of stuff. He’s one of those people who people just instantly like and who you don’t see for ten years and then feel like the conversation is carried on from one two minutes ago. Anyway he’d kidnapped me and for the first few days I was staying at his place. It was a d**ned fine place to stay too - I’d wake up, walk through the kitchen (putting the coffee on as I went), open the door and jump into the pool. I’d then get out, pour the coffee, jump back in and drink it sitting on the steps at the shallow end. Of course, this wasn’t every morning and one of the first saw me getting woken early and told to come...we were going fishing!
We drove over to Pumula to the home of a friend of Peters. Noel was a giant of a man; I’ve never seen anyone so big in my life. Tall, broad...just massive. The closest comparison I could make would be his son, Noelie. A smaller version. They’d been out the day before and this 35kg musselcracker had been shown who the boss was – I had to hold it for a photo and it wasn’t easy!
First things first, the boat, Takunda, had to be taken down to the beach, put into the sea and the engines warmed up. A 25ft ski-boat, Takunda was a pretty big platform for us to fish from and having roared out through the surf we motored around until we hit the right spot. Out came the rods – heavy duty stand-up bottom sticks with huge Scarborough centrepin reels loaded with 100lb mono and 6 hook flapper rigs. Baited up we freespooled them down to the bottom, held them high and waited, finger on the line, for the tap-tap of a bite. Line would be let out as required and when a bite was felt a quick few turns of the handle was needed to set the hook. Simple fishing and I soon got the hang of it, bringing in some brightly coloured bottom fish.
As the morning wore on I was getting quite into this and sat there, my arse on the centre hatch and my feet on the gunwales...then Noelie started puffing a bit. His rod was bent quite well and we took the other lines out of the water as this was something big. I didn’t realise how big but Noelie was a solid bloke and within a few minutes it broke the surface. I kid you not, about 14ft of Tiger shark! I remained in the same position but was sitting on the other gunwale in the blink of an eye...I just couldn’t believe what I was seeing and was in shock. Anyway, it was snapped off and disappeared again with a flick of its tail. One of those memorable images that sears itself into the mind. I don’t really know what I caught but out of the two trips on Takunda I only remember one particular fish I fought – and it was a hell of a weight. It was only a smallish ray but it had taken both mine and Noelie’s baits so I was fighting him as well ;D
Back at Peter’s in those first few days we decided one afternoon to go down to the beach and fish from the rocks – a bit of rock and surf as they call it there. It may even have been that first day, probably was in fact. My very first fish was, bizarrely, something out of an aquarium. I’d caught a puffer fish a few inches long. I actually managed more than one of these but the best catch of all was a crayfish! In size, but out of season, this having finished a couple of days before. Well, rules are rules so Peter hid it in the bottom of his tackle box and I ate it later. Lovely it was too!
Of course, the plan was for me to help Denise and so we started touting for business at the beach and putting posters in shops. Soon we started to get people out with us. I remember the first time out very vividly as it was a flat-calm day with an oily surface to the sea that is rarely seen. This increased the clarity and also allowed us to see shark fins easily – and there were, quite literally, hundreds of them around that day finning on the surface. As to the fishing, we trolled Rapalas and caught Yellowfin tuna, our staple catch over the next few months.
The boat, Sensational, was a 22ft catamaran with twin 115hp outboards on the back. It was quick, handled well and had plenty of space for fishing from. It was dropped onto the beach by the slip, pushed around and pushed in nose first whereupon I would stand and hold it while the engines were warmed up before jumping aboard. Lifejackets on, we would head out through the surf to the backline – the border of clean and coloured water – whereupon lifejackets came off and were stowed and we’d head out to Protea Reef, about 7km’s distant. I’d be rigging up the rods as we went out and once at the mark would pay out the lures before setting the rods. Charters had first pick at the rods and we’d take up the spares between us. It was a wonderful way to make a living and we caught tuna by the bucketload, with a few bottom fish taken later on some occasions (it looks like a small kingfish in one hand and a Yellowfin tuna in the other on this photograph).
Most of the other charter boats were doing bottom fishing only as this was obviously cheaper, not using as much fuel, and thus attracted the lower end of the market but Denise wanted the top end. The boat was new and clean, the gear was top of the range Shimano and the targeted fish were the hardest fighters. As we came in loaded with 15kg tuna people would look away from the bottom fishing boats with their hauls of 1 and 2kg fish and make their bookings. We were in the game and the bookings increased.
Practically every day we’d be out, and if it wasn’t with charters it’d be with friends, or a mixture of both as in the photograph below.
Me? I wanted sharks. I’d had a fascination for them since my first visit here and so I was always pleased when I hooked one. The first was a small one of maybe 50kgs, cut off and let loose. Then a houndshark, followed by a raggedtooth. These have a superb set of gnashers on them and while the carcass was kept for Peter to fry up in portions in his takeaway (fried fish...of course it’s fish) the jaw was going back with me.
I’m not convinced that leaning over the side hacking heads off is wise in the kind of area where these are swimming around but there you go...
Now that day in particular remains etched in my memory. We were anchored up over a mark that produced a few raggies but then something hit Denise’s bait, and hit it HARD. I’m talking about a freight train. Amongst the raggies were a shoal of yellowtail and these things make a tuna seem like nothing. As it hit it tore the one handle from Denise’s hand, ripping it clean out of the ABS plastic...the reel span. As it span the other hand hit her forearm and also shattered. The reel was a mess of jagged plastic and this fish was still running. I’d have been crying like a baby by this time but with a ripped-up hand my aunt rammed the still spinning Scarborough onto her leg (ripping that up as well) to brake it and then fought the fish up to the gaff. Unbelievable. I don’t have pictures of this but as an idea of what kind of a woman defeated it here’s one of Denise at a competition weigh in with a Couta...
Sharks are messy and their blood buggers up a boat but if a charter wanted to take one home then so be it, and take them in we did.
Now, the appeal of a shark is universal and at this time they were not as well-loved as they are now. Sharks are present off the Natal coast in massive numbers and are vermin as well as a danger to swimmers. They create a fascination in people and we noticed that bringing one in had the boat surrounded and extra bookings ensued.
The day that I got my big one was not far away. It started the same as any other day, up at 4:30, make Denise a coffee and keep quiet. Go down to Shelly Beach to meet the charters, launch, motor out and so on. We had five charters that day and 6 lures out. We were trolling as normal when ZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZ and all reels started peeling line off as the fish ran. Denise controlled the boat while Lance and I handed the rods out to the charters. There was no-one to give the last rod to so I held on to it.
All the others were in but this was still running. I was told to set the drag – but I already had. I was told to stop messing around – but I wasn’t. I asked that the boat be turned and the fish chased but was told no way. I then stated, matter-of-factly that in that case I had 50 metres left before the line went ping and we lost the lot ;D We turned and followed it.
We got over the top, line recovered, and I started to pump the fish. 20lb line, 30lb wire and a stand-up rod with a harness on was connected to a Rapala CD11 Magnum and whatever the hell had grabbed it! As I lifted the rod I heard zzzzz. As I dropped it I wound some line in...lift zzzz...wind and so on. We tightened the drag right up – the fish either came up or we snapped off. It took an hour and then it came up, vertically. It looked for all the world like a record kingfish from the angle but no, a 300lb Zambezi shark that had clearly been feeding on the Tuna and that had snapped at my lure, getting the treble just in front of the teeth. I still have that lure. And those teeth.
The bangstick was armed and it was goodbye, lights out. Gaffed, the shark was brought aboard and everyone sat on the other side of the boat for the rest of the day to keep it properly trimmed.
(oh, the cigarettes in the ears are rudimentary ear defenders!)
I was played out for the day. Back on the beach we created quite a stir and so I took the shark down to the beach and started to cut it up. First the jaws, then the guts – dissected as I’d seen done by the Natal Sharks Board, with commentary for the onlookers, and then the stomach opened. First out was a tuna head, almost down to the bone. Then a chunk of body, maybe 3-4 kgs, then the tail end. Three neatly sliced chunks. The last two disappeared while I wasn’t looking...
Peter had fun cutting that up for the shop I’m sure. As for the missing stomach contents, it turned out that it had been taken, cooked and served up at a bush party by Milton, our native deckie. Nice.
Christmas came and both Peter and I got given new Scarborough reels, sized for the localities they were going to be used in. I still have mine and occasionally use it.
The other charters slowly started to come around to the idea of game fishing being better business and one of the first to start doing this was Chop Chop. I was actually on the beach one day while Sensational was out and got asked if I’d come and fish with them as they were short on charters. Fair enough, sounded good to me and off we went. I informed Denise when we passed her on the reef...she wasn’t overly impressed to be honest. Still, we did some fishing and I got an insight on how much better her operation was. But it was bloody hot that day! In the end the heat got too much and we motored away from the reef for a dip. The idea was to hold the rails by the motors, drop in and pull oneself straight back out. Bugger that thought I and I dived off the bow, swam around and clambered aboard. It was only a few minutes later that one of the charters pulled up a 6ft tiger shark...again Denise was less than impressed when I mentioned it! They were decent blokes on Chop Chop though and they were so pleased with their first billfish – a sailfish. Which reminds me of another story...
Sailfish. A beautiful, sleek, slimlined billfish that is such a marvellous capture. A friend of my aunt caught one while I was there and as she knew how to mould and fibreglass fish and was a dab hand with a paintbrush he asked if she would do a mould for him. Bear in mind this thing was five or six feet long. Denise agreed with no promises and so we set to work.
The way we did it wasn’t the full moulding that the professionals do, instead we just did one side of the fish. To do this is easy. First off, put some bricks down around the fish on the floor. Then, fill the gap around the fish with sand until you are halfway up the fish, leaving one flank exposed. Fill the gaps with tissue paper (gills, mouth etc) and pour plaster of Paris over it. Now leave it for twenty four hours to set...
The trouble is, the heat generated by the plaster and also the ambient temperature means that the fish doesn’t stay as fresh as if it had been gutted and refrigerated. But hey, as he’d given Lance and I the fish to dispose of somehow and make a few bucks it seemed to be fair game. I mean, somebody must surely have a use for a 29kg line caught sailfish, right?
I phoned around the hotels and restaurants listed in the local phone book and finally found one that were interested. We settled on a mutually agreeable price and Lance and I set off to do the deal. The first problem that we encountered was the problem of fitting this stiff old sailfish safely into his beach buggy. Much head scratching ensued until we figured out that it was no real problem to cut the thing in half ;D
Okay, so now imagine this. Two scruffy looking eighteen year olds in shorts and filthy T-shirts in a beat up buggy with a smelly sailfish set off to this hotel, stopping en-route at the river mouth to give the fish a bloody good rinse ;D It looked clean enough to us by the time we’d finished and so we carried on, finally pulling up at the front of this poncy looking country club place. I forget the name but it was pretty well known...
With Lance sitting in the buggy, no doubt smoking and laughing his arse off, I walked in. Barefoot, tanned and absolutely minging with fish juices from head to toe. I was in the lobby, in front of this sweeping oak staircase with someone playing a baby grand in the lounge with a bunch of noncy-arsed ponces sipping sundowners. Eventually someone noticed the smell and enquired if I required some assistance at all (before they shot me). On saying I’d brought tem a fish they sent me around the back to the kitchens were I gave them two halves of a dead fish and they gave me some cash and practically shooed me off the premises. Money for old rope this, Lance and I split the cash, had a beer no doubt and went back to Denise’s, laughing all the way.
On our return we were asked who the hell had bought that stinky old rotten fish from us, everyone there thought it was a big joke. When I told them, though, you could have heard a pin drop. We’d only done the deal with the number one top place on the south coast ;D Denise made sure they had no idea who I was or that it could be traced back to her and started to relax slightly. Peter, on the other hand, thought it was great, being just the kind of thing he’d have done! Still, we had the money and they didn’t have our number.
The story should end there really, but it didn’t quite. My cousin went to a wedding reception there the following day. They’d heard the story by now so didn’t have the sailfish...turns out they didn’t have the sh!ts either, unlike the rest of the guests. Their fault anyway, after all – would you buy a used fish off this man?
...or his mate?
I fished loads in the three months that I was there. Usually with Denise but once with a friend of hers, Peter Richardson, on his smaller skiboat Janvic. Nice fella Peter. We only had small Yellowfin but it was a day out. Another time my cousin’s husband, Brett, and I planned to take his 14ft skiboat out after he finished work for the day. I went in with him and it was a lovely morning...the afternoon was good too. The trouble was, by the time we launched the sea was getting snotty and really we shouldn’t have bothered but sometimes you just have to go, right? Well, we did, and we stayed close in. Nothing really happened but then Brett caught sight of a shadow fifty yards away, he figured it to be a school of fish so got excited, then saw a fin...Marlin! He cried, and started getting things sorted to go for it but I got a better look as the fin broke the surface again and there was no mistaking it – shark. And a big one. Bigger than us, anyway ;D I told Brett this and we watched for the fin to come up again – sure enough...”get your lines up, we’re going” Brett said. So I did as told, but slowly because I wanted to catch it! It was having none of it though and so we up-anchored and motored away. I speeded things up by saying some well-chosen words mind you:
“Umm, Brett...it’s following us!”
Full throttle and away!
There are surely countless stories that would come to me in time but the last amusing one to relate doesn’t really involve fishing. Uncle Peter was around one evening and he and I were chatting when Denise took a call on the answerphone. This person on the phone wanted to charter the boat for something a bit different. Not for fishing, nor diving. You see, there had been a death , followed by a cremation. Would it be possible to charter the boat to scatter these ashes perhaps?
Well, Denise was not up for this – the crew would flee the boat believing it to be cursed, she wouldn’t know what to charge, it could bring bad luck, we might not be able to launch and so on...of course Peter and I got set off too and started banging on about ashes being blown back onto the boat, wiring some trebles to the urn and trolling the bugger out, catching him again by accident and having the boat haunted...Denise hit the roof with us winding her up before she’d called back and slung us out! I slept at Peter’s again that night ;D
Eventually my three months was up and I had to fly back home. I brought with me some Rapalas, some reels and presumably some rods, a rucksack full of stinking but mostly dried-out shark jaws (which I still have) and some great memories. If only I’d brought my passport to the airport things would have gone smoothly...it had been great but I needed to get home. After all, I had to find time have a haircut...
A Snapper's Tale. Part 6. Wanderlust
There’s nothing like a bit of travel to get your feet working and to make you want to get moving again. And so, back from South Africa I had the urge to up-sticks again quite soon. My chance came while flicking through the jobs section of the local paper...It seemed that a young Englishman was required to work for a few months on a farm in Denmark, assisting with maintenance and the harvest plus allowing the family to practice their English. Well, this seemed like a good idea to me and so I phoned up...
Some time later I found myself on a ferry crossing the channel to Esbjerg in Jutland, Denmark. I’d got the job. I was pretty pleased about this as not only was I sorted for the summer but I was also travelling and had already lost interest with fishing at home for obvious reasons. A big advantage here was the 12 acre lake that the farmer had and which no-one ever fished...
It was a lovely summer that year, 1992. I was actually there when Denmark won the European Cup which made a happy nation even more happy. I loved the Danes. The job was also pretty good. I spent the days variously feeding and mucking out pigs, painting barns, mending fences and moving irrigation pipes although on one notable occasion I helped mend a traditional water wheel. The farm (and mill) was at Sonderskov in Brorup Kommune and the family who owned it were great.
But let’s talk about the lake ;D The lake itself was pretty shallow and largely silted up. Average depth I would say was a couple of feet and it was clear water. There were some deeper pools, mostly around the edges and I fished three of these in particular. This was my main spot:
The lake was fed by a stream that came in at the top end and at the bottom end was a water wheel on the side of the mill. Under this was another stream which, further down, fed a trout farm from which there were some escapees. This was shallow and rocky but deepened under the wheel and it was possible to cast under here, pick up a small trout and carry it up to the main lake. For the ones in the main stream it was easier to just ‘tickle’ them, which I had great success with albeit in a slightly modified way to the traditional poacher’s method. I’d run my hands up the side of the fish then flick it up onto the grass.
The two main pools that I fished were the one seen in the picture above and the one by the top of the wheel, shown here:
Within a few weeks I’d lost or damaged my floats and had taken to using pieces of twig tied to the line directly – it made no odds as the amount of fish and lack of pressure meant that they would be on the freshly dug worm in seconds. To catch thirty-odd fish in my lunch break, and have lunch was quite normal.
There wasn’t much in the way of species in here – I saw an eel once, there were a few brown trout (two when I arrived, a load more when I left having transferred them from below) but the main bulk of the fish were either Roach or Rudd. I think the former but I never did check really. The fishing, as I say, was easy...but the quality was there too! Now, a 1lb roach is not overly common here in the UK but I was catching them all the time. A 2lb’er is a specimen and I know many, many people who have never had one to that size. I certainly haven’t in the UK. But I did there. Not one or two mind, but on or two regularly. They may have been the same few fish of course and the challenge may have been getting through the small stuff to get to them but I had fish and fishing there like I would have never believed. It was only a brief two month interlude in my life and the fishing was all the same so there isn’t much more to say, apart from that lake giving me my first trout, my best roach and best coarse fishing ever.
A Snapper's Tale. Part 7. Prodigal Son.
Well, by the middle of the summer I was back home in England, with my best ever suntan, by way of the recently reunified Germany. A trip into what had been the East was illuminating to say the least – main roads through towns that were cobbled on one side, dirt on the other, houses in poor condition, brand new Mercedes, BMW’s and satellite dishes outside them...it seemed that the priorities following the fall of the Berlin Wall were not, strangely enough, anything made by Shimano or Rapala.
Back it was to the hard fishing of East Anglia. I was still heading across the marshes to fish for eels in the New Cut with occasional forays onto the marsh for pike. Fishing the dyke was hard at this time of year, chokes as it was with weed, but when the water was clear pike could be seen finning gently, including big ones that ever seemed to want to play to lures Come the wintertime things would pick up, especially around March time when they would come in to spawn. Things often got hectic as the sun disappeared even if nothing had happened all day.
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[/URL]Still, these things are sent to try us and it was still worth going fishing. On occasion we would head to Beccles, by the small iron bridge that spans the river at the old entrance to the town. Lures would take jacks regularly and I would sit with my stereo for an afternoon in the sun. Other times I’d fish from the quay with my mate Michael and one occasion sticks out more than most...
It was a cracking day, bright and warm, and we were legering maggots while flicking lures out. I’d swam across to retrieve them from trees no doubt and we’d had to reel in to let boats past but it was otherwise pretty average as far as fishing during a summer day goes. Granted I’d had a new species – I figured it was a baby carp but was reliably informed by another angler tat it was a snotty. Fair enough, I returned home to find out the real name – my first Ruffe. So apart from that the day was not in the least bit unusual and we were catching a few roach and gudgeon. A completely normal session, that is, until Michael cast his leger without checking things would flow smoothly ;D As he cast after rebaiting his line wrapped around the rod tip and the leger swung around, down to the water, and up again. That could have been quite nasty had I been in the way. He could have taken my proverbial eye out. As it was, when the leger had swung around and hit the water there had indeed been a casualty! A Ruffe had borne the brunt of it and was now paddling around upside down!!! He’d whacked it good and proper and had I not seen it with my own eyes I’d have never believed it.
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[/URL]It was about this time that I started going on the water in my own right. My grandfather had given us his old Zodiac inflatable and my father bought a 4hp Johnson Outboard as a family Christmas present one year. It had been used once or twice before this summer but now I had a mooring for it on my friend’s property which led down to the river so it got a lot more use...but first, the tale of the Christmas outboard...
The 4hp Johnson that my father bought brand new from Gorleston Marine after months of looking for a cheap secondhand one was a two stroke and, being new, required running in before use. It was fortunate then that my Grandparents had come over from Spain for Christmas as it would be of some interest for my grandfather. Under his direction we duly bolted the motor to the post and rail fencing outside the kitchen window and placed a water but underneath which was filed by hose. It was then necessary to go outside at various times of the day to run it up for ever increasing lengths of time and at different revs, just so it’d all work fine once on the boat. It was on one occasion that my grandfather noticed that it had no reverse on it...
“I don’t need reverse Gandpa, it’s a short boat and I can swing it round to spin or go backwards” said I, not seeing the need. Grandpa, however, was going to point out the error of my ways and tell me one of his legendary tales which would leave me in no doubt whatsever that I absolutely NEEDED reverse. Now, Grandpa’s tales were superb. Long-winded (hmm, genetic?) and full of detail they would have the listener enthralled as he had that gift of drawing people into the story fully. That same Christmas he told me the one about the buck in the dambo, for example, which took perhaps half an hour and meant my father and I missed the washing up. I’m not going to relate it here but it was brought about my mention of athletes foot. Then there was the tale of the mushroom and the one about the lioness. Anyway, back to this story:
“Peter (my uncle) and I were asked by a local headman to come and help as there had been some attacks on villagers by a crocodile and they wanted me to shoot it. Crocodile skins were selling for good money then and this was a big croc so we took the boat and our rifles and went out one night to look for him. You always went for crocs at night because you could use a powerful torch to pick up their eyes (like lamping for rabbits here) and then aim between them and take him out. So, off we went down the river shining this torch around to see what we could spot. Peter had the rifle and I was driving, slowly so as not to spook it. Eventualy we picked up some eyes up on the bank and so we moved in closer, keeping the torch on him all the time, blinded by the glare. Then there was a noise and the eyes started to move towards us. Fast! We noticed then that it wasn’t a sloping bank; it was a steep drop and I put the motor in reverse, opened the throttle and we got out of the way as a couple of tons of pissed-off hippo came hurtling over the edge with a huge splash!”
I was suitably enthralled and impressed by this story, which was longer and more detailed in the telling but one thing niggled me and so I mentioned it...
“We haven’t got any hippo’s on the Waveney” ;D
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[/URL]Anyway, we had the motor all run in and I started to use it more often. Sometimes I’d troll – illegally – a pair of Rapalas out of the back (never caught a fish) and other times I’d motor off somewhere and fish from it. Mostly we would be between Burgh St Peter and Reedham but occasionally we’d drive it over to Beccles and head up to Geldeston on it. I went up there with a girlfriend once... ;) We’d use it for our version of skiing on occasion – hold a rope and be dragged at maximum revs through the water until you were half drowned or find other ways to amuse ourselves. My favourite would be to chug along really slowly in front of hire cruisers and then wait until they were alongside, overtaking, and then open it up and get on the plane. I must have pissed so many of the holidaymakers off that summer. Bloody townies. Another bit of fun was had doing something very silly bu useful if we spotted the broads Authority boat on the water. Flat out on the plane it was possible to tear down the river and straight through/over some reedbeds into the clear pools behind to hide once you knew where they were.
One time when we did pack the boat up, my friend Daniel and I had been out all afternoon and had landed under the bridge at Haddiscoe. We deflated the boat and waited for my mum to come and pick us up with the trailer. As we sat there a couple of sailing boats came towards us. Judging by the age of most present onboard it was a school party and we watched with interest as they furled the sails and headed, in the current, towards the bridge. The first dropped his mast down and floated under with no problem. The second had one of those teachers who knows everything and is suprememly confident that nothing could possibly go wrong. He decided he didn’t need to drop the mast, it’d go under. It was quite amusing watching them trying to pull the release pin out under the tension of being forced against the bridge...especially when one of them got a clout from the boom ;D
It was a great place to be picked up as it happened – another occasion saw us pissing ourselves when a twenty-something bloke swaggered over to his ‘speedboat’ with his blonde ladyfriend. They got in, he started it up, turned it up river, opened the throttle and sat there in disbelief, staring at the steering wheel that wa sin his hands but not connected to the boat. The thud as he rammed the pilings was pretty impressive too. We weren’t to blame but it must have been sabotage, and the best bit I ever saw.
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[/URL]We were still fishing off Gorleston harbour at this time, though not as often. It was an interesting place to fish really as you had a choice of fishing the seaward side, which would result (for us) in whiting, dab and rockling or the river side which would see us catching whiting, tampons, pantyliners, condoms and fifty yards of weed on the ebb. We still ate the fish though, we just didn’t think too hard about their diet. We were still rubbish fisherman though, maybe getting 2 or 3 whiting apiece most times. Too illustrate how poor it was here is a photograph of my brother and I after our best day’s fishing. It harks back a couple of years though as I would have been around sixteen when this was taken. As you can no doubt tell we were blissfully unaware of minimum landing sizes at the time and we used to keep pretty much anything that was big enough to fillet.
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[/URL]I did venture to Norwich once, to fish the Wensum inside the city for pike along with my mate from cubs, Will. Arriving the night before we got royally pissed, ate Chinese takeaway, watched Jacobs Ladder on video and crashed out in the early hours. It was the first time I met his future wife ;D We wandered down to a smallish bit of river first of all and flung some lures about for an hour or so. I can still recall the sight of an irretrievable Rapala of mine hanging in tree. We had no takes so wandered elsewhere, a more urban-looking bit of the river with some lock gates, weir bridge supports or something from memory. We flung lures for hours here, still with no luck. It only stands out in my memory because of the local loony, an old boy who stopped on his bike and told us about the giant white pike. Apparently there was a HUGE albino pike here. Yup. Course there was mate, course there was.
Having failed to catch this mythical beast...the last fishy tale from this era would be my only fly fishing experience. My brother got it into his head that we wanted to go up to Narborough to do some fly fishing. We could hire rods and pay some money and catch loads up there, it was really easy. So, off we went in my multi coloured Mini and I scared the crap out of him by keeping my foot on the floor practically the whole way. This was revenge for when I’d been younger. Once there, we paid our money, bought some flies and hired some rods before wandering out to try this nancy-boy method of fishing.
Well, my attention span is not very long and after a whole hour (I was really trying to do it) I’d had enough. I kicked the tops off molehills but failed to find any worms and so was wandering around, fed up, when I spotted the beck...Now, they ahd some breeding pools which drained into a beck that ran through the middle of the site. It was maybe 4ft wide and 3ft deep. In here there were loads of trout. So I duly tried to get them to eat my fly. Not a hope, they wouldn’t take any of them. My brother, having also failed miserably was called over and, once he’d got over his fear of being hung for crimes against fly fishing joined me in catching loads of trout. I happened upon a successful fly in my position. It was the biggest and heaviset one I had and was a sinker. It was, in fact, perfect for dropping upstream, allowing to sink slowly under control and then yanking into the arse of whichever trout I wanted to fight ;D They don’t half go when they’re foul hooked! We finally stopped when I worked out I had no more money for fish, being £1.65 a lb after the two included. I think we were the only ones to catch that day.
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[/URL]And then I started getting jiggy too much to fish. I needed to leave the country again!
A Snapper's Tale. Part 8. Pirate of the Carribean…and Solent.
I had itchy feet. I wasn’t yet 21 and figured I still had time to see the world. I’d got into photography now and had been working a couple of holiday camps amongst other things and following the summer season I began to look at replacing this work with something else. Two interviews followed, the first being at The Norfolk Hotel in London for a company called Image.
Image supplied photographers to cruise ships around the world and my interview consisted of the usual questions, some technical questions and a practice run of photographing somebody (the interviewer). I left having been told to get a Seaman’s C1 D1 visa and they’d be in touch soon.
The soon happened to be a few weeks later on a Friday night when I chose to answer the phone as a Chinese take-away...isn’t that always the way? It was someone in Florida telling me they would be flying me out in a week or two and to get my life in order. Game on!
Landing in Miami airport myself and another photographer made our way to the hotel in downtown Miami. We were in the Cuban quarter and made the most of the freshly squeezed orange juice made while-you-wait and enjoyed breakfasts of nicely spiced pork sausage and crisped-up streaky bacon while getting measured for uniforms and having medicals which included testing for HIV and drug use. The rest of our time was spent wandering around looking for bargains and, on finding fishing tackle, using handlines off the jetty at Biscayne Boulevard and the docks while waiting for our ship to come in.
Biscayne was the first place, just around the corner from the Hard Rock Café. A piece of line, a size 12 hook, some lead and various bits of hot dog – I kid you not – were used as bait. The sausage attracted the fish well but was easily stripped from the hook while the hot dog buns were too fluffy to make great baits but did work a bit. Handlining while lying on the boardwalk, we could see the fish attacking our baits and eventually I had some success! I have never found out what species this was but could not begin to imagine what it’d sell for in an aquarists back in the UK.
Within a couple of hours we had quite a crowd around us and I remember letting some kid have one of these (I only caught two that I can recall) to take home to his family. I’d not had such fun with a handline since tempting moray eels out of the rocks in South Africa when I gave up trying to hoist the crayfish out! (Hard to pull in they were, but easier to unhook than the octopus I got the one day. Moray eels made good money for the boat boy – Wilton – too as the Zulus use it for a birthing potion.)
We fished down at the docks too, and one of the main quarries was triggerfish. They’re adept at stripping hooks with their small, bony mouths that project outwards. Fascinating to watch I only managed one in an entire afternoon. It would have fit in my hand. Then it was time to join my ship.
The SS American Adventure (ex Costa Riviera) looked glitzy and glam from the outside and in the passenger decks but was an absolute nuts-hole below decks. A maze of pipes and steel doorways there were no-go areas and places to party as well as one crappy small cabin for Rick (the No.1) and I (No.4) Numbers 2 and 3 were Ryan, the only Antipodean I’ve met that I’ve disliked and Frank (replaced by Jonathan soon after). Hours were long, typically 14-16 per day, and were always rounded off by drinking sessions. This wasn’t my cup of tea as I’d got bored of drinking by then and kind of stopped for a couple of years (I have video of the night I started again ;D ) The food was good though, we could eat what we wanted when we wanted and this included 24 hour pizza, barbecued burgers or hot dogs, ice cream or anything from the huge buffets or in the restaurants (I’d made friends with the head waiter as I was quicker than the others doing the table photography which meant he could change out of the pirate costume sooner!).
My days varied between bouts of snapping fat American kids sat on scraggy donkeys or playing baseball, families swimming with dolphins (including Jake who was in a Guns and Roses video and who I swam with on my 21st) and other run-of-the-mill picture opportunities during the week-long cruise of Miami – Bahamas – Dominican Republic – Key West. There was occasionally time to relax though and one memorable occasion was diving somewhere in the vicinity of Nassau which took me through shoals of 4ft yellowtail and ended in me sitting on a toilet inside a sunken boat. But there was something else to do too...I found some crappy Wal Mart fishing rods in the back of the photolab one day...
The night I found them saw me on the back deck in a non-passenger area with a Turkish guy called Ayhan and some others. We were anchored off the Dominican Republic over a reef and had spotlights pointing downwards onto the sea. What looked like tiny garfish were easily seen hovering in the water here and so I chucked some bread in on the end of my rod, casting as far out as I could. We were quite a way up, maybe sixty feet, so the baits weren’t far from the side of the ship. Immediately the fish would dart towards them and then turn, disinterested. Until you started to reel it in. I twigged to this as being because they wanted to chase and eat by sight as they weren’t interested in bread. I tried again...dropped a few and then, having slowly dragged and twitched the bait, I gave the garfish on the end time to get it down past that bony spiked mouth. I struck. Bang! It took off – splashing out of the water, tailwalking, accelerating left and right, back and forth and going absolutely mental! I fought it out then brought it up the side of the ship. Nope, they weren’t a few inches long. It was about a metre long! I got it over the rail and it went berserk, thrashing around as we all started jumping about to try and grab it. Eventually we got hold of it, blood and scales everywhere and it was duly dispatched by Ayhan who I made an instant friendship with. He worked in the restaurant and the next day he served it up to me having had it cooked specially!
Other opportunities occasionally presented themselves to me and I would fish on the floating pontoon we moored to between tenders ferrying passengers to the islands and would release all manner of small but beautiful fish of many colours. Often I’d get a good tug and have a few seconds fun playing one of the many reef sharks below but without the right gear there was no way I’d land them. I even ended up fishing in Key West and being the centre of attention of the crew, including Captain Percivale, an Italian who begged me to keep these tiny fish that I was throwing back for him to eat. Well, I didn’t like the idea much but the Captain is worth being on good terms with...
Back home again after six weeks, myself and my liver having not fitted in to the lifestyle, I milled around wandering where to go next. And then came a call from the other company I’d been interviewed for back in the winter. The week after the D-Day 50th Anniversary celebrations (which I’d have loved to have seen) I’d be joining the MV Normandie, flagship of Brittany Ferries, to work the Portsmouth – Ouistreham route. Strangely, I didn’t do any fishing having little time to do so when in port as we would either be eating proper food (burgers) in the terminal or photographing the cars driving on. Nor did I do much fishing at home on my weeks off having other more pressing desires...
It was the third year that I was working on the ferries that I finally did some fishing. One evening when my mate was doing the photographs (we were on the Portsmouth – St Malo route now which only used one loading ramp) I got chatting to the dockers who were fishing from the edge of the linkspan. Handlining up tiny pout they would freeline these on crappy rods with all manner of things as floats (coke cans etc) after the bass. And they caught, too. One of them let me have a go.
I forget how I got hold of the eel but I took both the eel and the bass back to the shop and put them in the sink while we printed the photographs off. The purser had seen me fishing and told me that if I caught one I must bring it onboard and we would eat it together. Once we’d sailed he came wandering in and I ushered him over to the sink – his face was a picture when he saw the bass. So was mine because I couldn’t see the eel! He took the fish away and said we would have it the next day and, as soon as he left, the two of us started scrambling around on all fours looking fro this bloody Houdini-eel! It was eventually – luckily – located under the printer and disposed of over the side. The next day the purser made his apologies as he was unable to join me for dinner but with all the Frenchies looking on the waiter in the crew mess brought me this bloody great bass cooked in the skilful way only the Breton can manage and I devoured it with a little bit of assistance from Jasmine, the pianist who was the only other Brit onboard who ate fish. d**ned fine it tasted too.
I occasionally found some time to fish at home now and would go to Southwold with my mate’s brother Tim to bang out some whiting here and there. We also went flyfishing the one time too. I don’t get on with that kind of girly fishing so stuck a spinner on the end of my flyline and dragged out the only trout of the day. Lovely! Another time, with my girlfriend at the time, I went and sat on the bank at Beccles for half an hour with chocolate coloured water in the swollen river that followed some recent floods and hauled out my first ever bream, a fish of a pound or two. I was amazed.
The following year I’d split up with this girl and met my now-wife. This meant that my weeks off were in France if they coincided with her week off or in England with other diversions to try and find. This would have been 1996. My friend James had recently built a Canadian canoe out of marine ply and fibreglass with his dad and suggested one day that we ought to go off in it for the weekend with the tent and fishing rods. A canoe fishing expedition? That sounded like a lot of fun!
We’d stay on the field of a farmer friend of his (where he shot) that ran down to the river where we’d occasionally fished for pike with lures, having some big fish escape on occasion. We launched down a track across the road from his house.
I dropped a handline down into a likely spot straight away before we paddled anywhere and was awarded with a reasonably sized perch almost immediately! A shoal was present and we had a few of them before paddling upstream. The rest of the day involved fishing, paddling, wading and collecting firewood before we unrolled our sleeping bags and got our heads down after watching shooting stars flitting across the sky.
A few hours later we were awoken by drizzle and belatedly pitched the tent! The following day was much the same and we returned to pull a few more perch from the spot before dragging the canoe out and back to his house. The seeds were now sown for me buying my own canoe and subsequently kayak ten years later.
A Snapper's Tale. Part 9. Back Ashore and South Africa Again.
At the end of 1997 I decided to leave life on the ferries and settle down in England with the girlfriend who was to become my wife. I’d had a couple of trips abroad to Israel and Morocco during the course of the year and decided on one last trip before the onset of home-owning. Where else but South Africa?
Six years on I caught a flight to Johannesburg and onwards to Durban to be met by my uncle. It was as if I’d seen him only a day before. Much had changed since my last visit – Mandela had been released, apartheid had ended and the death penalty had been abolished. The latter had the most visible effect – everyone was armed as life was now something extinguished with every robbery or car jacking. My uncle had himself been shot during a robbery as had the father of his son-in-law who had not survived. It was no longer the carefree location I remembered.
My aunt’s business had changed too. She now had three boats and was busy. Despite the poor weather I did get a few trips out to the reef chasing tuna and these were, as ever, obliging although not as easy to come by as they’d been the last time I’d been here. The weather had been unsettled for a while and this had affected things greatly. But no matter – fishing is fishing!
I was also able to go out on one of the netting boats of the Natal Sharks Board, the agency that protects some of the beaches to reduce the risks of shark attack. My cousin’s husband Tim skippered the boat that ran from Port Shepstone down to Margate and I went out on a couple of occasions with him. I’d been before a few years earlier but this time I had a camera. We launched before first light and were back in by ten...
I stayed about ten days or so before hopping onto a postal truck headed for Cape Town where I spent a couple of days before heading northeast to Knysna and my other aunt’s home.
Knysna sits in a lagoon surrounded by high ground. The sea proper is accessed by navigating through The Heads, a natural cleft in the hills with rocks at either side. This has caused a few vessels to be wrecked and one of these I dived on during my stay. With visibility of only a couple of metres and the knowledge of sharks in the area it wasn’t the most comfortable of dives nor the most impressive! It did, however, beat the dive I had a couple of days later that went wrong from the start. We went through The Heads on a RIB and my buddy and I dropped in as a pair, swimming down to the bottom. It was rough, with a 3-4ft swell and some chop but the surface was better than what awaited -the last I saw of my buddy was his fins just in front of my face. Then he was gone. Alone, I followed the rules and surfaced with only a few metres recorded on my pressure gauge. I bobbed around for a few minutes before I was spotted and retrieved. Slowly the others appeared, all bar a newly-qualified couple. It was ten or twenty minutes before the dive master retrieved them – with zero visibility they’d swam along holding hands. Full marks for carrying a plan through ;D
My uncle and I went out fishing in the lagoon one day on his dory. His fishing shed is a mecca – there must have been fifty rods, tackled up and ready to go, lining the walls and all the other odds and ends to boot. He chose the requisite ones for the fishing we’d be doing and grabbed a cast net before we set off for the water. The first task was to gather bait through the use of the drift net and I watched as he stalked the margins, knee deep in water, throwing the net out to try and trap some mullet. He must have had an off day because it took forever to get a handful of these easily-spooked fish. Still, we had some and set out into the lagoon to fish. I can’t remember what we fished for; it could have been anything as we didn’t get a single bite. We did, however, get the opportunity to drag the dory half a mile back to shore up to our thighs in foul-smelling mud though!
Another night my cousin took me out. It was only a small boat, maybe 14ft long, and there were three of us aboard, all sat in the rear fishing area. Here we drank a few tins of Hunter’s Gold cider (a lovely drink) and sat back to await the first run. Sure enough there were fish about and I was into a 6ft gully shark. A good scrap followed and as I brought it alongside to be cut loose my cousin did something I wasn’t expecting – he hauled the bloody thing into the boat to unhook!
Absolute chaos ensued as a hundred pounds of toothy fish thrashed around with the agility of an eel and scared the crap out of us until my cousin – who wasn’t even slightly perturbed – unhooked it with a pair of pliers, had me kiss its nose (always kiss a shark on the nose for good luck) and put it back over the side.
This was repeated with a second one caught by my travelling companion and then we waited for a third that didn’t come.
It wasn’t the same as fishing Protea but it was certainly fun! A few days later it was time for me to go home again.
Back home again I started working in various places and managed the occasional session but just didn’t seem to catch enough to write home about. A few sessions on Lowestoft pier were notable by the absence of fish and the expense of lugworm – the best session being one pin whiting, a starfish and what I thought was a baby monkfish (I know suspect it was my only seas scorpion). Another session occurred on the beach at Pakefield with my old mate from Fritton Lake days memorable only because it was me and my old mate from Fritton Lake days! I don’t think we caught. Nor did we catch when it was me, the girl from work and her boyfriend on the beach at Gunton – but at least she went and bought some chips. I also fished once with my brother – me with my brand new Tilly Lamp and him with his brighter and more expensive Coleman. I say brighter because it was supposed to be. Had the glass not shattered in the van on the trip to the beach that is. Winterton was intended I think but we ended up on Gorleston pier I think because we couldn’t see anything.
A trip across to France did, however, yield a keeper. Flo and I went down to the local lake to sit, chat and catch some sun and I handlined in a nicely poached brown trout, later baked with almonds.
Another trip abroad, this time to Greece, saw me pack a crappy telescopic rod and I had plenty of fun trying to catch the large mullet hanging around the moored boats fifty yards out from the sea wall at Nafplio – the one I did hook broke me off and would easily have been a personal best that would take some beating. I tried for small gars in Kavala and Thassos without joy but did manage to catch a few tiddlers in the harbour at Athens while awaiting a ferry across to Crete.
There was, however, one memorable session in honour of my aunt who had left her boats in her husband’s capable hands and come over to the UK with my grandmother. What a good idea, thought I, to take her boat fishing in the UK so she could see how it compared...So 5am on a Saturday morning saw me, Denise, my mate James and his partner’s son and friend board a charter boat out of Lowestoft. It was August so grey and drizzly and Denise spent most of the time huddle up in numerous layers of clothing, James’s ‘son’ huddled up in the bilges cuddling a hangover and the rest of us huddling up to static rod tips! Finally the skipper landed a Dover Sole. Not bad for £300 eh? I’ll have to get the photographs off James...for some reason I didn’t bother taking any myself!
Occasional forays to the pier continued to yield very little and so I kind of knocked it on the head all bar one or two sessions a year when I really had nothing else to do whatsoever...
The Pike Dyke.
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.
I left it alone and then, in early 2010 I realised that the coarse season was about to end. There was nothing for it but to plan a kayak fishing 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.
It was good to be back.
My Old KP. Seasons in the Sun
Friday the Thirteenth. I should have known really. I’m going to backtrack though, by 19 years, 4 months and 20 days to 24th December 1991 and an evening in Umtentweni, Natal, South Africa.
Alice Cooper got it about spot on: I'm in the middle without any plans; I'm a boy and I'm a man; I'm eighteen and I don't know what I want. Nor, it seems, does anyone know what to get me but Denise, my aunt, thinks she has the ideal thing. Hell, this place is the home of them and she’s already taught me how to use them. Yep, I’m eighteen and she gives me my own KP Scarborough reel.
Yeah, she’s taught me well. The very first time I used one was out on a ski-boat with Uncle Peter and his mates from Pumula, bottom fishing but with Denise I’ve been taken to the next level. These are big-ass black plastic Scarboroughs with 100lb line and half a dozen hooks on and so far I’ve landed a fair few decent fish on one, not least a 150lb ragged tooth shark on the same day that I caught what I’d been banned from trying for – a yellowtail. Now, why would you ban someone from trying for a yellowtail on a Scarborough? Well, these things fight like hell and run quick. If you make one mistake you’re toast; the line unravels and wraps around the spindle and you get smashed up or perhaps you let go of the handles and they spin straight through your knuckles or fingers…yeah, yellowtail are hardcore.
I saw one mess her up that day. A big hows ya father, maybe 20kg of muscle, it hit and she braked the reel with her palm and then, as she grabbed the handles something happened and the handle sheared off leaving a great jagged hole in the side of the reel…it continued to spin and the other handle was smashed off on her hand…the reel is in bits, sharp edges everywhere and blood is pouring out of gashes on her hand…she jams the reel, hard, onto her thigh and as more blood spurts the reel brakes and she fights the fish to the boat. Hardcore.
So, I have a 4 3/8 inch deluxe KP with the hardwood facings. This is going to be fun back home. My uncle, on the other hand, has one more suitable to their type of fishing.
So I’m back home with a bunch of Rapala Magnums, a small KP reel and a load of South African ski-boat fishing knowledge which will translate to the UK piking and beach casting scene I’m sure. Sure enough I use it on occasion but mostly it sits at home unused and unloved while I crack on with my Shimano baitcasters (the first I ever saw in the UK, also brought back). It gets the occasional airing though when I take my girlfriend off for a riverside shagging.
Then, one morning in March 1993 at maybe 7am it gets a proper workout; it’s the reel of choice for what is still, to date, my PB pike at 23lb 6oz.
A historic moment for that reel. It lapsed into disuse again as I stopped fishing for maybe ten years bar a couple of outings but then, as I begin kayak fishing in the summer of 2006, it caught my eye again and got taken out for my very first sea launch, a solo trip onto the wreck of the White Swan at Gorleston. More history, even if I did blank.
You see they’re the best bottom fishing reel there are, bar none. The other main attraction is in the direct one to one connection with the fish; it’s a fairer fight. The drawbacks are the freewheeling nature which makes it difficult to use efficiently on a kayak and so it rarely came out in recent years although it was the weapon of choice when I went and anchored an Ocean Kayak Sprinter up on a day of lunacy.
So we come to Friday the Thirteenth. I’ve come across my old KP and I want to use it again. Westie and I have been chatting and he’s got bored with the usual downtiding we do and to be honest so have I. Bass season is starting now of course and with my parents in South Africa on holiday I’ve sent them to get a KP for Tim and one possibly for Steve. Of course an argument ensues between my dad, my uncle and the fishing shop staff about which reel a kayak angler in the UK needs and my dad, knowing bugger all about fishing but just following instruction keeps the peace and buys three…of which I hand Tim his the day I take mine out again for the first time in too long.
I’m determined. I want to catch on my KP. We get some bass (Tim fishing the pants off me) on lures and other gear and then move out deeper for a likely looking smoothie/ray mark. We don’t get there but anchor over a mussel bed and out of the two rods I’m using the KP is the one getting nearly all the bites and both fish…
My appetite is whetted; I want a bass on it now. We head inshore again but nothing and then head back to Gorleston. I leave it in the van; I’ve bust a rod and lost a Rapala and it doesn’t look fishy here now anyway with the wind up so I’m not going to take it out. Nope, Friday the Thirteenth has done enough.
Saturday the Fourteenth dawns and here we are off Lowestoft. I’m trolling a J13 with the KP wedged by my thigh when suddenly I feel the rod bucking; I’m in! I’ve done it, got my bass on the KP.
Then, with the water coloured up we head back to the Wreck of the Swan via breakfast at a café. It doesn’t bode well, the water is coloured up and the wind is blowing. We try though and within ten minutes a Rapala I’ve had from South Africa in 1991 is snagged and lost; I am gutted. That leaves only one of my originals. I only had one minor snag the night before, typical. Then, on the next pass, I snag up again and the reel, not held down firmly enough, spins, ripping both handles off and trashing my beloved KP :(
Using a bigger one:
This was on one:
Goodbye to you my trusted friend…
