Whether it is that strange mixture of fear and wonder, or just their sheer savage beauty, no fish etches itself in the memory in quite the same way as the pike. My first encounters with the toothy one were quite accidental, admittedly. A roach kicking on the line one moment, bloody history the next, seized in a heart-stopping mass of teeth and flared gills. Or that occasion when the keep net began to shake mysteriously, the long, sinister culprit prowling close by. Genuine heart attack material.
These were not fish to my tender imagination, but monsters from another world, dwarfing and terrorising those little roach and gudgeon that were then my staple catch on the river. As well as fascination, it was fear that captivated me.
Perhaps the tipping point was a family Christmas present of a rather cheap looking jointed plug. Cheap, yes, but it wiggled quite beautifully, at least to a twelve year old boy. A plan was hatched. I knew exactly where a fine pike lived; in a deep hole underneath the river bank, from which she would emerge in the blink of an eye to snatch roach, devour dace and generally fray nerves. The idea of trying to catch this beast had existed only as a vague idea, until then.
So, on subsequent trips to the river, a glass fibre spinning rod was set up at the ready for the monster’s next appearance. Anything but subtle, she didn’t take long to show up, sliding out ominously from under the bank and scaring virtually every fish in the county. With trembling fingers I cast the plug. My seedy little present did its sexy, cheap wiggle, like a guadily dressed hooker prospecting a new street.
A few casts later and I was wondering if the plug was capable of fooling anything, when WHAM! Perhaps sick of seeing this seedy, repetitive dance for the eleventh time the pike surged across the stream in a lunge of primeval violence. I nearly died of shock. The pike shook her head from side to side furiously like a terrier being electrocuted. The little rod bent obscenely under the strain, before everything went slack.
Total disaster. The jointed plug had given way in the middle and I was left with only the front half and a sick, empty feeling in my belly. Worse still, the pike was now swimming around somewhere with the lure’s tail half in its jaw, like an unwanted piercing.
All that I could do was to cast again, this time with an old copper spinner. I tried the same spot. I tried fast and I tried slow. I tried upstream and downstream. It seemed futile. I must have cast that spinner hundreds of times, my only incentive the thought of leaving that magnificent pike tethered to half a gaudy plug. My heart sank when Dad said we would have to leave shortly.
I kept recasting, regardless, more in blind hope than expectation, bringing the spinner back past that same undercut lair. Just as my brother was packing up his rod, the line went solid. The pike was back on and as angry as ever! I held on hard as she gave both the spinning rod and my nerves another pounding. “Not so hard!” pleaded my father, loosening the drag a little as she flailed in mid stream. Her manic power was amplified by the weight of the current. The reel did an impression of a coffee grinder, whilst I held tight and prayed. After a brutal fight that seemed to last forever but was probably only a few tense minutes, she was in the net. The pike weighed six pounds, an absolute monster to my young eyes. She was the most awesome, perfect fish I had ever seen. We removed the spinner first, before taking out the broken half plug. I watched her swim off with as much relief as joy, hands still trembling. She bolted straight back to her lair underneath the bank, each of us having learned an important lesson about steering well clear of cheap, plugs, no matter how sexy their wiggle.
A Tale of Two Halves
(ANGLER’S MAIL)