The glorious 16th

The ashes of the river season are barely cold, but already I'm dreaming of roach, and looking back on a distant and precious memory of one particular day in the middle of June.

A pool local to me had a reputation for its specimen roach, although it was the gargantuan chub patrolling the gin clear margins that most fired my interest. Three fish in particular were eye-poppingly huge, but a few years earlier another chub, the largest of all, had swam with them. The Queen of all Chub - a stately and immense gun-metal-and-brass torpedo, I had spent hours upon hours of my young life trying in vain to tempt her as she toured the margins, ever accompanied by her close group of courtiers. 

Early one summer morning in the late 1970's we found her in the shallows, gasping her last breaths of this world. Our attempts to revive her were to no avail. She was, we were sure, a very old and venerable fish and this year's spawning was to be her last triumph of a long and glorious life. We watched with sadness and wonder as she passed, then gently netted and weighed her before returning her reverentially to a quiet place beneath the pond weed. This was her place and ours, so we told no one what my Little Samsons had said. She would have beaten the UK record by two ounces. 

I neither saw nor heard of her or any of her shoal mates ever being caught, but it didn't stop the trying, so here I was again at day break on June 16th, bunking off from sixth form, armed with bread flake and optimism. The plan, to suspend my bait at chub-cruising-eye-level, my rod laid on a gnarled mass of overhanging beech tree roots. The pool beneath was deep but clear and even in the canopy's shade my young eyes were sharp enough then to discern the shapes of patrolling fish. It was a simple matter to set the trap and wait, and it was but a short time before my float dipped, but in a strange kind of way - more of sideways displacement than the classic bite of a bait sucked in. Perched on the raft of roots I peered cautiously over and could see the culprit - a large chub-shaped shadow hovering near my bait. As I watched, my fingers tightening around the rod's cork handle, I expected to see the white flash of an opening mouth and readied myself to strike. But instead, the fish nudged the bread flake with its snout, mouth tightly closed, once, twice, and the bait was knocked free from the hook to sink slowly deeper. Only now, that white flash of a mouth, and with the bait consumed, a languorous tail flick away that said "dream on!" I knew then that I had been comprehensively beaten. 

But I fished on, enjoying the morning and the fact that my fellow students were by now stuck into stuffy old texts on the English Reformation, and before long I was rewarded by a brace of fish that I have not bettered in the thirty odd years since. The float dipped - this time properly under, and soon I held an exquisite 2lb 2oz roach that looked in the morning sunlight to be newly minted. Generous compensation for a lack of chub, and although I already held the morning now perfect and complete, the next cast brought me another roach, 2oz heavier still. The spirit of the pool had at first teased and then smiled upon me - a blessing for secrets kept.

You can't always get what you want.. but if you try sometimes well you just might find.. you get what you need.