We’d talked about a return to Hazel Court during the week, so I didn’t pack my chair or the umbrella but did pack my large box that I sit on when using my pole, and of course, the pole. The tent went into the back of the car with folded down seats as did one mattress and sleeping bag for Wil who would have the alarm receiver while I fished my pole.
That was the plan anyway.
When I got to Wil’s house to pick him up, he seemed to be in a strange mood, but then teenagers often are. I asked him if anything was troubling him and his answer was that he’d been thinking all night about the peace and tranquillity of Mallard Pond at Tri-Nant, which we often had to ourselves. Did ‘thinking all night’ mean dreaming? Plans went out of the window, a quick return trip to my garage saw the tent, mattress and sleeping bag back into the garage and my chair and the umbrella into the back of the car because Mallard is as close as a commercial can get to a natural pond and the pegs are not flat enough or large enough for a tent.
After a drive-through breakfast, we retraced our journey partly to find a longer route to Tri-Nant but one with slightly wider lanes for the most part. With the sun on the near-to-the-carpark, shallow end, it would be logical to fish there but Wil seemed insistent that the deep end should be our target area, we walked down the left-hand side to a usual peg, but he kept going until he was part way back up the right-hand side and under an oak tree. “We haven’t fished here for ages.” He told me, and he was right. Maybe, only maybe, the oak tree had been in his dream.
The last time we’d fished from under the oak was in the winter and in the snow. This time though the wind was from the opposite direction so the umbrella was placed against bushes and pegged down. The umbrella takes three pegs and the ones that came with it were slowly getting bent out of use or lost in long grass. We had bought a box of new pegs that looked like nine-inch nails with orange tops and they came with a peg puller. The peg’s sharp points slipped into the hard and stony ground using feet, not a mallet, and held the umbrella all day until it was packed up and the orange tips of the pegs stood out in long grass.
Wil set up his method feeders on our new alarms and cast to his right into deeper water, and I set up three top-two kits, one for fishing short, in the middle of the channel between us and the island, one for fishing a foot or so off the island next to a tree stump, and one down my left-hand margin under an overhanging tree. All three were baited up with eight-millimetre banded pellets and size twelve hooks.
With my three swims ground-baited with a mixture of boilie crush, sticky pellets soaked in fish oil, and a mixture of green and brown groundbait, all in big pots, my short line of top-two plus one was first to strike with a four-pound common caught by a tiny float that takes only one shot which allows an eight-millimetre pellet to drift slowly down to the bottom as if the rig is a pellet waggler. Obviously and inevitably, Wil had to strike next and even more obviously his common was a pound heavier than mine.
From that point on, the fishing got weird. With the full ten-metres of my pole out to my long line, almost on the island and next to a tree base with presumably its roots under the water, my float shot under, I struck, and the fastest fish I’ve ever encountered, took seconds to dive to the right and to snag me up heavily in bramble bushes that had grown down into the water around the island. I tried forcing him out, I tried relaxing and waiting for him to come out, but in the end, it was a case of a snapped hook length and sadness that he would now be swimming about with a hook in his lip.
Next came an even weirder encounter. On my short line, the float dipped slowly as it had drifted and I knew it was snagged on something on the bottom. Shipping in to just my top-two, it felt like a twig or small branch, then it felt as if it was fighting, and then it felt like a branch again and appeared above the water line as a very large twig of about three-feet in length. I brought the branch in, unhooked my line, placed my gear to one side, and as I held the branch, I could feel it fighting again. The branch was covered in tangled braid, I pulled on the braid and brought in a half pound rudd. We’d never seen a rudd before on Mallard, but he was unhooked and let go to swim freely for the first time in probably ages. There was no way though that this was my snagged fish because I don’t use braid and the twig looked covered in silt and had obviously been on the bottom for a while. The braid and hook went into the rubbish carrier bag.
Wil’s alarm went off and before he could reach the rod, the bait runner had allowed line to be stripped off the reel. This left Wil with a fish some forty yards away in the middle of the deep-water of the lake and he had to play the fish for ages before it came to the net. Weighing in at a surprisingly lowish four-pounds eight-ounces, we looked at this common carp and decided that it was a chunk, all muscle, broad and deep and a fighter.
Fishing got weirder when my margin swim produced a half pound rudd from under the branches of the tree next to me, only the second rudd we’d ever seen in this pond and the second of the day, followed by another rudd from my long line near the island tree base.
The weather forecast had been for sunny but cloudy for the first half of our fishing, followed by bright sunshine for the second half but that bright sunshine failed to appear. With the sky looking as if it was full of clouds with black thunder heads, we packed up, the orange tipped pegs were a boom being easy to find, and we got back to the car with everything loaded.
In addition to all our fishing gear, we also had a carrier bag full of discarded fishing line, (some with hooks attached), ground-bait packets, an empty spam tin, a full and un-opened tin of tuna, and much paper that we’d collected throughout the day. Our grandchildren have all been taught, and often now recite, “leave only footsteps and take only photographs,” but surely if you can add to that with the removal of litter left by uncaring slobs, then that is a bonus in life and maybe saves the lives of song birds that may get tangled in line.
Although we write together, Wil and I, there can be no doubting that we both have personal thoughts about our fishing. For me, Mallard today looked as if it would fish best at the shallow end, nearest the car park. The wind, which was strong at times, was blowing into that area and the sun was on it to warm the water. However, Wil knew exactly where he wanted to fish and maybe had private reasons, maybe concerning a dream, that I didn’t delve into. Who knows the workings of a young teenage mind that id definite about which pond he wants to fish, and which particular peg he wanted.