Toombs Raided (Nearly)!
And so the farce that is fishing begins. In warm summer sunshine I make my way back from the paper shop reading my copy of the Angling Times. A quick glance at the weather forecast brought a smile to my face as little dots of sunshine were plastered all over the map. I looked down to see what the Moonies had to say and with a full moon up your anus and more stars for Wednesday than decorate an American generals chest, the prospects for the days fishing looked stunning!
That evening I made a quick phone call to my Dad to arrange lifts to the river in the morning.
“Have you seen the weather forecast?” was my greeting.
“Yup the Angling Times says it’s going to be hot and sunny!” I reply.
“It’s not what the BBC reckons.”
There then followed the usual ‘what time do you want picking up’ followed by the ‘what time can you get here by’ conversation. Let me put you in the picture a little here. If I’m disabled then my Dad is knackered. One lung, diabetes, triple heart bypass, glasses and a hearing aid means watching my Dad get ready for anything is like watching the pilot episode of the Bionic Man, and if you mention going for a pint and the old bugger can hit mach six and singe the verge in his rush to the bar. My Mum passed away at fifty two from a stroke, so the combined family medical history means I was sodding doomed from birth. I suppose there is always the off chance Mum had a fling, but the seven strokes and two heart attacks I’ve had since I was thirty five means there’s no chance of that. Let’s just say when the Johnson boys hit the river bank it looks like a scene from Jackson’s Thriller! So with all probability of Dad running late combined with heavy rain and gales, its going to be typical summer fishing Wednesday.
Wednesday morning dawns…well it just sort of dawns. As mornings go, if this morning was a cocktail, it would be the kind your Uncle Fred makes with the cocktail kit he got for Christmas. Made from all of the dregs he could find in the bottles left over from the festive season, when he ran out of booze at his annual summer barbeque. Spots of rain, grey skies with the odd shaft of sunlight and a stiff breeze greet me as I take the dog for his morning walk. I say walk, but I should have called the dog Woodbine, as he’s twenty odd years old so I take the bugger for a drag. We get back to the house at a quarter past nine, load the car, and then my step mum drives us to the tackle shop. I grab a bag of Marine Halibut and a bag of Frenzied Hemp ground bait from the shelf, together with a tin of Frenzied Hemp and a pint of ‘mixed’ maggots. I comment about the weather as I spot Nev Fickling lurking behind the counter, then head out to the car.
Now this is where things go ‘tit’s up’ to use the vernacular. Dad passes me the club tickets he’s bought for me, and the Scunthorpe Police Angling Club tickets have turned up as well. This means the Warping Drain is a possibility. I’m all kitted up for the Idle, but I can tell from Dad’s tone of voice that he wants to fish the Warping Drain, probably in his usual spot. His usual spot is the only place I blanked last year, but just to keep the old bugger happy…
My step mum has an expression like Margaret Thatcher on valium, as she gives me instructions that she will be picking us up at four as we unload the gear from the car. We’ve stopped mid point on the section of the Warping held by the club, just before what used to be the ‘match section’ starts. We select two swims side by side with me to the right and Dad away to my left. As soon as walking becomes a problem you soon learn that all the best swims are just too far away! By the time we are rigged up and fishing it’s nearly 11:45.
I mix up the groundbait, mixing in some hemp and a handful of sweet corn flavoured with Liquid Brasem, fed a couple of orange sized balls into my swim, then nipped across to see if Dad needed any help and I take the ground bait with me. This is my first mistake, as Dad hangs onto the bait and my mixing bowl. I start the session on feeder, using a Zebco light feeder rod with a 1oz test curve tip, a light maggot feeder on the main line, through to a swivel and a light hook length to a size 14 hook. The wind is starting to pick up now, and I know what I’m like with tangles, so this seemed to be the best solution. What a mistake that was! Within fifteen minutes I gave up on that idea and switched to my Mach Three rod, with a bodied waggler through to a 14 hook, baited with sweet corn. This stopped the tangles, but the wind was making life difficult, both casting and spotting bites.
I’m muttering to myself having seen Dad’s chosen gear. He’s using his ‘old’ fibreglass Goldcrest rod circa 1974 (he moaned this was too heavy so I bought him an up to date rod for his Christmas box) along with his closed face Abu reel (bought with his rod when I was eight) and a hideous home made porcupine quill float. He’s fishing hard on the bottom with about five inches of his float above water, using a size 14 hook baited with maggot. We are now an hour into the session and not one single bite have we had! I change to maggot and cast out to the tiny bay on the far side of the drain, I’m rewarded with an instant bite. It’s so fast I miss the damned thing! With a sense of impending doom I get the funny feeling that I’m about to become a fully paid up member of Toombsy’s Raiders and bloody blank! I re-bait and cast in again, this time I hit the bite and reel in a finger length roach. This was it? The best that the tench Mecca could provide was not enough to fill a Czechoslovakian finger roll! A few more ‘sprats’ added to my tally and then bites dried up.
You see the thing about being a ‘pleasure’ fisherman is you don’t have to catch a monster to be successful. Call it defeatist but I hadn’t been water licked (watter licked in the local dialect), I’d caught something! Dad meanwhile had caught bugger all, not a single bite! I started to muse on the brilliant ‘Pre-baiting’ videos by Toombsy as www.gofishing.co.uk.
Okay many would be embarrassed by the size of the fish I was catching, but at the end of the day if a fisherman of Toombsy’s calibre can blank, hell a fish is a fish! I looked at the clock and it was 2:45, an hour and fifteen minutes left!
“Tim!” was the shout.
I knew it had to be urgent. Timothy is my Sunday name. Like Ronnie Corbet in ‘Sorry’, if I get‘Timothy’ I know I’m in trouble. Usually I’m referred to as ‘Are Kid’, but ‘Tim’ means it’s important. I scrambled up the bank thinking the silly old sod had fallen in. Falling in, I am sorry to say, is a regular occurrence with my Dad. It’s been happening for as long as I can remember. Bearing in mind the old bugger served most of is life in the Royal Navy, show him some water and he will fall in. As a kid I used to have a secret code I shared with my Mum. If we came back from fishing, and I climbed out of the car shaking one leg, it meant the soft old sod had fallen in again, and Mum would fetch dry clothes desperately trying not to laugh!
I reached the top of the bank and was buffeted by the strong winds. Sat among the reeds I hadn’t realised how much the wind had picked up.
“Are you all right?” I yelled at Dad.
“Landing net!” was my reply, as I saw the bend in his rod and heard the wind whine and whistle past the taught line.
Grabbing my landing net I slid and slithered behind him, and caught my breath, as a tail thrashed the surface of the water before the dark shape of the fish made another break for freedom. The fish rose to the surface again before rolling and diving once more.
“Give it a gob full of air!” I told Dad as the fish surfaced again before diving once more.
I have often heard anglers say that Bream don’t fight, what rubbish! A couple of minutes later and we had the fish in the net. Five and a half pound, Dad had saved the day! I took the opportunity to grab the groundbait bowl and went to mix some more.
No sooner had I got my hands in the mix then a shout went up.
“Tim!” again as I climbed the bank, noticing the rod doubled over again.
Fighting again, the fish was eventually tamed and another five pound bream slipped into the net.
“I’m catching them on one white and one red maggot, if you want to know!” said Dad.
As I walked back to my own swim I could here the strains of a song floating on the wind.
“One red one, one white one….and one with a bit….and one with a fairy light on to show us the way!”
Back in my own swim again another shout of ‘Tim’ was followed by a ‘never mind’. The silly bugger had fallen in this time but had climbed out.
“Tim!” went the shout again, this time I just grabbed the net and helped him land a six pound fish this time.
As I sauntered back to my swim, my step mum arrived to take us home. With Dad wrapped in a towel as he changed into dry clothes I photographed the fish and returned them before packing up.
What a fantastic day! It rained twice but other than the strong wind, nothing to complain about. Well the Moonies had got it all wrong, for me at any rate! Just one thing bothered me about the fish. For such large fish, each one showed a lot of damage in the forms of rips along the body. Something had been at them, which means to me there are a lot of big pike in the Warping Drain too!
Next time…The Idle!
