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- Herausgeber: Merlin Unwin Books
- Kategorie: Lebensstil
- Sprache: Englisch
- Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2015
The Secret Carp is a fishing book with a difference. As The Independent comments, it is one of the few books that manages to capture the real joy of fishing in such a way that even a non-angler could be seduced. It tells the true story of the events of a single day and night beside an English carp lake in high summer. When he stumbled upon a long-neglected, overgrown lake holding some monster carp, Chris Yates knew that he had discovered the kind of place about which every carp angler dreams. He set about trying to catch the huge, elusive inhabitants with rod and line. It was a quest that was to reveal many insights into the secretive behaviour of this king of freshwater fish and bring him thrillingly into contact with his quarry. Waiting, watching and stalking, quite undeterred by the damp sleeping bag and the cold. Yates' enthralling story whispers adventure and promise. And it is punctuated by moments of great drama as monster fish disturb the tranquil world of the angler. Fishermen of all persuasions will enjoy this masterful angling chronicle.
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Contents
CHAPTER ONE
The Perfect Pool
Any fisherman who dreams of the perfect pool is always hoping that his imagined paradise really exists and that one day he might actually find it. Many years ago I thought I had stumbled on such a place, but because it was night time and a mist was rising I could not, at first, be sure. It was the scent that originally led me to it, the soft, ripe smell of vintage water that is familiar to anyone who has spent half his life fishing for carp by the side of old lakes and ponds. I was on my motorcycle, riding back from a long day’s chub stalking on the Sussex Rother, near Petworth. It was late, but instead of making straight for home I took a foolish plunge into a maze of twisting lanes, looking for a particularly fine-sounding pub a friend had told me about. I didn’t find it, in fact I got hopelessly lost.
Then the lane I was following dropped into a wooded valley and I found myself passing through a cloud of that sweet evocative scent. It was so strong and so infused with all the other summer smells I associate with carp fishing that I had to stop and investigate. Slowing down meant the scents stopped rushing into my face, but though less concentrated in the stillness, they were just as infectious; a lovely pot-pourri of elder, dog rose, honeysuckle and wild garlic weaving through the denser smell of ancient water like wood smoke weaving through a barn of apples. Somewhere nearby was a pond or a lake and it was essential that I find it. The setting fulfilled all my requirements for perfect carp country: deep valleys, old woods, no obvious signs of habitation and lanes that had more traffic going across than along them (since leaving the main road I’d not seen a single car coming or going, but there had been roe deer, fox, rabbits and a hare crossing in front of me).
Taking off my crash helmet I leant my bike against a fence post and stood in the road listening. I hoped there might be the distant sound of water trickling or rushing over an outfall, but apart from the ticking of the cooling engine, all was silent. The canopy of beech trees reached overhead but there was not, at least, complete darkness. The moon was up, only a few days from full, dappling the lane with vague spots of light. I began walking, looking for an opening through the trees where I might get a better view of my surroundings. After a short distance the tall smooth trunks on my left became stark silhouettes against a weirdly luminous background.
Low-lying roads back along the way had taken me through several pockets of mist and, with the clear night rapidly cooling after a hot day, conditions were pointing towards a fine, fat fog. There seemed to be a hollow lower down the valley, a perfect cup for the kind of mist that wells up from deep tepid stillwater. By dawn it would probably have overflowed and drowned the whole county.
I stepped under the trees towards the light but bramble and blackthorn made an almost impenetrable barrier and I could not find a clear way through. However, after a few jacket-ripping yards I did find a large half-decayed tree stump which improved my view once I had climbed up onto it. Straight away I saw what I had hoped to see.
Between two beech trunks I looked down at what appeared to be an expansive, pear-shaped lake. It was surrounded on three sides by woods, but I could not see anything of the banks because of the mist. The low, early-summer moon was directly overhead and the mist looked as white and as a smooth-surfaced as a field of snow.
Only by staring at it for several minutes could I detect the slow shifting, the almost imperceptible rising and falling of the upper layers. Then a curious current of air drew a long column of vapour out of the main mass and it rose up, pale and transparent against the trees beyond before detaching itself from its base, only to dissolve and vanish.
Of course, all the while I was thinking that this might be my perfect carp pond. I even hoped I might sniff out the very smell of carp amongst the other scents, for the fish do exude a faint yet distinctive aroma. It does not actually have anything fishy about it, reminding me more of dried herbs and marmalade. There may have been something like that in the air, but it was not strong enough to convince and anyway, carp or no carp, I knew I would have to return in daylight. The place needed exploring properly and I wanted to discover what creatures, if any, haunted it.
I turned to go and as I began wading back through the brambles I heard, in spite of my commotion, a sudden, sharp sound. I froze and listened and it came again: the echoing crash of a heavy fish leaping.
Stupendous carp lived in that lake. It had never been fished, in fact its existence had become almost entirely forgotten by the locals and the owners of the huge estate on which it lay. It was overgrown and inaccessible, its banks a tangled wilderness, its margins speared by reeds, jungled with weeds, bristling with the gnarled branches of drowned, fallen trees. The great fish would emerge from the depths and cruise between and beneath these reefs of dead wood or they would materialise out in the lake’s centre, drifting just below the surface, looking like the shadows of passing clouds.
These were the images I carried home with me that night and which grew even more wonderful and improbable in the days that followed, despite the fact that I could not find the lake on my map. Perhaps, I thought, it had been further north than I remembered or maybe, as sometimes happens, the cartographer had, for some reason, failed to show it. However, as a lifelong carpologist and hunter of lakes, I felt my optimism was justified. As well as having the right smell, the place had had the right feel.
Since quite early in my angling career, I have had this picture in my head of an ideal carp pool. Moreover, I did not merely hope that such a place existed, I was convinced, even though my vision of perfection, as described above, was rather unusual. All the ingredients though – the unkempt banks, the solitude, the tangled margins, the shadowy depths – all were necessary for that essential and yet indefinable quality: mystery. Every water, from winding brook to mountain tarn, has an element of mystery, but the mystery, the enigma of a carp lake should be deep and profound, as befits the nature of the fish itself. The problem nowadays of course is that, because of over-intensive angling, too many carp waters have had their mystery literally fished out of them. There is Redmire Pool, for instance, in Herefordshire, a legendary place and once the most magical stillwater in the country. But its jewel-in-the-crown status has now robbed it of much of its enchantment. Over the last forty years it has generated so much interest and attention – much of it of the wrong kind – that its finest quality has become diminished.
But it is not simply a lack of mystery which, to me, can undermine the complete enjoyment of carp fishing. There are many other reasons, some obvious, some obscure, why a lovely looking place could never be called perfect. And, unfortunately, there have also been near-perfect pools that were despoilt and some that have always been denied me.
Beechmore in Devon, deep and dark, encircled by towering trees, seemed the epitome of my ideal but, like Redmire, it was rather too high up in the carp fishing hierarchy, rather too well-known. Furthermore, I felt that the atmosphere was cool and occasionally even disturbing, as if the pool was a perpetually staring, hostile eye. A much more affable water was Sheepwash, a pool of about three acres set in gently rolling Sussex farmland. When I first visited it, in 1973, it was unknown, undisturbed, unfished. There were plenty of carp, one or two of them very large, there were willows in the water, lilies and vast weed beds. Yet, though it was pretty and despite the fact that I and a few good friends had many enjoyable days there, Sheepwash could sometimes seem prosaic, even bland; it was like a person whose talents you could admire, but whose lack of depth discouraged any lasting friendship.
Abbotsmere, in a green, fertile valley in the Black Mountains, seemed almost perfect when I first fished it, in 1970. It lay in the grounds of a former monastery and had a lovely hallowed air about it; a small pool, not more than two acres, surrounded by crack willows, alders and oaks. The carp were genuine wildies whose ancestry obviously dated back to the time of the monks. Beautiful fish: graceful, streamlined, richly-coloured in various shades of gold, ochre and blue.
In 1972 the pool was unofficially stocked with mirror carp which grew quite large and it was subsequently invaded by anglers for whom size counted for everything. Nothing else mattered in their headlong rush to accumulate carp poundage. The tranquil paradise became littered with beer cans and bait tins; it became crowded; it became depressing. I crossed it off my list.
Another love affair that ended badly concerned Furnace Lake, near Felbridge, Sussex. It was a large, square sheet of water, surrounded by high woods and great beds of reeds. When I first saw it in 1968, I was immediately struck by its quiet grandeur, its cathedral atmosphere. The carp were mostly small wildies, but there were also monsters known through legend and by the occasional tremendous splash as something rose from the depths. I actually hooked one of these mythical creatures on a piece of crust and its inevitable departure still haunts me. For a few years this lake was overflowing the pages of my fishing diary, but then, tragically, a mysterious disease wiped out almost the entire stock. The spirit went out of the place and though it was later restocked (with mirrors) it was never the same again.
There was a chain of carp pools in woodland to the north-east of Lewes, the largest of which, with its overhung bays, its overgrown banks, its wooded island and its clear depths, struck me as one of the most attractive, seductive carp waters I had ever seen. Alas, the owner refused me permission to fish. I discovered another marvellous pond in a dense hazel wood near the village of Dunsfold in Surrey. Reedy, weedy, it was mostly quite shallow and had, despite its tranquillity and remoteness, a uniquely cheerful, optimistic character.
It was also the domain of a colony of immense carp and I thought that even if I never obtained a permit I would still have to fish there, regardless. Then, by chance, I discovered the identity of the owner and my pleading letter was sympathetically replied to. I was given permission to fish there whenever I liked. Yet there are places on earth that are more than simply mysterious. No matter how glorious or magical (or maybe because of their magic) they are somehow impossible to revisit. I still have the owner’s letter, dated May 1969, but it’s probably too late now to take advantage of it. For all kinds of not very good reasons, I never went back to Dunsfold.
However, ten years later, the mist-shrouded lake preyed more effectively on my imagination and after a few days I knew I had to return. Even in daylight, I presumed it was going to be difficult to find again without a map reference. But, after an hour, chugging aimlessly through the labyrinth of hedged-in, tree-hung lanes, I recognised a landmark, picked up my trail and so came once more to the place where the road had taken a dive into watery incense.
In the breezy afternoon the fragrances were unnoticeable and the air was merely fresh and sweet. Leaning my bike against the same fencepost as before (off the road the turf was too soft for the propstand), I quickly found a straightforward route through the belt of beeches, avoiding all the thorns and brambles; yet before I reached the edge of the trees I suddenly knew exactly what I was going to find. I walked out into an open field and looked down into a wide hollow that bristled with reed tussocks and clumps of sallow, but which contained not even a puddle of water. The mist had been shrouding nothing more than a shrunken marsh.
What I had smelt and seen, however, was a ghost lake for I later discovered that an old lake had, indeed, once stretched across that valley. And the sound of the leaping fish? That might also have been a ghost, but it was more probably the sound of a startled fox or badger turning suddenly in dry leaves. All echo and illusion, brought on by the intoxicating air and a mind too inclined towards carp fishing.
Years passed and I almost gave up my belief in the perfect pool. But now, after a quarter of a century, I think I might have found it…
CHAPTER TWO
The Angler’s Dream
It is 3am on Midsummer morning. I am sitting by a lake. A real lake. What I mean to say is that this is happening now. Writing with letters larger than usual I can just see these words appearing on the page, but the first touch of day is so feeble that the pen-lines melt like smoke if I stare too hard. It is almost two hours before sunrise, and with the world’s edge veiled in a fine mist, the lake has become oceanic. Its immense surface, unbroken by ripple, mirrors the faint light and seems to spread beyond the far horizon. If an Atlantic liner steamed through the middle distance or an albatross winged gracefully overhead I think I’d be only mildly surprised.
The air is utterly still and a pallid vapour hangs motionless over the water. For eight or nine hours this stillness has been building like a wall around me, yet the lake has never once been absolutely flat calm. The pale moon looks static in the west, but its reflection slowly spins and sways like a wobbled plate. There is a constant, subtle shifting, like a gentle sea swell, a just-perceptible undulation. Unlike a small pond or pool, which remains completely still on a windless dawn, a large deep lake like this is continually pulsing and stirring with hidden currents and gradually subsiding turbulence – the echoes of yesterday’s waves. And, of course, there is something else moving down there, unseen as yet, unknown. In fact at the moment it seems unreal, just another fantasy but a powerfully compelling one. Anything that can keep an ordinary mortal from his bed for an entire night must be fairly remarkable. Yet I am no ordinary mortal, I am a dormouse, and I love my bed so much that I have rediscovered the art of hibernation.
Even so, this fantasy has kept me from my pillows more than just once; over the years it has led me through a thousand nights and into almost as many sunrises. It is more fundamental than my dream of the perfect pool, in fact it is the inspiration for that and a score of other such dreams. I call it a ‘fantasy’ because it seems not only unreal at this moment, but also a little irrational in this day and age. Yet if all goes well, fantasy and reality will eventually converge at a point thirty yards from where I’m now sitting. My line will run out, my rod will curve and, after a suitably dramatic interval, the subject of my fantasy, the inspirer of dreams and fomenter of troubles will come rolling over the net in the shape of a fabulous carp.
For the present though, this lake and its surroundings have been locked under a spell and not even the approaching morning is having an effect on it. Everything has been transfixed by the night: there are no movements, no sounds, nothing to disturb the scene. The woods hang like static grey clouds along the water’s edge, the thin mist furls across the distance like cauldron steam, my line droops from the rod like a stitch of old spider’s web. The surface tension flexes gently and not even a rising bubble breaks it. Yet the thought that it might break theatrically at any second puts everything into another dimension; my line might cut suddenly across it or perhaps an amazing golden-scaled creature might burst through it. Pure conjecture, I know, and all a consequence of that wretched fantasy; my angler’s dream. Yet it sustains me, it will keep me here all day, it charges the atmosphere with marvellous potential, and though there will be times when it loses force and even goes stale, I keep coming back to that happy notion that sooner or later, it will come true, just as my dream of the perfect lake came true.
CHAPTER THREE
A Lord of the Lake
It was like a different world here yesterday. I arrived in the late afternoon and a strong summer wind was blowing down the length of the lake making it look like a swollen fast-running river. The ripples slapped heavily into the dam and these woods, so calm and quiet at the present moment, sounded like a raging sea. I walked halfway round the lake, pausing in gaps between the trees, looking for carp, trying to decide where I was going to fish for the night.
No one else was here and there were no signs that anyone had ever cast from the banks. I know, from the local legends, that big carp haunt this place, but what I find so exciting and fascinating is the fact that, throughout the long history of this lake, no carp angler has ever fished here before – or at least, not until this summer.
Of course it was difficult to see anything below the waves, but I made out a few vague, carp-shaped shadows moving quite swiftly in different directions as they often do in windy conditions, like sailing ships on important voyages. None of them seemed particularly large, however; perhaps the biggest was twelve to fifteen pounds and the rest averaged about eight pounds. I crossed the dam and entered the noisy wood. Then, as I peered into a kind of bay between fallen and leaning trees, I came to a pocket of marvellous silence, as if a glass box had been dropped over my head. The wind still blew and the leaves still hissed but I experienced that same isolating quiet that, say, a gambler in a crowded casino would know if he was suddenly dealt five aces.
The fallen tree on my right protected the area of water in front of me from the worst effects of the wind and the surface just swayed and rocked. In mid-water, not twenty feet from the bank and facing away from me, hung the dark mass of an immense carp.
Its tail was outspread, but barely moving and the big pectorals did no more than keep the fish balanced and absolutely motionless. Sunlight, refracted through the shifting surface, ran in flickering bands along its great back and, though I couldn’t see every detail, the dark mesh of the scales and the long furling sail of the dorsal were clearly visible. Being so wide across the shoulders I thought it might be a forty pounder, but then it began to swing slowly round until it was broadside on and I saw that, despite its three-foot length, it was not terribly deep and therefore probably weighed in the middle thirties. A superb-looking fish though; dark and compact, it had a kind of solemn majesty that befitted a lord of the lake.
It gave a slight flinch and I guessed that it could feel, if not see, my intensely gazing eyes. If ever a big carp comes closely into my line of sight I always try to look away. After all, the carp, with its acute vision, is almost certainly going to realise that an angler’s eager and horrid face has been superimposed over a familiar background; therefore it’s best to dissolve into that background by slowly turning your head, then easing back from the water, trying to look indifferent, like a cow or a horse. The trick in carp-watching is to pretend not to watch, but on this occasion I was too fascinated to look away and the fish, intimidated by my constant stare, began to de-materialise. It sank lower and then, with a single flick of the tail, curved away and melted into the depths.
I didn’t need to look any further and decided straight away to pitch in near to that place. Not right in it, though. It would be tricky enough to fish in broad daylight, but the menacing jungle of twisting, submerged boughs would have made it suicidal at night. So I chose a spot by a lily bed, where there was a convenient gap in the trees, about twenty five yards down the bank. From there I could cast just to the edge of the first sunken branch and hope that, if the carp returned and I hooked it, I could steer it into the open water in front of me. I scattered sweetcorn, a bait the fish had probably never seen before, round the area, then went and fetched the rest of my gear from my van, parked nearby.
By the time I had tackled up my rod (a lissom split cane creation called The Bishop), prepared my net and made a cup of tea, the wind had begun to lessen. And by the time I was in position, with the bait cast to the chosen spot and my few bits and pieces ready to hand, the waves were beginning to smooth away into a gentle swell and the trees around me were easing towards stillness. Then across the lake the sun went down and for a while everything glowed like a smouldering tangerine. Fluttering bats appeared, cutting across the curving flight paths of swallows and swifts; the first big, slow moths hovered over the bankside vegetation, looking for nectar. Gradually, the warm glow shrank into the north-west, leaving the world layered with blues and greens and in the distance a carp pencilled a pale line on the surface.
Soon the birds had finished their evening chorus and the swallows and swifts left the airways for the bats. Before it became properly dark I reeled in, re-baited and cast again. Though I couldn’t see the exact position of the nearest submerged tree I tried not to be too timid and aimed to get the bait as near the carp’s sanctuary as possible. Naturally I overdid it and got hooked up. But as I pulled for a break the line suddenly sprang free and everything seemed all right when I checked it. I cast again, less recklessly, but was faintly troubled by thoughts of chafed line and strained hooks. A more cautious angler would have tied on a new trace (I was using a yard of 12lb b.s. braided nylon) and a new hook.
The after-glow shifted perceptibly round to the north and was visible until midnight when the strengthening moonlight obscured it. Four or five days after full, the moon must have risen at around eleven o’clock, but I had no sight of it until much later. It was low to the south and the trees round the lake were only dimly illuminated. By midnight the occasional distant road-drone and the faint eddyings of breeze had all ceased; apart from the whisper of water going over the outfall, there was perfect silence.
Never perfect calm, though. The image of that great carp, banded with sunlight, was still vivid in my mind; in fact it grew brighter as darkness fell. Under the black lake it had probably returned to its haunt and would almost certainly come across the scattering of corn. I could imagine its huge, shadowy form, now flickering with moonlight, as it sniffed, cat-like round the bait. At any moment the foil on the line might jump and rustle and signal a take, and though I leaned back comfortably against my creel and tried to concentrate on counting meteors, I was never completely relaxed. I’ve only fished here a couple of times before and this was my first complete night and day – a full twenty four hours. Though the fish had no reason to be nocturnal, I felt it was more likely to feed confidently at night.
