A mid-winter Macnab, on a fly

Tempting a pike from the depths to satisfy an American guest’s New Year wish proves tricky – but not impossible…

- Charles Rangeley-Wilson

When fish-crazy Professor Henry Hughes of Western Oregon University came to England, his rods and reels stashed optimistically under Christmas presents for his wife’s family, this was the only escape he could muster, the first week of the New Year. But what can you catch in January, apart from the flu? We’d met by email when Hughes wanted to include an old story I’d written about chasing bonsai sharks in The Wash in an anthology of fishing writing he was working on. He was hoping I could take him on a similarly batty adventure. And now all I really had to offer were pike. Good in theory. The creaking-creel school of pike angling paints a romantic picture of hunting Esox in the depths of winter, galoshes crunching frostbitten grass, icicles on the nose and vast pike swirling menacingly under a duvet of mist. But in my experience, on those arse-numbingly frigid days of angling folklore, pike are impossible. They are nutritionally celibate, fishy Trappists, sunk to their midriffs in ooze and weed, contemplating only the inside of their dull, fishy brains and locked in semi-hibernation. The only way to catch one on such a day is to dangle a rotten herring infront its face for 12 hours. And I don’t fish with bait. There’s grayling, too, of course. Just like pike, they slow down in the depths of winter and, just like pike, are so much better when you can see them and stalk them. In October, for example.

TEMPERING EXPECTATIONS

I tried to temper Hughes’ expectations. We’d have to hope for a warm spell, I said. We might have to use plugs and spoons. And there are no grayling in Norfolk. None of this fazed him. Not at all. He’s from Oregon, where men are men and sturgeon are nervous. Hughes’ luggage jingled with fishy Oregonian hardware as I met him off the bus at King’s Lynn. It was New Year’s Eve. We drove the long way home, reconnoitring the local dykes and drains.