Warwickshire Avon - Stripeys and Strumpetocracy

There I was, plonked down at Piccadilly Circus this time not for barbel. Not the one with the neon lights, pigeons, and tourists trying to out-selfie each other in front of the giant screen, but the one of my own making. An amphitheatre of swirling water, whistling wind, and the faint perfume of groundbait wafting downstream, which I like to imagine must smell to a perch what a freshly fried bacon sarnie smells like to me on a Saturday morning. It was all rather idyllic in my mind’s eye, until, like a clown bursting into the middle of Hamlet, a lure angler arrived stage left and decided to conduct his casting display directly into my carefully prepared swim.

Now, ordinarily, I’m a man of peace, content with nothing more than a flask of lukewarm coffee, a bag of maggots crawling suspiciously faster than they should, and the chance to watch a float perform its aquatic ballet. But I’m also an angler of principle, and to see a lure splashing down in my territory was like someone cutting into your Sunday roast before you’d sharpened your knife. So I politely voiced my concern. 

To his credit, the chap apologised none of that territorial chest-puffing you sometimes get from anglers who think they’ve bought the exclusive rights to the riverbank along with their packet of soft shads. No, he was all smiles, turned his rod tip the other way, and before he left me to my contemplations, asked if I’d caught anything.

“Errr… nought sadly,” I replied, with all the enthusiasm of a man describing his tax return. He, however, grinned like a lottery winner and informed me that he’d just had the biggest perch he’d ever seen follow his lure right up to the bank. A proper beast. The kind of fish that turns your knees to blancmange, makes you question every knot you’ve ever tied, and leaves you muttering in the bath later that evening about “the one that got away.” 

Only in this case, it wasn’t even his fish it was just a very large, very smug perch that had deigned to inspect his lure before shrugging its scaly shoulders and sauntering off. A damn shame, yes, but perhaps also proof that age brings wisdom. After all, if I’d been around long enough to see every trick in the book wobbling plugs, rubber worms, and feathers dressed up to look like a Harlequin’s wardrobe  I too might decide that a bellyful of bleak and a mid-afternoon nap was preferable to taking another swipe at a suspiciously wriggling lump of plastic.

Now, for me, the perch is a curious creature. Beautifully barred, crimson-finned, and blessed with the kind of haughty expression that suggests it knows it’s the best-looking fish in the canal. And yet, for all my years dangling a line, I’ve yet to bag one over three pounds. They’re always just shy of it, like pub landlords who measure your pint with an extra millimetre of froth. 

I remember the Warwick Racecourse Reservoir in my younger days, a water now closed and, I imagine, paved over with something ghastly like a housing estate or a retail park where you can buy all the polyester socks you’ll never need. Back then, it was my perch playground. I’d spend hours trying to tempt those stripy thugs, with varying degrees of success, usually ending up with more tales than trophies.

So, having been reminded of the circus lurking beneath the waterline, I decided that today, well into my advancing years and supposedly wiser for it, I would scratch that itch. The plan was beautifully simple: lure the small fry in with a sprinkle of groundbait and a sprinkling of wriggly maggots, wait for the perch to start sniffing around like hungry punters at a pie stall, and then present them with a lure they simply couldn’t refuse. In theory, the perfect plan. In practice, somewhat less so, for fish rarely read the script.

The float dipped occasionally little dace and roach queuing up like extras in the background of a film. But that big perch, the star of the show, remained elusive, just offstage, probably running through its lines before deciding to pull out of the performance altogether. Still, that’s fishing for you. You make your plans, tie your rigs, sprinkle your maggots like confetti at a wedding, and hope the bride doesn’t run off with someone else before the vows. And even when they do, you go home with a story, a chuckle, and maybe a flask that still has half a cup of cold coffee left in it.

Because, at the end of the day, fishing isn’t about the fish at all. It’s about the circus. The clowns with their lures. The floats that dip like trapeze artists. The perch that follow but don’t commit, teasing you with the promise of greatness before flouncing off in a stripy huff. And me, standing there with my rod, my groundbait, and my eternal optimism, waiting for the curtain to rise on the next act.