THE INCOMPLETE DANGLER
FIFTY YEARS OF SEA
AND FRESHWATER FISHING
TIDAL TALES – STILLWATER STORIES
ESSEX AND BEYOND
By the same author:
Poetry
Two Essex Poets (Brentham Press)
Talking to the Bees (Brentham Press)
Autumn Manuscript (Littoral Press)
The Beatitudes of Silence (Littoral Press)
Autobiography
The Willow Pond (Littoral Press)
THE INCOMPLETE DANGLER
MERVYN LINFORD
THE LITTORAL PRESS
First Published in 2004
The Littoral Press
38 Barringtons, 10 Sutton Road,
Southend-on-Sea, Essex. SS2 5NA
United Kingdom
© Mervyn Linford 2004
The right of Mervyn Linford to be identified as author Of this work has been asserted by him under
The Copyright Designs and Patents Act 1988
British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record of this book is available from
The British Library
ISBN 978-0-954184-43-8 (Print)
ISBN 978-0-957660-82-3 (eBook)
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be Reproduced or utilized in any form
Or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including Photocopying, recording or by any Information storage and retrieval system, without Prior permission in writing from the Publisher
Photographs: Clare Harvey
eBook conversion by Vivlia Limited
CONTENTS
1 Beginnings
2 Further Afield
3 Chelmer Memories
4 Foreign Waters
5 Seaweed – Sand – and Saltwater
6 Dover and Deal
7 Paglesham Pie – Blackwater Bass
8 Winged Horse Angling Club
9 New Friends – Same Waters
10 Billericay and District Angling Club
11 The Lion at Thurne
12 Lands End to John o’Groats
13 Mopeds and Maggots
14 Belaugh to Beccles
15 ‘Last Lines’
PROLOGUE
ALL SAINTS (ULTING – RIVER CHELMER)
There is a church beside the river -
An ancient place of stone and flint – living
The lessons of an age that’s passing. Sermons
Are different now – the diving tern
Dips to the icon of its sacred self –
Shatters the instant with a dream that’s delving.
The Gospel is the cadence of a warbler –
A wash of notes – that daily – as they daub
Leave the mind a mural made of sound.
Moorhens pierce the passion of their vows –
Where light reflects the image of a spire
And captures clouds. The alders – are a choir –
A whispered susurration of the air
Where leaves are tongues of language –like a prayer –
And preaching is the purpose of the sun.
The celebrant – is sentience – and summer
As thoughts of something other touch the ear
And visions are the vespers of revering.
Ecclesiastic order here divines
The depths that drown with miracles of fish –
The moment – in itself – is bread and wine
Beyond the realms – of reverence – and wishes.
I was hatched – as is appropriate to all good angling stories – in Fleet in Hampshire in June 1946. Having had a life-long love of the countryside – lakes and rivers especially – I’d like to think that being born in rural parts authenticates my credentials as a bone fide bucolic. Unfortunately, the truth is I was only born in Fleet because of The Second World War. My parents and their parents all originated in such illustrious places as Custom House, Canning Town and Silvertown in the East End of London, and my mother only moved into the wilds of Hampshire because of the Blitz and other sundry wartime inconveniences. So genetically and spiritually my real home was made up of slums, bombsites, docks, belching smokestacks, jellied eels – fishy at least – pie and mash, sarsaparilla and Rathbone Street Market! Nevertheless, The Laurels, 64 Westover Road, Fleet, Hampshire, was to be - and still is - my one and only claim to genuine rusticity. I left Fleet to return to the prefabs and the city when I was only three years old, so my memories of the place are vague and somewhat sketchy to say the least. I remember a small black and white dog, a bridge, what subsequently turned out to be watercress beds, and somewhat surrealistically – goldfish! Those subaqueous seams of rippling scales and muscle obviously swam deep into my developing subconscious and primed my life-long love of all finned and pharyngeal denizens of the shallows and the depths. London and the Thames was a different kettle of conundrums altogether. In those delightful days of pestilence and pollution the average flounder wouldn’t be seen dead – and I use the word advisedly – without a Mickey Mouse gas mask and a de-contamination suit! The river was as thick as chocolate after rain and yellow and sulphurous the rest of the time. The only shoal-fish known to inhabit that onetime rancid watercourse were the ubiquitous brown-scaled Richard the slippery Thirds!!! Angling would have to wait until I partook of my second pseudo-bucolic experience. My father was given the option of exchanging his prefab for a house in West Ham Borough or moving to Basildon New Town. Fortunately, for the aspiring angler, he chose the latter. Basildon in those days consisted of just two estates: Whitmore Way to the northwest and Barstable to the south, where I was bound to reside. Other than those two enclaves of incipient urbanism - Laindon in the west, Wickford to the north, and Pitsea, the creeks, fleets, marshes and the Thames Delta to the south - all was fields, farms, smallholdings, orchards, elms and thorn thickets – a paradise indeed! By this time - 1951 - I was five years old and already infused with the pioneering spirit. In those prepubescent times - devoid it seems of perverts and paedophilia - I was allowed the privilege of a completely free rein and spent many a happy hour wandering around the countryside on my own. There were ponds – mostly it’s said, bomb craters that were bone dry in August but full to the brim with water, frogs, toads, newts and sticklebacks in spring – and ditches by the dozen just waiting in the sparkling shafts of sunlight for the withy and the ever eager angle! I cut my piscatorial teeth on those sticklebacks. The males were darting gems in those diminutive waters: silver and black, ruby throated, and with eyes like sapphires. All you needed by way of equipment and bait was a bent pin, string and a worm. Sometimes they fell off the hook before you got them to the waiting jar, and this early experience of watery disappointment was etched deep into my developing circuitry and still exhibits itself in its full electrifying force whenever my pole-rig and a double figure carp part company. Such is life! Have you ever really looked at sticklebacks in a jar? The curvature of the glass plays strange optical tricks and those tiny, jewel-like, delicate fish, can sometimes take on a weight and a demeanour of alarming proportions. I think that this may be where the propensity for adding extra pounds and ounces to one’s diminutive catch had its origination – well that’s my story and I’m sticking to it hook, line and bloody sinker!!! Newts are not exactly fish, I’ll give you that, but they are wet, spend a lot of time under water, and are ideal for honing one’s infantile angling skills. Worms and wool were the ideal tackle, but whether the quarry appreciated being held by the tail after capture and being swung round above one’s head, is something a helicopter pilot alone could tell you! Mind you, a dizzy newt corkscrewing its way back to the bottom of a ditch with out the aid of alcohol is a sight to gladden the eye of any recovering dipsomaniac! The seeds of fishing were not just sown by the whispering whiteness’s of the freshwater crowsfoot but also by the salted breath of sea lavender, purslane and thrift. The marshes, fleets, creeks and saltings of the Thames Delta were my oyster – to coin a serendipitous phrase! Such evocative names spring to mind as: Timberman’s Creek, Vange Creek, Pitsea Hall Island, Benfleet Creek, Fobbing Horse and Holehaven Creek, to name but a few – What inspired nomenclature! Although still relatively young and unable to afford the required tackle, that didn’t stop me from watching the older boys and the men practicing their piscatorial arts in the tideways of that enchanted corner of East Saxonia – or Essex to the uninitiated! Flounders, which for some reason start off round and end up flat, were plentiful. Fish of two pounds or more were not uncommon and if fished for with light tackle – especially freshwater float gear – put up a spectacular fight. School bass were ledgered or spun for and their spinning silver scales captured the sunlight like a thousand mirrors. Eels were a marshland speciality. I’m told – by an Anorak of my acquaintance – that most of the eels we catch are only up to two years old as after that time they return to the Sargasso sea from whence they came in order to spawn – or whatever eels do by the way of sex! The monsters that are caught – as thick as your arm and as slippery as a car salesman – are, I’m reliably informed, sterile, and therefore have no urge to return to their Caribbean roots. These watery representations of the eunuch and the virgin grow to inordinate lengths to avoid sex – and being caught by worm dangling voyeurs. But caught they were by the stewed and jellied bucket full. I’ve seen grown men turn to whimpering tearful wrecks as they wrestled with the slimy leviathans in the sinuous and constricting marshland grasses – formidable adversaries indeed! When I think of just how often we swam in those salt laden waterways I’m surprised that we weren’t torn limb from limb by those carnivorous, piranha-like, monsters of the deep – not to mention the possibility of their smaller cousins entering every available bodily orifice – it doesn’t bear thinking about, does it? As Jack Hargreaves once so wisely said, fishing is not just about fish, it’s also about ‘the angler’s other eye’. Those marshes and tidal flats were a haven for wildlife - waders and wildfowl especially. Redshank tweked, shelduck laughed eerily, curlew called their solitary calls, and oystercatchers bleeped from their sub tropical, coral coloured bills. It was a prelapsarian wonderland. Peewits and herons rose on angelic wings, godwits and teal and widgeon were cherubim and seraphim to my newly religious eyes, and all the principles and powers of the heavenly hierarchy floated to earth in the name of dunlin and turnstone and knot. It was not just sea birds that coloured the eye with their exotic plumage but passerines and raptors preened and perambulated throughout the thorn thickets and the reed-margined fleets. Magpies chattered in the sloe and hawthorn, bearded reedlings flitted through the whispering reeds, linnets and redpolls undulated in flight, warblers warbled, and whitethroats rattled their love songs in the scrub. Skylarks rose to infinity, or almost, a pencil point, a full stop to their own song. Sparrow hawks soared and kestrels hovered, voles and shrews and small birds cowered in the predatory grasses, foxes stalked, and rabbits and hares twitched and quivered on the edge of cover. Pitsea Fleet was an especially interesting area of brackish water. Apart from the ubiquitous eels, before it was inundated by the sea in the Great Tide of 1953 it was home to some particularly stupendous rudd. I sat and watched as they rippled the summer surface of the fleet to such a concentric effect that you would think you were witnessing a shower of rain falling from a blue and cloudless August sky. Some of the locals freelined floating crust or used a bubble float to tempt those animate jewels. The golden sides and red resplendent fins of the rudd are a joy to behold – once seen, and especially handled, never to be forgotten. Some of those glorious creatures of God’s creation reached the specimen size of two pounds or more and to see the sun-shot crystal spray as they were played across the surface to the waiting net, was as if to see the sun itself explode and shatter into red and golden fire. My first real fishing was practiced at a diminutive local fishery, known less than originally, as the Willow Pond. It was an oasis of willows and water crowsfoot deep amongst the surrounding scrub and elm-lined farmland to the north of Pitsea. One of the willows was of the old, gnarled variety, with broken limbs and trailing silvery leaves and branches. Sometimes in the summer the seed floss would blow on the warming breeze and settle on the water’s surface like an unseasonable snowfall. Dragonflies – known locally as the Devil’s darning needles – stitched and unstitched the humid air, hovered like kestrels, then shot off at lightning speed in search of prey. Water boatmen - boated, pond skaters - skated, great diving beetles dived and surfaced in silver bubbles, frogs croaked and damselflies danced on their delicate blue and green metallic wings. If the marshes were prelapsarian then this was Paradise indeed. Ambrosia was bread and sugar sandwiches, nectar, ginger beer or Adam’s Ale for the less than fortunate, and the golden cups of floating lilies drank in the shafted honey of the omniscient and omnipresent sunlight. Here there were swimming grass snakes, and tribes of primitive boys and adolescents splashed about in the frenetic margins to rid the waters of imaginary pythons and anacondas. Mute swans - as white and wild as a dream of the Arctic – whispered their muted expletives as we disturbed their summer reveries, and blackbirds chinked their high-pitched, full-throated glasses, as they toasted us with the urgency of their alarm calls. Whenever silence ensued thoughts of crucian carp and fishing became of paramount importance. Swims were few and lily-padded so invariably when it came allocating the prime positions the biggest boys – as always in this cruel life of ours – caught the biggest fish. Not that the fish were that big in all honesty. The pond must have been knee deep in stunted crucian carp ranging from tiddlers to what we at that time considered specimens of around six inches at the most! But did it matter? Did it hell! Tackle was still somewhat primitive to say the least: a willow switch sufficed as a rod, 16 hooks, once purchased, were prized and cared for as if they were part of the Gold Standard. Floats were handmade from cork and matchsticks and painted and varnished with all the skill, love, and inspiration attributed to Renaissance painters and the illuminators of ecclesiastical manuscripts. This was serious stuff. Mr. Crabtree had been read in rapt and religious silence, Bernard Venables absorbed and assimilated, and baits prepared with secret essences such as custard powder and pilchard oil – the relating of which still smacks of the utmost in angling heresy! In the heat of the long, hot, summer days, bites were few and far between, but when the shadows lengthened and the swifts and swallows lifted into the cool benighted skies and the pipistrelle bats tickled the water’s surface with their prehistoric wings, the crucians started to feed. And what fish they were! If you think that a willow switch is not the perfect rod for crucians; then try one for yourself. They had the perfect all through action for our young and inexperienced hands, anything stiffer and we’d have probably bumped off more fish than we caught. As it was we caught plenty of the thick-muscled, aureate-scaled, mini leviathans. Ounce for ounce I think they shake, circle, dive and fight as hard and as long as any fish in British waters – sea fish, silvers or otherwise. These days I manage to catch crucians of well over two pounds on occasions, and beautiful fish they are too, but nothing can compare with those early days of improvised tackle and limited resources. In my childish imagination they were more valuable that all the treasure plundered from the Spanish Main. To hold one in my young hands, to feel all the pent up power in their glint and golden muscles, was the closest I had been to heaven on earth, and the memory of fishing for crucian in those early days is still associated in my mind with the spirit guardians of the Willow Pond, and the primal Gods of pectorals and pure Platonic form!
You’d think what with having Hampshire as my birthright and having visions of goldfish and watercress at an early age, that rivers like the Itchen and the Test would be well and truly in my blood. Not a bit of it! Up to my early teens lakes and ponds – apart from the creeks and the sea – were my sole outlet for piscatorial diversions. The nearest river – or more accurately, the Chelmer/Blackwater Navigation – was some twenty miles distant and not conducive to spindly legs, inordinate amounts of fishing tackle, and a clapped-out, antiquated, velocipede! Chub and dace would have to wait until motorized transport became available. For the time being all of my fishing would have to be done within easy peddling range. Woody’s is the first lake that springs immediately to mind. It was situated behind the Bull Inn and Corringham’s equally ancient village church, surrounded by elms and the flappable purple sheen of garrulous rooks. It was an old gravel working that had matured over the years into a natural looking tree-lined fishery. The margins had the occasional sporadic swathes of reeds and rushes, and there were one or two patches of lily-pads – which in early summer held golden goblets in their green uplifting palms. On the western side of the lake there were a few caravans owned by Woody himself, a bungalow and a very respectable tackle shop. We fished for crucian, tench, bream, roach, rudd and perch. There were common carp in the lake but in those days they were considered so wary and cunning that it would be a waste of valuable fishing time trying to catch them. Nowadays it seems that carp are so ravenous and competitive on a diet of ‘boilies’ and ‘fish pellets’ that those with expensive polarized glasses swear that they’ve seen double figure carp queuing up to ascend the dangled lengths of any available monofilament!!! How times change. Poor old Dick Walker must be turning in his sparsely populated heavenly thermocline! He is dead, isn’t he? I hope so – if you see what I mean. No, Woody’s was no Redmire Pool, but to the prepubescent danglers of worms and bread flake it was more than adequate. I – as the title of this book indicates – was very rarely in the frame, but I did catch the occasional decent fish which was more than enough to keep me happy. One of my friends I nicknamed Gibbo the Tench. He could have caught the little tincas down a drain – I’m sure of it. The red-eyed doctor fish were his speciality. Most of the tackle I fished with had been begged, borrowed, or stolen, but he had an Allcock’s Gloria and a spanking, brand new, aluminium centre-pin reel. He fished light, either laying-on or using the lift method with worm or bread for bait, and invariably stole the honours from June to September. To me the various species of fish are a bit like the seasons – whichever one I’m in, or whatever type of fish I’m catching – is for that particular moment my special favourite. I’m not fickle; I’m eclectic – so there! One of the regulars at the waterside was an Irishman known predictably as Paddy Cane. Cane by name cane by nature - his wooden tackle was that old that we all assumed that he had purchased it from Noah himself! But this particular Bernard o Venables was always one hook, line, and sinker, ahead of the sniggering Anglo Saxons. The man had more blarney than a bookmaker and had the Celtic effrontery to name the species of fish he was about to catch before he’d even had a nibble! What was worse he always used the same bait – the ‘worum’ and nothing but the ‘worum’. I don’t know whether or not he had a direct link to the patron saint of fishermen ‘he’s self’, but being a devout Catholic I suspected that St Peter was definitely on his side. Whatever, if he said he was going to catch a bream next, then ‘be’geebers’ he caught one! “It ‘ul be a tench,” he would say, and it was. “I tink I’ll be having a perch,” and a perch he definitely had. It was infuriating, but give the man his due; he knew the water like the back of his hand and knew exactly what he was doing. If I’d have paid more attention to his tackle and his methods perhaps I’d have become a ‘Complete Angler’ far sooner than later instead of vainly trying to get beyond the veil in my dreams and my meditations for a one to one with old Izaak himself!!! Another thing I experience at Woody’s for the first time – was night fishing. For a group of eager youngsters a tent by the rushes with the moonlight glittering on the water was the epitome of excitement and adventure. Not all was calm and tranquil though – not by a long chalk. To the south of the lake, across a couple of miles of fleets and marshes, lay the Thames Haven Oil refineries. At the time one of the scariest programmes ever to have been broadcast on television – before or since I might add as I twitch and tremble into hair-raising recollections – was ‘The Quatermass Experiment’. Much of the spine-chilling series was shot at those very refineries. In one particular episode an unfortunate individual was thrown into one of the large spherical tanks containing a particularly corrosive liquid. For the 1950’s the special effects were pretty good. As he sunk into the viscous liquid you could see the flesh peeling off of his bones and although things were black and white in those days you could imagine his blood leaching and bubbling in the acidic environs! On one of our night fishing escapades we dared ourselves to walk the perimeter of the lake in near pitch darkness. As we passed a hedge overlooking the eerie, flickering glow of the distant refineries, an apparition rose like Lazarus from the dead and lunged at us through the moon-silvered foliage. “Eff off you frigging bastards,” he expleted, with a face as contorted and corrosive as the corpse in the tank of aforementioned acid, “can’t a man get any frigging sleep round ‘ere?” He was probably just a gentleman of the road utilizing God’s own grass-lined and leafy green four-poster, but at that particular moment such rational thoughts were far from our irrational minds! Traction was difficult on the dew dampened greensward but suffice it to say we managed to put a considerable distance between ourselves and that festering visage of the wildwoods! Have you ever run around in ever decreasing circles not knowing quite what to do and why, with your heart pounding away like a pile-driver in overdrive? Well I have and I can assure you getting the adrenaline back into its ductless glands makes camels and the eyes of needles seem like a piece of piss! We were terrified, but even under the lunar influence, sanity eventually returned and we realized that the man was only trying to get a kip, and that ‘things that go bump in the night’ are usually bream rolling and rollocking on the surface of the moon-gladed waters. Mind you, back in the tent, the hooting of owls and the barking of foxes did little to reassure us or soothe our shattered nerves. Still, such was Woody’s and the ways of our wayward youth. Now that I’m older I much prefer the nocturne to the symphony of sunlight and the sounds of nature in the still and early hours are as soothing to me as the slime on the glistening silhouette of a midnight tench!
Bata’s was another small lake that we frequented. It was situated about half way between Corringham and Fobbing. Truth be known we shouldn’t have been frequenting it at all - mainly because it was strictly private! But such are the recalcitrant ways of adolescence. Is it any different nowadays? I doubt it. A one pound roach on day ticket water is something special – is it not? But an illegal one pound roach is something to die for! There’s not a Peterman in the world that has not experienced the same illicit joys as we did when cracking the safe of that prohibited lake. Stealth was the watchword. We assembled our tackle in the field beyond the fishery, baited up, and crept like Apaches through the surrounding hedges and undergrowth. Not a twig was snapped as we soft-footed our way towards the unsuspecting quarry. The lake was hardly ever fished and as a consequence of this fact the fish were both unwary and ravenous. Rudd like gold bars came thrashing to the nets to be admired and assayed. Big, pink-bellied roach – smelling like the crux of all that’s rivery – soiled our tainted hands with illegal silver, and perch with felonious stripes pumped and plunged to the abysmal depths of our depraved piscatorial imaginations. We were never caught red-handed in the act of poaching. The lake was surrounded by trees and hedges and the owner’s house was hidden from most of the bays and inlets by the mass of summer foliage. The only places I catch fish as easily and frequently as I did in Bata’s in those days is on the ubiquitous commercials – and what’s more I have to pay handsomely for the privilege! Free fishing; free legal fishing; dream on my maggot-riddled friends – dream on!
Stanford Warren, now there’s a name where memories abound. Owned by The Shell Mex Angling Club and open to day tickets, it was – and still is – a large complex of lakes, islands and promontories, connected by deep channels, bridges and wooden walkways. To the west lies Mucking church and in-between a nature reserve supporting the largest area of phragmites reeds in Essex. Nowadays the reserve is famous for its population of bearded reedlings, water voles protected from the deprivations of mink and other carnivorous escapees, lizards and adders. I often walk the dogs along a pathway that cuts straight through the centre of the reed beds. Lining the pathway there are sloe and hawthorn and wild plum. The reeds on either side are constantly alive with the rasp and rattle of sedge and reed warblers. Every spring I get out my field guide and try to determine which are which. One species it’s said sing – if that’s the right word – both louder and slower than the other. But do you think I can remember which is which? Not a chance. My ears are attuned whilst I’m there with the field guide in my hand to refer to, but no sooner do I get home and put the book back on the shelf than I immediately forget which is which and have to go through the same infuriating procedure every time I visit the reserve. I have the same trouble with coots and moorhens. Telling them apart in open water is no problem at all – I might not be an Anorak, but I’m not a complete wally – an ‘incomplete’ one maybe! No, it’s when they’re skulking in the reeds that the difficulty arises. When I see one in the flesh – or the feather if you see what I mean – simultaneously with its call, then I’m convinced I’ll remember one from the other. But as soon as they disappear back into the reeds – hark! Is that a coot or is that a moorhen? Will I ever know for sure – I doubt it. But never mind, happiness is ignorance, or so some dim witted pseudo philosopher was prone to spout reassuringly at the mentally challenged! I even have trouble with old Philomel. Is it a song thrush whose been taking singing lessons or is it the one-time resident of Berkley Square? Not all is lost. I bought myself a tape of birdsongs a number of years ago and although I still have a certain amount of difficulty identifying a number of my avian friends, I have most of the common birds and even some of the rarer species well and truly sorted. Perhaps I’ll get my I-Spy Badge after all – or is it I-Hear? I digress; let’s get back to the past and the willowy, fish-concentric waters of Stanford Warren. One of my first really successful tench sessions took place on the smallest lake in the complex – known appropriately as the ‘child’s pond’. I cycled down with my friend Pancho before dawn on one warm and starlit night in late June. We’d gone all out this time; we’d read all the pertinent literature on the subject, mixed a heap of breadcrumb with chopped worms and ox blood, and sharpened our hooks as well as our intellects. As we tackled up in the crepuscular light, swarms of bats were changing shifts with equally abundant swifts and swallows. Fish were jumping everywhere and the slap of their sides on the silky water was echoed by the plop and splash of our descending groundbait. I was fishing with a ten foot split cane rod, four pound line; a six inch quill float and a number twelve eyed hook tied directly to the monofilament. Fishing slightly over depth in the still unruffled waters as the first rays of breaking sunlight illuminated the trees on the far bank, my float bobbed a couple of times then sailed away under the water at an angle of about 45 degrees. It was my first real tench; three muscular pounds of olive-sided obstinacy requiring side-strain, time, and nerves of tempered steel. Eventually after a long and powerful fight it came to the net thrashing in the crystal spray like a demented denizen of Neptune’s watery domain. We both caught a net-full of tench ranging between one and three pounds in weight and my love of the doctor fish doubled and trebled and quadrupled with every bite. There were apocryphal stories of enormous eels being caught in the deep channels that connected some of the many lakes in the complex. Another friend – Dennis – decided to go for bust and fish for them exclusively. On one occasion I joined him for a night-fishing session. Our tackle was heavy; strong, eight foot, solid fiberglass boat rods, 15lb line, a running ledger and a wire trace with a number 6 hook. To the aforementioned tackle we lip-hooked sprats, lobbed them out into the deepest water and awaited results. I don’t know about you but the combination of darkness, deep water, dead bait, and the thought of the ravenous maws of marauding leviathans does nothing to instill in me a sense of peace and perfect tranquility. In fact on that particular occasion foreboding would have been the understatement of all understatements! I was shitting myself. Fortunately, being as already verified, the most ‘incomplete’ of all ‘incomplete danglers’, I didn’t have a bite all night. But Dennis did – oh yes he did!!! As strong as his rod was it curved as though he’d struck into a veritable conger. Eels pump and plunge as only eels no how, but slowly and surely the strength of the tackle overcame the slippery, writhing weight, of that wriggling giant from the depths of some serpent-spitting hell. The eel was some five pounds in weight and to watch Dennis grapple with the ferocious coiling beast – from a safe distance I hasten to add – was to a young teenager with a vivid imagination terrifying in the extreme. Nowadays I see eels in a different light altogether. I’ve grown quite found of them really – apart from the jellied and stewed variety that is – and see them as no more or less than another example of God’s fish-fingered creativeness. Tubby Issacs can say what he likes, but I for one have given up eating the delightful creatures. It’s bad enough being sterile without being bumped on the head with a ‘priest’, cut up into manageable pieces and boiled in one’s own fat! No, as far as I’m concerned, eels and my good self are all brothers and sisters under the skin; no more or less than different expressions of God’s diverse and infinite thought processes. If they can’t go home to the far Sargasso Sea and mingle with their relatives then I’m more than happy to see them take up permanent residence in these Sceptred Isles surrounded by a silver sea – after all, I’m no xenophobe – am I?
In the vicinity of Pound Lane in North Benfleet there was another local pond known as Jackson’s. This particular pond sat – if ponds can be said to sit that is – on top of a hill between All Saints Church and the eponymous farmstead itself. As can well be imagined; in the days before the ravages of Dutch elm disease the pond exhibited itself as something of a rare and rustic idyll to our city oriented eyes. Geese honked and ducks dabbled. Cows mooed and sheep bleated and did unspeakable things with their own diminutive droppings! Another friend of mine in those far off dreamy days was Dave Parks. He was a completely different kettle of fish – to use the appropriate terminology – from all the other prepubescents I was acquainted with. It has to be said that he was rather forward for his age – he did eventually put his milt in the wrong place and fertilized a spawn heavy girl of just fifteen years of age. I have subsequently heard that they got married when they reached the legal definition of consenting adults and went on to produce a ravening shoal of screaming tiddlers!!! Or human fry if you wish to be pedantic. I digress yet again. This lothario of the lakeside would insist on bringing his latest girlfriend – or catch as he preferred to say piscatorially – on our supposedly all male fishing trips. Crucian carp and roach are one thing but a hand full of sprats caught from the corner of one’s eye as one is dutifully trying to angle the dangle is another. This could be the very reason why I still associate fish with naked women!!! It has the social advantage of keeping my sybaritic therapist in the luxury to which she has become so regally accustomed, and no doubt the profit orientated drug companies are more than happy to keep supplying me with more than my fair share of ‘Largactyl’ – chlorpromazine to the mentally adept or insane amongst you. But for me accusations of bestiality are very hurtful. Okay, I love fish, but I can assure you that it’s purely a platonic relationship. Is it my fault that my young and somewhat impressionable mind was to be irrevocably confused by the incongruous juxtapositioning of crucian carp and golden pubic hair – is it, I ask you? I can’t count the times that I’ve taken a girl home from the pub and groundbaited the bed before I realized that she wasn’t a mermaid! If anyone knows of a cure for this psychological disorder please write it on a PVA bag and send it to the publisher’s address – I would be extremely grateful, and perhaps fish might even stop winking at me in the depths of my deep subconscious dreams! Well, I think that that’s more than enough of ponds and puberty for the moment. It’s time to leave the lakes and ponds of Southeast Essex and to move off far into the rural hinterland of the county and to wet a line or two in the slow, reflective, waters of The Chelmer/Blackwater Navigation. See you on the bank – tight lines!
The Chelmer/Blackwater Navigation was opened for business in 1796. The two rivers which gave it its name both started within a mile or so of each other on the hills in the north western corner of Essex. From there both rivers headed of in opposite directions before circling round and joining together again at Beeleigh weir just to the west of Maldon. At one end the navigation terminated in Chelmsford at a location known as Springfield Basin. In the original plans for the canal the other end was supposed to be in Maldon itself but due to local opposition a cut – known as The Long Pond – was eventually excavated between Beeleigh and Heybridge. Heybridge basin – as it became known – was an ideal site because the new sea lock opened out into Collier’s Reach on the tidal River Blackwater where there was a depth of water capable of accommodating larger vessels than would have otherwise been the case. The main trade was in coal, lime, chalk, timber and coke, and was carried on prosperously until superceded by the newly-built railways in the 1840’s. The last trading vessels on the navigation were motorized timber barges operated by Brown & Sons of Chelmsford and these continued to ply their trade right up until 1972! In 1948 after a period of particularly heavy winter rain the canals walls were breached at Beeliegh and for a time it was thought that that would be the final nail in the coffin of the once prosperous navigation. Fortunately for anglers and boating enthusiasts some quick thinking soul thought of scuppering a couple of barges and building the retaining walls around and over them. This action ultimately saved the canal which is now a much loved haven for fishermen, pleasure boating types and wildlife.
I personally have fished – what I’ve always know as the River Chelmer – since the late 1950’s. It was an exceptionally prolific river fish-wise and being as for most of its length it was completely isolated from the more industrialized parts of Essex as it meandered through its valley surrounded by low hills, woods and farmland, it was also aesthetically very pleasing as well. Sadly, during the late 60’s and 70’s it suffered a number of major setbacks. Insecticides and herbicides of a particularly virulent nature decimated the area’s wildlife and severely depleted the fish stocks. The use of artificial fertilizers added to the weed growth in the river and what with this and increased water abstraction things were beginning to look very bleak indeed! As if all of this wasn’t enough the waterway was then struck by a disease which was a disaster for its perch stocks – a disaster of national proportions – and finally to add insult to injury Dutch elm disease did its best to turn some of the riverside copses into skeletal, leafless, graveyards. I can remember in the mid 60’s seeing such birds as peregrine falcons by day and nightjars and nightingales at dusk. Partridge – both red-legged and English – were plentiful, along with pheasants of differing varieties. Insecticides in the food chain put pay to the peregrines, nightjars and nightingales, and the agricultural rush for ever-increasing profits meant that the farmers started ploughing right up to the field edges, leaving no headlands. In an intensively farmed landscape headlands are extremely important. Game bird chicks are scientifically known as ‘precocious’. This means that when they are hatched they immediately start feeding for themselves and need little or no assistance from their parents. The headlands provided the ideal habitat for wild flowers and these in turn attracted an enormous variety of insects. Fortunately, in recent years farmers have begun to realize the necessity of a more balanced approach to agriculture and the headlands have returned along with the missing pheasants and partridges! Is there hope for the future? I for one, certainly hope so!!!