I was going to write about the onset of winter and the week we were plunged out of our benign autumn and out into the cold, but the sad demise of angling’s Nick Fisher has given me pause.

Many of you will remember Nick in his 1990s angling heyday when he starred in several TV series of Screaming Reels and hosted radio’s Dirty Tackle. Since then he has been a cook, a Holby City writer and a Bafta winner, but that was Nick... never, ever dull. So full of life was he that his death at the age of 63 is nigh on impossible to take on board.

Of course, Nick was originally a Norfolk boy, living in Roughton and attending Paston School in North Walsham. Indeed, when I started working with Nick 30 years ago, the Norfolk angling and teaching legend that was Michael 'Robbie' Robbins told me some hair-raising stories about him as a lad. I can only repeat, Nick was never, ever dull.

For a good many years, I appeared with Nick time to time on both TV and radio, but mainly, pre-internet, I did the research both Screaming Reels and Dirty Tackle demanded. They both chewed up facts and stories and I was kept busy in my angling library and those of both 'Robbie' and of David Clarke at Erpingham Lodge. I learned, for example, that you can cook your egg by placing it in a crocodile nest and taking it out again hard-boiled when Mother Croc takes time off to go for a swim...

I also fished with Nick on the Wensum, the Wye and in Sweden and sometimes he’d even concentrate for 20 minutes before going off to collect mushrooms or follow a badger trail. Never, ever dull. A tragic loss of a fascinating man.

A crippling frost last week and a rock hard day’s angling after it reminded me of my Ten Degree Rule. It sounds bonkers, but it has served me well since 1970 and it goes like this...

If you add the lowest night temperature to the highest day temperature and you get a total of 10 degrees, you stand a chance on a river for roach, chub and even barbel. So, if the night is minus three and the day seven degrees at best, your score is four degrees and you have little hope. Alternatively, if the night is plus three degrees and the day is nine degrees , the combined total of 12 degrees should see you catch well. 

It is rough and ready, hardly scientific and makes no rational sense, but I have only sometimes proved it wrong and weather forecasts will help me plot my river outings these coming months as a result. 

Ten degrees or not, we can all expect slow days’ sport in the coming months and that is just the nature of winter fishing. When the going gets tough, though, do you stick with well tried and trusted baits and approaches or do you go off at tangents, trying new ideas that could make a difference?

I guess a lot depends on your nature. If you are a slow, steady type like me, then you are happy to trust in tactics that have worked for you in the past. If you are a Nick Fisher razzle dazzle customer, then any cunning plan can offer a possible solution and short cut to success.

I mention this because the day after that hard frost, late afternoon saw clonking big perch chase chublets of up to a pound on the surface way out in the full force of the current. Here, there, soon everywhere, huge perch were exploding the water in their voracious quest. A hundred fish must have been furiously active. In its own small scale way, it was like an Attenborough film, a dawn of creation feeding fest. In all my long angling life, this was something I’d never witnessed before. Amazing! Why should they do that?

I was playing it safe , float fishing lobworms in a nice, calm, marginal eddy whilst my mate immediately put on a huge lure and began whacking it out mid-river. No chance, I thought. Wrong, of course. He landed a whacker and I went home frustrated and fishless.

Never, ever dull! What sights this past week. Blazing 4pm sunsets. Kingfishers still burning the river blue. The oaks ablaze like copper mountains in shafts of sunlight. Swans arriving in the dusk. Owls calling early and hedgehogs shuffling in the onset of the dew. What a world of wonder and what a tragedy the ebullient Mr Fisher will no longer share it.