I’m writing this just before New Year. It's 5pm and I’m in a vast Georgian mansion, alone by a fire, the wind howling at the casement windows.

Now and again, the lights flicker as the wind picks up, still bringing the torrential rain that has cascaded day long, throughout my exhausting journey north. I’m thinking it might soon be time for a warming dram and my imagination is running wild in this  Gormenghast castle of a place.

I am on a pike quest, I’m researching a loch that has monsters, the owner says. If Dracula doesn’t get me in the night, tomorrow might see me land one, a pike of even my dreams.

Yes, of course, I am writing from Scotland, not far from Loch Ken in Dumfriesshire where a 72lb pike was landed in 1774. Not many hours back, I  passed the rain-swollen river Endrick where an estimated 70lb pike once lived. Nowhere near as long ago, I talked to a fishery worker around the Great Glen who swore that a weighed 55lb-er had been enmeshed in his nets back in the 70s. And in the 90s I drank in a Highland bar with an otherworldly, bearded angler who swore he had taken a 47lb-er from Loch Loyne... on a pork chop no less. On a wild night like this, let no one tell me that Scotland still does not have its mysteries and its monster.

The headline come from the late Fred Buller’s definitive work on huge pike and Fred’s tome highlighted three regions the chaser of mammoth pike should explore. Scotland, of course, the loughs Conn, Mask and Corrib in western Ireland... and Norfolk. Shall we take 40lb-ers as our benchmark, the size when pike belong on another planet? I count myself a lucky man because I have seen three such fish in my life, as well as a near miss of 39lb 8oz, and let me tell you that pike this magnitude don’t just take your breath away but change you forever. Once one is seen, you yearn to witnessay a second, a third, on and on with all the fire of angling opium eater.

I have little doubt that there are 40lb-ers as I write this piece alive in lough Corrib, and perhaps Mask. But, by god, they’d take some catching on those huge waters that have been made even more difficult by the pike culling activities of the Irish Inland Fishery department. Whilst the tales of Scottish leviathans have been queried, rubbished even, over recent years, never would I bet against one of our 40s living in a water like Ness or Awe or even the unknown, uncut diamond of a place I hope to investigate this coming Hogmanay.

Norfolk? You might well have a better feel than I do. The tidals? The Thurne System? I know that I will always wonder about the Thurne pre-prymnesium, around 1962 perhaps, before the salt water-derived toxins obliterated the finest pike water there might ever have been. Frank Wright, a down to earth Norfolk man if ever there was one, told me about the fish he had seen dead that fateful prymnesium year as he punted up  the short river. "Big pike I counted in their hundreds. Forties were there in their scores.” Who am I to disbelieve Frank Wright?

I have seen extraordinary pike in the margins of the Baltic Sea around Sweden, including two of my 40s. These giants feed off herring and cod, grow just possibly to 60lb and I will always believe I hooked just such a fish back in the 90s. Today, the Volkerak, a colossal freshwater lake in the Rhine-Meuse-Scheldt delta is making the news with fish of 40 and way beyond. Mind you, the fishing is gruelling and the best man at the job counts a fish every dozen sessions as rare. He trolls lures of 40 centimetres or more, costing 200 euros a pop. All the while he is dodging the wakes of sea-going vessels and the nets of commercial fishermen in weather cold enough to kill a cat.

Perhaps there is a lesson for us here? Perhaps Corrib, Ness, even Hickling, need to be attacked with plugs nearly two feet long. And perhaps if this gale dies and takes the rain with it and I can get out on the water tomorrow, you just might be reading pike fishing history in this column next week. That would be a start to the New Year!