I hesitate to admit this fact, but the truth is I haven’t been out with a rod for a good few days now.

It’s a week since I huddled by a pike lake at the start of this latest cold snap and my tackle has lain dormant since. Shame on me.

I remember a January back in the late 70s - or was it start of the 80s - when the snow lay deep as corn grows high, but that didn’t stop me trekking to the river Nar most afternoons after the colossal dace there in those times. Oh my, I had a couple that weighed a pound, just, if you squinted a little at the scales, but most were 10oz or more. I had the biggies really going one day, late on as the hard, cold sun was setting and the ice crept into my bones. That’s when I had the pounders and I had a feeling bigger was to come when my German Shepherd puppy ate my bait and, breadless, I was forced home and perhaps out of a record. I wonder if those dace, or their descendants,  are there still? But I’ve been doing a lot of wondering in my days of angling abstinence.

Can anyone explain this one to me for starters? We know that the Environment Agency (I’m not having a pop this week, promise) is keen to expunge all weirs and dams from our rivers nationwide so that fish can have free passage. How, then, can we countenance the return of beavers whose wood-working puts even more barriers up than there are now? If beavers got back into any of our upper valleys, wouldn’t they eventually turn these into wide spreading swamps, just what the scientists are endeavouring to avoid? 

The whole question of weirs, dams and mills brings me to the eel conundrum. What really has happened to make them the rarity they have become? Remember when the whole of East Anglia swarmed with them and you couldn’t fish a worm anywhere until winter for fear of catching them? We’ve heard this theory and that, but it strikes me no one really knows. There have even been eel passes made to allow them easy passage through mills here and there, but this has to be nonsense. Did the eels of our youth need a pass? Hardly. And what about beavers? Wouldn’t their dams be disruptive to the way of modern thinking?

Talking about old species passing, are there any true rudd strongholds left this year 2023? I know the Fens, the Cam especially, has them in quantity and quality but does Hickling still hold whispered monsters like it once did? And what about the estate lakes? In my childhood, Wolterton held them the depth of dinner plates. The lake at Elmham bred beauties and there was a glorious pool south of Holt with a boathouse, island, crystal clear water and rudd as gold as an 18 carat wedding ring.

But, of course, Felbrigg was the place, the greatest rudd water I have known, in the UK at least. I stumbled on it around 1974, but perhaps the largest fish lingered on until this century... just. My information is that otters have done damage, but it has been cormorants mainly that have pushed this historic population to the brink, or probably over the brink. What an absolute tragedy if this is so. Forget fishing, think the environmental disgrace. Those rudd were stocked when the lake was dug according to research I did half a century ago and surely that merited their protection? Had those rudd been robins, say, something would have been done, but fish, to many, are best on a slab. How can we have let this annihilation happen, as they say, on our watch?

In the same vein, I come to crucians, once the species every Norfolk lad started out catching. We all know how they fell on hard times  but have been partially reinstated through the hard work of types like Carl Sayer, Bernard Cooper and their crucian-crusading mates. Brilliant work, but I wonder if we will ever catch big crucians properly again? By that I mean on a float, not a blooming bolt rig? I say this because I have been fishing on one of the country’s best crucian waters and not a float-caught fish could we winkle out. And let’s look at the extraordinary Rockland Mere, run by the exemplary James Harrold. No matter how hard I have tried there (along with Robbie Northman, who is far my superior at this game) I cannot get that float to go. I sense it is something to do with the ultra finicky way big crucians feed and that once they are pressured, they learn to sense a shot the size of a pin head. Somehow a bolt rig, the modern approach, fools them, but I want nothing to do with it. It’s the old way or no way for me.