A river rising a foot an hour. Cold water off cold land made colder by a bitingly cold wind. A bleak prospect indeed but my old pal Anthony Butterworth stuck with it, a model of grit and graft.

We moved and we moved again. We tried this bait and that one. We tinkered with hooks, leads and whatever we could think of to make a difference. We hunkered down in the rain, looking for respite from the gale. What a hero Anthony was and how he deserved that last hour when a smattering of chub came his way.  And then! When the sun squinted through the cloud, when the rising levels held steady a while, the bite came just as the last cast had been called.

A barbel. Anthony’s first. A good 'eight' for sure. A Trojan that kept deep and fought until the last. A miracle fish indeed. A barbel out of nowhere, from the dregs of a dire day. I was just astonished enough to buy a Lucky Dip Lottery ticket on the drive home. I was bound to win, be rich and and would never hammer out an article again. I didn’t. You’re stuck with me it seems…so, therefore, to continue, what can we make of that capture against the odds?

To state the obvious, like the Lottery, you have to be in it to win it, and had Anthony succumbed to the weather, as I was praying he would, that barbel would never have had its afternoon disrupted. Also, to emphasise an old angling lore, if you are going to catch on a tough day, your best chance will always be as the light fades and the whole axis of the natural world begins to tilt.

It’s not just fish that stir. As dusk approaches, your cat emerges from sleep and thinks about an evening on the prowl. Your chickens begin to troop to their coop knowing the fox is about.  Interestingly, and I don’t know if Anthony noticed these things so intent was he on his rod, bats began to fly in full daylight and owls called long before the light values dipped and the barbel made its mistake. 

Because we’ll never know these things for sure, my guess is that several factors came into play that special moment. The rain ceased and the wind abated. The air had a mellow feel to it and a few flies began to hatch… hence the bats I suppose, making hay whilst they could. There was a shift in air pressure for sure, something Anthony and I could sense, sniff in the air if you like, but a change that was very real to that barbel. So real, so strong that in all probability it decided to eat for the first time that stormy day. We could so easily have decided that, by that time on a torrid day, it was the pub for us, but we didn’t. That fine fish was Anthony’s reward.

Anthony was 48 hours too late. Then, on Monday, the river was all of a quiver, still low but stirring uneasily, flood water on its way. As if sensing hard times ahead, the barbel fed their blessed, bearded heads off and 16 fish fell, taken from eight different swims. Two fish from a swim you see, then move on and leave the bulk of the shoal untouched, happy to enjoy their grub. That surely is the way to treat our fish when we begin to realise what creatures of sensitivity they are, how alert to the world around them.

Paul Whitehouse and I were on Radio 5 last week talking about our book - yes, I know that’s another unforgivable plug, but with Christmas on the horizon you’ll see my point. Nihal Arathanayke was our interviewer and I thought he asked really splendid, open-ended questions that gave us space to expand on how the two of us see our fishing. But there was an edge to them.

In 2023 we have to understand that fishing is not the mass sport it once was. Yes, a million people fish and it’s huge, but in the modern day no sport has legions of participants as was the case back last century. Many out there see fishing as dull and even questionable, given the growing awareness of animal rights - a wokism that doesn’t seem to stop the nation eating more cruelly raised chickens than ever before.b Paul and I were at pains to stress that fishing can still be full of magic and mystery and it is anything but boring if you do it right.

We hammered the point that only anglers care for fish and the vast majority of nature lovers could not tell a carp from a cod. And we also pointed out that fish are the love of us anglers’ lives and their welfare is paramount to us all - or at least it should be. Anthony, I know, would agree with that, driving home with a smile on his face as big as a barbel!