The lake was still silken when we got there, the last mist lifting. Nothing moved save for the duck and the drake nudging softly through the margins and for the ebbing full stops of the dimpling fry. Stock still in that hemmed-in little bay — reeds to our right, branches to our left and reaching overhead — we might have been a part of the place ourselves, rooted in it.
Time passed and then more time. Half an hour on, my pal whispered and pointed. A little way into the reeds a single stem stirred. It did not waggle or wave, it moved stiffly from the base. More stillness and then another stem stirred and then another. My breathing tightened and the world zoomed in. Something was edging the plants aside.
Then, close by, something else — an incongruous noise, a kind of sipping noise but deeper and more drawn out. I lifted the rod and edged it forward inch by inch. I let three feet of line hang vertically above the water, the baited hook not touching it but ready to be lowered.
And then the hoped-for happened. Five feet out and deep down, an orange circle slowly materialised and lifted, resolved into a round mouth and broke the surface. Slurp. I glimpsed an eye, the soft, stabilising waft of fins, a body as fat as an alderman’s behind them.
The tried-and-tested ground bait had done its job. Small dog biscuits that my pal had steadily flicked out, first into the centre of the reeds and then nearer their edge, had drawn the fish from their sanctuary into open water. Watching half a dozen big carp, almost close enough to touch, unaware of our presence and their danger, was angling distilled as only an angler can know it.
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Now, I am above all a fly-fisherman, my preferred quarry, the trout. I am also an enthusiastic coarse fisherman, who, when the trout season ends, happily sends a float waltzing downstream inquiring the whereabouts of roach, dace and chub. But I had never before set out deliberately to catch a carp. This introduction by a friend who, late in life, has become infected with carp fever and is now seriously ill with it was riveting.
For two hours those fish sipped down every dog biscuit we sprinkled before them, save for the one I laid in wait for them on the hook. Then I caught two, one soon after the other. Each take was the same — the orange ring lifting, the punctilious slurping, the disappearance of the bait so often previously ignored, the smashing-down of the rod as though hit by a sandbag, the trial of strength and guile, a golden ten-pounder in the folds of the net.
It was all as nerve-stretching and visible as any fly-fishing I had done. There are countless ways of fishing for carp, just as there are countless ways of fishing for trout, but little separated the experiences using that method, that day.
A few days on I went farther. I was on another lake with another pal who likewise knew the carp and its dog-biscuit fancy. In mid-afternoon a pod of fish, big as submarines, idled into view and in the dog biscuits spattered. A few minutes of suspicious circling, of looking and turning away, looking and turning away followed, then one fish rose and then another. The more biscuits we threw in, the more confidently the fish rose and fed. We were, of course, conjuring exactly the response from carp that a hatch of fly draws from trout. I put up the little fly rod, tied on a fly big and brown enough to suggest a biscuit and watched.
One fish, I saw, was bigger than the rest. I crouched and waited, cast to it and rose it. Twenty arm-aching minutes later, I landed a 19-pounder, one of the biggest fish I have taken from freshwater in Britain.
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This bridging of carp fishing and trout fishing, new to me but accomplished every day by others, makes even more ridiculous the attitude found among some game anglers that coarse fishing, which of course includes carp fishing, is crude and beneath them. The Blimp school of game angling is much smaller than it was, but here and there it is still encountered, mindless and ignorant of the facts. And they are that no branch of serious game fishing — Halford and Skues, Pashley and Falkus notwithstanding — has had more brain-power and ingenuity poured into it than specimen coarse fishing, carp fishing especially.
Carp fishing, of course, has its barmy fringe, too. To the rejoicing of the national media, there are some who devote their very existences to the fish. They are obsessed with it to the exclusion of work, relationships and engagement with the wider world. Stories about sad loners who lose all perspective, who weep as though for their mothers when some worn-out porker turns up its fins, who talk of candlelit vigils and setting up bankside memorials, are silly-season staples.
But that is not the way most of it is, with carp fishers, trout anglers or the rest. All fishing, purposefully pursued, is sophisticated and nerve-stretching. The fascinations of ambushing those carp on those lakes were new to me in their specifics, but no surprise. New experiences, fresh angles on old experiences, are out there for the taking.
May the blimps and sad ones rejoice.
• Brian Clarke’s angling column appears on the first Monday of each month.