The Pike

A Memory of Royston.

Many years ago in the late 1960s there was a stretch of canal down by old Royston. The local fishing club would spend hundreds of pounds on replenishing the fishing stocks with rainbow trout - the only problem with this idea was that being farmed trout and not knowing about predator fish like the pike, they'd simply swim by a pike and would be eaten up as fast as the canal had been filled with trout. I was not interested in trout fishing and would hope I could capture a pike just like my brother Peter had once trapped within a shallow reed bed. He had taken it home and wrapped it up within his towel (he'd been swimming the canal), he filled up a long zinc bath with tap water and then put the pike within the bath. It lay in the bath almost motionless, only to move its gills. That was until I had put my finger some three feet away from the nose of the pike, it shot towards my finger where within a nano second I was so lucky to have kept my finger. Anyway the thing is, there I had got pally with a young man who'd show me the ins and outs of catching pike. He'd take me to the Dearn some five miles from Royston where we'd catch small minner fish within breaded jars and then transport them back to Royston on his old army motorcycle. We'd use them as live bait to catch pike. We'd use a treble hook fastened onto a long wire trace (to stop the teeth of the pike cutting the nylon line! ). Anyway the minner of which I had hooked onto my line was quite a strong fellow and pulled the pike float as if it were a tugboat. I watched and waited at length until I thought that my minner had exhausted itself. I slowly reeled in my line and got to the edge of the reeds when to my surprise there was a sudden flurry which shot out from the reeds. I discovered that a Jack pike (baby) had shot out and grabbed hold of the minner. The jack pike had all on to swallow the minner and was almost choking on its catch! I was about to take it off the hook and throw it back into the canal where the lad I was with urged me to put the Jack pike on the treble hook. He told me that pike eat pike and favored Jack pikes more than anything else. I did as I was told and then cast my fishing line some eighty feet into the middle of the canal. There I was sat down without a care in the world. It was then that as the sun was glistening on the water, I saw what looked like a telegraph pole slowly coming into view! My eyes then began to focus a little bit better: this half sized telegraph pole was not a pole at all but a full grown pike which was, without a lie, some six and a half feet long which had a girth of about 38'' wide. The head and snout of it put the fear of death within me and I began to reel my line in quickly. The lad who was with me, having seen me bringing in the line at great speed, shouted at me and told me to let the pike get hold of the Jackie? Go and get stuffed, it's not going to snatch my fingers off? Years later the same pike whilst a fish filled keep net was at the canal bank I saw it fearlessly grab hold of the net and try to rip it apart to get at the fish within. Even with a rod being brought down upon the freshwater shark's back it did not seem to care. My days are over for fishing and being 62 years of age I doubt whether I'd go back to my family routes; one of the reasons is that many of my school buddies were to die in their early twenties and thirties, leukaemia and other forms of cancer and tumour of the brain. One lad was athletic and was very fit, others were active without a doubt and although none worked at the Monkton Coke Ovens it's my belief that the Coking factory with all its air-born chemicals was a contributing factor to the deaths of many young lads who were only less than thirty.

---

---