My Underwater World

The Great Estate

 As another year ends, I have to admit that it’s been another summer of partial discontent in my underwater quest. A packed season full of filming and features has left little time for my most intimate fishing pursuit, life below the lake’s surface. Down there, I find a sense of peace and tranquillity that’s impossible to describe. Maybe it’s calming for human beings to find themselves submerged in water, after all that’s how we started our very existence.

 

 The truth is that I shouldn’t restrict my underwater filming and observations to the summer months, but that’s pretty much how it’s always been. Without doubt, we are approaching some of the best underwater observational months in the calendar and yet I have always taken my foot off the gas this time of year. Until now I had thought it was with good reason but another brainstorming session with FW has my cogs whirring like a demented hamster running round the fishing wheel in my mind.

I want to write about some of my latest mind-blowing findings, but a voice in my head is screaming to me just to write about that winter and what happened all those years ago. The truth is, I probably haven’t ever written on the subject as the story is slightly embarrassing, and complete lunacy. However, Frank, being Frank, has convinced me that it’s far more than just a mad story; there is great logic behind it that needs to be understood.

Mother Nature’s cycles can have a profound effect on our beloved quarry, where they slow down in many cases to little less than a heartbeat. It’s also little fun trying to observe the fish as the temperatures plummet off the scale. There is a strong case that a winter underwater DVD would make fascinating viewing, and yes to some extent I agree. Summer lake exploration beautiful, serene and amazingly enjoyable; the water is alive and teeming with life and in shallow water it’s like exploring a vast warm fish tank, so you would think that a little mini-dive in winter would reveal fish languishing in beautiful, cold, crystal-clear waters. Even in the deep winter sunshine, rays of light penetrate far into the sparkling abyss; one would assume that these were indeed perfect conditions. What I am about to disclose was witnessed by one man, my long-term angling partner, Wiley, and only whispered on the breeze to our closest angling pals. The events that occurred are not indicative of all lakes in the winter.

We used to fish an estate lake on the Norfolk/Suffolk border, the kind of place that you could only ever dream of fishing. I have found two jewels in my angling life and that was one of them. It was love at first sight. You were instantly seduced by the overhanging willow, the ornamental pads and intimate little bays. It was every carper’s dream and even more special because no other anglers knew about it. Wiley and I really had struck carping gold.

 What made it even more appealing were the carp; they really looked like they belonged in a little treasure chest. They were absolutely stunning, flawless in every way.  It was a chance meeting with a friend of mine from whom I bought a gun dog that put me on to the water. He described the place like heaven on earth, with massive fish swimming on the surface. To me that was a metaphor for a pretty little place with a few scraper doubles. I couldn’t have been more wrong. In fact, my mate was bang on with his observations. It was all that he had said and more.

That first season was carping bliss. I had a permanent smile on my face and it was the launch pad for my under life as I now know it.  Now, at that point we had never been up in the winter, however tempting, the owner was never keen for us to interfere with his shoot so we respected his wishes. However, Wiley and I had concluded that we wouldn’t really be getting in anyone’s way if we dipped our toe in the water, so to speak; after all, it would be a long winter without the lake being part of our life. It would have been like saying goodbye to your girlfriend for the winter so it sounds great in essence, but we have our needs, carping that is.

To be fair Wiley and me were always actively stealthy. In fact, we were very stealthy. I remember the lady of the manor once calling me and insisting that we come down to the lake soon for a spot of angling. I felt relatively guilty, as we had already been there nearly a week. That’s the drawback of having a mercenary killing machine as a fishing partner.  At the time we just couldn’t set up like normal people; he always had this notion that we might have been followed or they were coming for him! Bloody murder when he won’t even let you order a pizza on a Friday night as a little treat, just in case the driver is being followed.

There was this one day we were fishing and it was getting late in the evening. I thought I’d take a cuppa round to my mate. Well, I nearly had a bloody heart attack as a one toner lit up the night sky, and he jumped out on me. “Yep, the trip wire works”. I suppose I should been grateful that I didn’t fall down the pit of doom he once dug out when we were fishing in France. He’d pegged out camo netting over it and covered it with leaves! Is that normal?

I will never forget that winter. It was February and very cold, a Scandinavian high-pressure day. The air was thin and crisp and although the sun was relatively still low, the light levels were very high. I got the call from KW that he thought we should head up to the lake and put some theories to the test.  We were soon on our way in the van and although I knew it was going to be a real test of will down in the depths, I was still excited. Now, I must say at this juncture that we always used to carry out our missions pretty much to the book. After all, safety always comes first. Cough.

I noticed that there was only my kit bag in the back of the van and one big bottle. After further questioning KW managed to persuade me that it would be better for him to have me on a safety line while watching out for the owners and the shoot syndicate. That way we wouldn’t upset anyone. I never used a dry suit, just a wet suit top and bottoms and breathed by means of ‘spare air’, that’s basically a mini-bottle with a regulator built in. It’s a safety device that’s used on a regular dive and if things go wrong you have a 15 minute back up of air; it was perfect for what we needed it for. I always found the less gear you had the more the underwater world would accept you. Well, that was the idea. Yes, I knew it would be cold, but it couldn’t be that bad could it?

 

Wiley and I had this knack of things never quite going to plan. In fact, I remember in one summer underwater experiment I was measuring the accuracy of Wiley’s casting while out in the water, lying on the lake bed. As I waited patiently for the lead to be cast a couple of metres in front of me, I felt a swift blow to the head. As I surfaced feeling slightly dazed, there was an apologetic Wiley saying, ‘sorry mate it popped out of the clip, lucky, that could have hit you!’ At times words failed me.

Or there was the time I was following the big, grey fish on Clare Park underwater. I was attached to the locked off safety line, which in turn was attached to the boat. It was in the close season and things were going completely to plan. I gently finned forward towards the magical creature and started to swim with her. I felt like we should have been making a documentary for BBC 1. I can’t describe the feeling; it was like swimming with giants - that was until I started being dragged backwards. The harder I finned the more futile it became. At one point I started taking on water, so I had surface. My confusion was soon explained. I couldn’t believe it. Wiley was playing a fish from the boat. It had weeded itself up and he had reeled into it. “What the bloody hell are you doing?” I exclaimed. “Sorry, mate, I just flicked a snide out while you were looking for the grey fish. I never thought I would get a bite so quickly. Well, at least it’s quiet mate” He hadn’t realized that I had found her. I had to wait another year. Yes, at times words failed me!

At the start of the piece you may remember that I was hesitant to write this story. I think you are about to find out why! Now, what I am about to tell you, you may find hard to believe, but as the old saying goes, the truth really is sometimes stranger than fiction so please keep an open mind. We were soon on the approach to the lake and decided to tuck the motor well out of the way. I quickly got changed in the back of the van and followed Wiley down to the water. All I had with me was an old towel and my fins, mask and reg. We already knew that there was only really one safe place to enter the water, as the rest of the lake was densely tree-lined and had a semi-steep bank. It was a little more in view than I wanted but we had decided we should be okay. After all, the lake was relatively small and shallow.

“Go on, son. Don’t muck about. The longer you leave it the colder it will feel.” Wiley couldn’t have known how right he was. He has this knack of making me do things that I don’t want to do. There was this one time in the south of France where he hung me over the edge of a cliff with a 30 feet drop to the water. It’s true! You see, he is fearless but I am not, a concept he has never quite grasped. Anyway, I started to herringbone towards the water’s edge and in went the first foot, then the second, and then I dropped to my knees and started hyperventilating. I was in serious dry suit territory, wearing a wet suit. I started splashing water over myself and it was so cold that I nearly threw up on the spot. I also had these weird thoughts that I wanted to bash Wiley round the head with something dangerous.  Bizarrely, I began to feel slowly like I was being anaesthetised and it just left me numb but not so cold. It was really weird.

Through past experience, I kind of knew it was safe to enter the water gradually and the last thing I heard Wiley say was that at least we’d had a mild spell up until last week. Now I wanted to kill him. Nothing had really prepared me for the feeling once my head went in, but I was in and that was that. Like I said, it’s not a deep lake so I felt relatively safe, and of course, I had Wiley watching my back so it was a pretty standard mini shallow dive. I knew this lake so well from the summer months and if I’d thought it was gin clear then, well, the clarity in the winter was mind blowing. I was surprised how much the lake had changed though from summer through to late winter.

Even the topography seemed different although it wasn’t. I guess the best way to describe it is that the lake was just like people who had been stripped of their clothes. Yes, that’s about it; the lake was naked. As I gently finned my way through open water, I was soon mesmerized, watching the bars of light penetrating into the abyss. The light was picking out the colours of the humble perch and turning them truly regal, something I had failed to spot until that day; maybe it was just an underwater perspective, or maybe I had been too focused solely on carp to see the bigger picture.

Shoal after shoal dazzled me with underwater aerobatics. They looked more like tropical fish, beauty beyond belief. It was a strange feeling, my heart rate was slowing, and yet the excitement was coursing through my freezing body. It was pleasure and pain all rolled into one. I have heard people like that sort of thing; some even pay for it!

As I passed the familiar objects that I had used as reference points in the summer, I became increasingly aware that I had not seen one carp. Now, bear in mind that this little shallow lake was full to the brim with our leviathan friends. The more I explored, the more I saw the little sergeants queuing up to take an inquisitive peek at the unfamiliar visitor.  Even the odd jack pike paid me a wary visit, but still no carp. I had been in a million hours - okay five minutes - and the cold was starting to make me feel slightly disorientated, it was truly horrendous. I briefly cast my mind to those nutters who swim the English Channel in winter, that’s never right.

I was scanning every inch of the lake bed and there was still nothing. In fact, I was so focused that I found myself at the starting point of the lake and hadn’t realized. “Well, son, what are they all up too?” Wiley asked me excitedly. “Can you see leeches? Are they just lying on the bottom?” He was a gibbering mess.

“They’re gone,” I told him.

“What do you mean, ‘they’re gone’?”

“I mean they are not here anymore. Please pass me the towel I am freezing.”

“Mate, we have got to get to the bottom of this. Go and do another lap. You’ve only been gone a couple of minutes.”

“Mate, please, I need to get out.”

“Jon, we need to get to the bottom of this. Get back in.”

“Why don’t you have a look?” I remonstrated.

“You’re already wet now mate. Come on, stop being a schoolgirl.”

Resistance was futile and off I went again.

This time I ignored the glinting off the silver flanks of the roach, I ignored the very regal shoal of perch that cut through the water with synchronized grace and in perfect in time. In fact, I ignored everything, but the outcome was the same - nothing! I must have been three quarters of the way round when I was aware of one almighty crash on my twelve o clock. It scared the life out of me. I looked up to see four legs paddling for all they were worth. Oh god, it was a Labrador swimming back to the bank. O know it was the shoot and they were all standing at the water’s edge drinking sherry. As I climbed out of the water Wiley was conspicuous by his absence and the look on their faces was just one of sheer disbelief. I shouted in my poshest voice, ‘afternoon everybody’ and started doing these weird stretches. I didn’t know what else to do. It was a surreal situation.

Mrs. Christopher, the near ninety-year-old housekeeper came straight over and said, “would you like a sherry dear?”

“Don’t mind if I do,” was my reply.

“Mrs. Christopher,” I asked in a lowly voice.

“Yes, dear?”

“Do you think it’s strange that I have just climbed out of your lake in the middle of winter?”

“Not at all dear,” she said, and just walked off. It must be great in some ways being that age because she genuinely didn’t care.

I finished my stretches and kind of pretended to jog off up the road with my little diving boots on, and gear under my arm. I can’t imagine how bloody silly I looked; I swear I could hear the sniggering in my wake. As I got to the van, Wiley looked at me wanting to laugh but there was a more serious question to answer.

“Well mate?” I told him that they had gone.

“The bastards have done the lake!”

The master must have given permission as they’d clearly netted it. We went home completely dejected. We had gone for answers and came away with more questions. To make it worse, the master was away until May in his holiday home in India, and we didn’t get on with the keeper that well. Thank god, he wasn’t there that day. We didn’t want to start asking questions and alert anyone to the fact that we had been fishing the place, although that didn’t really matter now.

We put the lake on the back burner and started fishing other venues and pretty much forgot about the place. Then one day, out of the blue, the master rang and asked when I was popping over next and that he hadn’t seen us in ages. What I haven’t actually said is that from the start when my mate put me on to him, I convinced him that I was a species angler so that he’d allow me to fish the lake. For some reason, the keeper had warned him off carp anglers. So, with that in mind, I didn’t want to stay away on account of the carp being moved and there were some very big other species in there. Besides that, it was always a nice place to go to winkle a few small ones out and gather your thoughts on a summer’s day.

 

On arrival at the big house, I was greeted by Tom and his wife. He seemed genuinely pleased to see me, so that was nice. It soon became clear why.  As we sat on the terrace with tea on the way, he thanked me for coming down in the winter and risking life and limb to remove that frightful fallen tree from the lake, the one that was a hazard to his beloved Labradors.  I tried to explain to him that that wasn’t the reason I was there, as I didn’t want to lie to him, but he was having none of it. Mrs. Christopher, bless her, even at that age had had the awareness to cover for us. God knows what she thought we were doing. She never mentioned it again and passed away some years later, god bless her.

I duly excused myself and headed off for a walk around the lake. I thought I might have a perch dabble; that was one positive aspect that came out of the whole episode. Now, some of you might have already guessed this next bit. Yep, the whole surface of the lake was covered in carp basking in the midday sun. I just stood there completely baffled. I swear that there was not one carp in that lake on the day of the dive and this story is not fabricated in anyway shape or form. I mean, the lake was clear and there were no hiding places, or so I thought. To this day, I can’t explain the apparently missing fish.

I had a conversation with Frank who offered the explanation that in many lakes, there are silt holes even in the middle of large swathes of gravel, and that was certainly true of the Estate. They were round, about the size of a children’s paddling pool, maybe a half a dozen of them a couple of feet deep in silt. Is it possible that these cold-blooded animals were grouped up in pools seeking safety and warmth in the depths of winter? Surely, this must be common knowledge for fish farmers and fish breeders alike. Maybe it is and I’ve just missed it. Do they come out all together or on their own? How long do they stay there? Does it only happen on natural lakes that have never seen boilies, like the Estate? Or does it happen on all lakes? Is that why they are often covered in leeches?  Does it happen below a certain temperature? I will leave you to draw your own conclusions because to this day I still don’t know.

Me and Wiley have fished a great many places since those formative underwater days, and quite often when a lake closes down in the middle of winter, he will say with that wry smile, ‘get your kit on and go and have a look for them, son.’ I can’t put response into print but one thing is for sure. If that lake was anything to go by, it doesn’t bode well for an action-packed, nail-biting winter underwater DVD. Well, that is unless you like perch. Having said that, though, it would be fascinating to know their habits, and most of all where they go.

Whoever said fishing was boring?

 See you next time,

 Jon Banister