May to September- Part One

Part One: All the best summers…

I always wanted to see the land the way an owl does.

Children stand a better chance of this; I’m with Proust on that one. They synthesize their experiences more quickly and far more profoundly. An adult can get there, although it takes longer.

The trick is to widen your perspective over time. Fish, walk, keep a journal: see the marsh over the years; walk its streams and follow its scents. Dream about it and reflect on your trophies.

For the past eight years, I’ve spent the warmer months on the marshes. Initially, I was driven to catch a ten pound tench; later, the landscape, then the birds became more important.

To know a marsh is to commune with the elemental. I’ve never known a mountain but I’ve become reasonably familiar with stretches of the Blean Woods. I grew up alongside the English Channel and in recent years have taken it for granted. I’ve moved away twice, first to Wales for several years to study, then to London to teach. Each time, I missed the sea terribly and dreamed about it.

My father never saw the ocean until he was sixteen but more than made up for it when I was a child; I remember our garage behind the vicarage in St Lawrence. An orange kayak stood proudly next to a series of glass beachcasting rods; endless Red Gill lures were strewn about and of course, there were the 70s Swedish-made Abu Garcia multipliers. My dad’s rod bag completed the collection: it was handmade from green canvas by a German fellow called Otto; they were both engineers at the local hoverport. The church behind our house was built by Anglo-Saxons in 1062; our garden was on the edges of the graveyard, which was (and remains) a beautiful mess of bats, jays and yew trees. It was a wonderful hinterland, but my parents wanted to be nearer to the sea, so a couple of years later we moved a few hundred yards south, into Pegwell village.

Here, the ocean infiltrated every road; when you couldn’t see it, you could smell and hear it. I first fished for bass aged twelve. They were the first species I caught, just down from the Chine cliff-gap, below the Courtstairs Country Club. I took six or seven schoolies on a Mepps lure, tied to a small lead bomb.

The Channel was translucent that day, and we were able to see the fish spiralling through the water as we wound in. We fished with France in front of us; the cliffs of Calais were easily visible. A few hundred yards to our west lay a silver disc of water, just inland; this was the estuary entrance for the Kentish River Stour.

My dad had brought a small battery-powered radio, tuned into our favourite station, Invicta FM. We chatted non-stop about fishing, only stopping to spar, eat sandwiches, or if a favourite song came on. Elton John’s ‘Sacrifice’ was big that summer, as was ‘World in Motion’ by New Order. The cliff behind us bounced the tunes around the rocks and into the lap of the shore. We fished for two or three hours around the high water, then walked the five minutes back up the cliff and to the house.

The next year, I followed the estuary downstream and found freshwater, although I had to experience its residents on my own; my father fished for the table and didn’t see the point in coarse angling. Me and my pal Karl, who lived down the hill, learned from the Angler’s Mail; every Tuesday after school, we would literally race each other down the hill to the village post office to pick up our copies. I also had a lovely old edition of Bernard Venables’ ‘Mr Crabtree Goes Fishing’ that my dad brought back from an auction house; more than anything else, this book formed the blue print for how I viewed the countryside. It was always about water for me, even before I read Venables. But now it was about seasons, too.

When I was seventeen, I witnessed a young orca wash up and die on Pegwell Bay. The whole village came down and tried to revive it. Afterwards, nobody spoke about the whale; it was completely taboo and I know at least two villagers who moved away as a result. The sea angler in me receded and it was many years before I bassed again. Recently, I’ve limited it to the spring time; for the past eight years, summers proper have been reserved for the marsh.

But this year was different. For the first time since that early summer, I’ve fished only for bass and nothing else. I’ve found this warm season less restful than I’d grown used to on the marsh. Noisier, too. And many times more violent: both the quarry and the landscape have been unforgiving. Much of the fishing involved walking in places you shouldn’t walk. But I kept at it, sometimes managing ten trips a week. My hips have ached, my knees have buckled but by the end of August, I was the fittest I’ve been in ten years. One morning, I weighed less than two hundred pounds.

Of course, I’m back to school now and eating like winter’s coming- which it is.

I’ve dug out my pike fishing gear, but it’s a little early yet. We’re having an Indian Summer and I don’t think I’ll be catching a pike until late October. So for these next couple of weekends, I’ll drop some posts about the summer’s bassing just gone.

I’ll talk about two separate sides of a coastline and describe a few of my favourite encounters with the bass and butterflies that visit them. The latter have gone now, and all but a few bass remain- although they are the larger ones, so there may be a postscript to these diaries.

After I hit the ‘Publish’ button, I shall be off out for a walk along the cliffs. The short eared owls are coming back. Some will stop over at Sandwich and on Pegwell Bay. Most will keep flying south and down to Spain. They’ll see the Channel in a way we never can.

But like children, we’ll keep on trying.