Читать книгу On Fishing - Brian Clarke - Страница 16

FISH will, on their day, take pretty well anything. There is scarcely a comestible you can think of that has not, at some time or another, caught them. Undeniably, though, some baits are more consistently successful than others and we all have our favourites.

Many of the best baits can be bought from tackle shops and lots of others come free from the wide outdoors. Acquiring the former is straightforward. Getting our hands on the latter can lead to excitements and delights, not all of them obvious or expected. I once risked the censors to write about them – and in a family newspaper, at that.

ONE of angling’s weeklies marked the opening of a new coarse season on rivers with a supplement devoted to the ‘Top 50 Baits’.

The supplement was structured rather in the manner of the dance-of-seven-veils. The revelations came little by little. They were made from the outside in. It was only at the very end that the Top Two – the tit-bits, so to speak – were revealed. Before them came as extraordinary a smorgasbord of fishy temptations as can have been served up in one place at one time.

Squid was Bait No 50. Marshmallows, the ‘Floating Kings of Confectionery’ as the weekly described them, came in at 49, elderberries at 46, beef steak and mince at 45. Potatoes came to the boil at 35, artificial spinners and spoons wobbled into view at 34 and cheese got a sniff in at 19. As might be expected whole fish, fillets of fish, bits of fish littered the list of delights for the carnivores and plenty of cereals, fruits and cooked pulses were there for the veggies.

When the last veils were whipped aside, we found ourselves ogling The Big Two. Top Bait No 1 was maggots, Top Bait No 2 was bread. It was the lack of detail on Top Bait No 3 that was surprising. Top Bait No 3 was that anaconda of the lawn and vegetable patch, the lobworm. What was missing was an appreciation of the sporting opportunities the lobworm offers in its own wriggly right. It is an omission I want to make good, now.

Only a masochist digs for worms. Every angler knows that lobworms aplenty will be found lying right out in the open, on top of the lawn at night. All that is required to catch them is a torch, a tin, the stalking skills of a Kalahari bushman and the fastest forefinger and thumb in the west.

I don’t know why lobworms come up at night, but I can guess. Some say it’s because they are attracted by the cool night air. Others say they want to drink the dew from the grass. More likely, I suspect, is the prospect of getting up to what nature expects all of us to get up to on the grass under the cover of darkness at some time or other – only faster and more cheaply.

When it comes to courtship, remember, lobworms have little use for chat. When pursuing their wriggly ends, they have no need to splash out on drinks and dinner, quite possibly wasted. There are no clothes to be fumbled off. All they have to do is lie out there in the buff, waiting for a touch from another pointy nose and they’re away. So lobworms are on the top because they’re on the pull.

Which appears to leave them vulnerable. To the uninitiated, it looks the simplest thing in the world to bend down and pick them up. But the lobworm has lots of tiny little hooks in the sides of its tail and while its body is in the open, it usually leaves its tail in its tunnel. The challenge is to spot the worm, grab it and whip it into the can before it can set the hooks into the earth and pull itself down to safety – which it can do at reflex-defying speed. Obviously, easier said than done.

Also, because lobworms are light-sensitive, the torch beam cannot be shone directly onto one for more than a moment or it will be gone. One solution is to point the beam into the grass and to look for your quarry in the periphery of the light it throws. The other is to soften the beam’s glare.

A friend told me about his preferred way of doing the latter, long ago. He recommended – you can see why no-one digs for lobworms any more – covering the torch end with several layers cut from a woman’s silk or sheer nylon stocking, ideally still warm (‘they’re more stretchy, then’) and taken from the thigh end, which for some reason was ‘better’. Tights, I remember him saying fervently, ‘just aren’t the same’.

There is no doubt that the thicker, thigh end of a sheer nylon stocking doubled and redoubled over the end of a torch, diffuses the beam nicely. The problem is that the time taken to negotiate one from the wearer’s legs can sometimes leave little time for fishing itself. Which, my friend said, was okay by him.

But let us say that these preliminary challenges have been risen to. Let us say you have your stocking-tops, that your worm has been sighted, that it does not bolt and that you have managed, with a lightning stab down of forefinger and thumb, to grab it. Now what?

Usually, not much. The worm will have its hooks firmly set into the sides of its tunnel. You will be pulling with the aim of extracting it. But you cannot pull too hard in case the worm snaps – and you want the whole worm. So you find yourself in a protracted battle of finely judged strength and wills.

What is required is a steady pull that does not slacken for an instant. If the pull does slacken, the worm will sense weakness and take heart. If the pull can be sustained, the worm will over time begin to give up hope and little by little its grip will ease. Eventually, if you judge things aright, the lobworm will release its grip all of a sudden and the prize will be yours.

So yes, though the Top 50 Baits supplement did not mention it, there is more challenge in getting your hands on a lobworm than in acquiring the 49 other baits put together. It can take ages. That is the down-side. The upside is that in getting the requisite gear together – the stocking-tops especially – you can end up with more than one kind of result. Which, as my old friend would say, has always been okay by me.