Originally published on January 15, 1999, this was Luke’s final column for the London ES magazine. It’s been our pleasure re-publishing them.
Also, we would like to take this opportunity to congratulate Luke on the success of his book, ‘Bloodknots’, which just recently became the first book on angling ever to be shortlisted for the William Hill Sports Book of the Year award.

A mail-shot arrives from an insurance company, offering me low-cost angling cover. If I am killed while fishing, as long as I am not at war, flying in a private aircraft, insane or on drugs, I get £5,000. I am tempted to dismiss this until, five minutes later, I read in the paper that Harris Simbawa of Johannesburg has been found dead on the banks of the Chungu river with a fish and a stick protruding from his gullet. Simbawa, it seems, had been about to bite the head off his catch when it jumped down his throat. Attempts to dislodge the fish with the stick had only driven it deeper, and the unfortunate 28- year- old had choked. Would Simbawa’s family, I wonder, have pocketed five grand if he had been insured, or would that little matter of trying to bite off the fish’s head have qualified as insanity? My suspicion is that he would have got his money in Jo’burg, where head-biting is apparently a conventional method of killing your catch, but not in London.
Try chomping the head off a roach or a tench on the Grand Union Canal and the local Waltonians will get very shirty indeed. Not that all London’s coarse fishermen practise catch-and-release. At Upper Maynard Reservoir in Walthamstow, where I was after pike, I met a man with glittering eyes who told me that he had eaten raw carp from a lake near Woking and found it good. We had a short but intense conversation, in the course of which he referred to pike as ‘deep dragons’ and explained to me that unless a man’s soul exited the body by means of a gaping wound it could not enter the White Kingdom.
I’ve met other fishermen who talk in these apocalyptic terms, and noticed that it is the ruthlessness of the pike which particularly inspires them. ‘The Brotherhood glorifies strength,’ the glittering-eyed bloke confided, which would have worried me more if he hadn’t had one of those little trolleys with extendable handles for wheeling his tackle about.

Click here to read previous articles by Luke.

Originally published in the London ES Magazine October 10, 1998.

There’s a scene in Bertrand Blier’s film Les Valseuses which has always irritated me. Gerard Depardieu and Patrick Dewaere play a couple of petty thieves bumming their way around small-town France. They pick up a girl played by Miou-Miou, and one day she drags herself out of the communal bed and finds the boys fishing on a canal. This being a French film, however, they are fishing without hooks or baits, just trailing bare lines in the water. As a piece of pseudo-metaphorical whimsy this takes some beating, but what makes the scene all but unwatchable is that you can tell the fishing would be wonderful. It’s one of those still, dewy, grey-green mornings that makes you long to swing a quill float and a pinch of bread-flake under the far bank and see what happens. But they don’t of course. They just arse about. What it’s part of, other than sheer wilful Frenchness, is this whole business of it not mattering if you can’t catch anything – that just being there is enough. But it does matter. Saying that it doesn’t is just blah, like an 18-year-old leaving a nightclub saying it doesn’t matter that he didn’t score because he enjoyed the lager so much. I put all of this to the test, as it were, the other day. I was fishing near Stockbridge, and found a wild brown trout of about 3lbs in a very slow, gin-clear water under willow. Conundrum: if I used a superfine leader, which I would have to do so as not to spook him, he would probably break it; if I used a leader strong enough to hold him, he would most certainly refuse the fly. In the end I put on a tiny dry fly, broke off the point of the hook with pliers, and cast it out on a one-pound-breaking-strain leader. The fish rose, engulfed the fly, tasted the steel, and spat it out again. Intellectually, I’d had him. Was it a zen moment? Reader, it was not. Call me juvenile, but I still need to score.

Click here to read previous ‘Pike’ entries.
Luke’s book ‘Blood Knots’ is on sale in the Caught by the River shop, priced £12.99

Originally published in the London ES magazine on the 6th of February, 1998.

The alarm goes off at 4.30am and I dress with care; the forecast has promised Siberian winds and snow. I meet Marco Pierre White in Knightsbridge, we pick up David Profumo outside Barkers, and head off down the M3; we were aiming to reach the Royalty fishery on the Hampshire Avon by dawn. The first snow hits the windscreen just beyond the M25, and soon we are driving through a blizzard. We pass flashing emergency-services vehicles and two overturned cars, and by the time we reach Chistchurch, the temperature is well below zero, with a sleet-laden wind roaring upriver from the sea.
With fingers frozen to slow-motion, we assemble the rods on the bank, cast out into the swirling blackness of the river, and settle down to wait. For the next two hours nothing happens; the windward side of Marco’s body turns completely white, and ice forms on David’s hat. We share a Thermos of tea. The fish are testing us, we agree, but this is no more than one would expect on a river that has produced some of England’s hugest pike. In four hours or so we will be on the motorway again, subject to the usual chaos and delays and domestic recriminations, but for the moment we are removed from all that. Pike angling is not about patience, it is about an intense, taut-wired expectancy, about a connection with the primeval. Marco flicks the last of the tea from the cup and we resume our positions.

Click here to read previous ‘Pike’ entries.
Luke’s book ‘Blood Knots’ is on sale in the Caught by the River shop, priced £12.99

Originally published in the London ES magazine on the 31st of October, 1997.

Sunshine, at the time of writing, and the warmth of summer still on the water. The season is under way, but until that first freeze knocks back the weeds and the pike move into their deep water, sport will be slow. In the meantime, there is piking literature. The great chroniclers were those of the 19th century, men like Stoddart and Cholmondeley-Pennell. Here is Stoddart describing his quarry: ‘None that ever felt the first attack of a pike can easily forget it… The whole is mouthwork, calm, deliberate, bone-crushing, deadly mouthwork. You think at the moment you hear the action – the clanging action – of the fish’s jaw-bones, so powerful, so terrific: you think you hear the compressing, the racking of the victim betwixt them…’
Books by Victorian pike-writers can be found in the second-hand shops, and just occasionally at bargain prices. A brief word of warning, though. ‘Fishing’ is usually next to ‘Flagellation’ on the shelves, and this juxtaposition can lead to misunderstandings. Recently, in a bookshop in the Charing Cross Road, I came upon a slim, leather-bound volume entitled ‘With Rod In Hand’. Assuming this to be the memoir of some Victorian sportsman I took it down, only to discover that it was actually a lovingly ordered treatise on the subject of birching and flogging. Film and video titles can be equally misleading. I sympathise with the reader who found out that Robert Redford’s ‘A River Runs Through It’ contained ‘far too much human-interest material’, and can confirm that Rose Troche’s ‘Go Fish’, while providing a fascinating insight into inner-city lesbian culture, offers very little in the way of decent pike footage.
And while on the subject of the Ladies Bathing Pond on Hampstead Heath, those rumours refuse to go away. Earlier this week I was introduced to a woman who claimed to have been the victim of a pike attack. ‘It just nibbled me a bit,’ she told me. ‘It was nothing, really.’ What, no calm, deliberate, bone-crushing, deadly mouthwork? No racking of flesh between those terrible jaws? Stoddart would have been disappointed, as would Cholmondeley-Pennell, who collected tales of pike attacks. Chummers, indeed, was himself attacked by a Thames pike which, having been landed, leaped from the bank and sank its teeth deep in to his thigh. Vis-a-vis my Hampstead Heath acquaintance, it seems to me there are two possibilities. Either she was employing traditional British understatement and was actually flayed to the bone, or she is London’s first victim of harassment by a roach.

Click here to read previous ‘Pike’ entries.
Luke’s book ‘Blood Knots’ is on sale in the Caught by the River shop, priced £12.99

Originally published in the London ES magazine on the 31st of January, 1997.

Last week I had a day on a Central London water with Bill the Vet. It was mournful and windy and cold as hell, but there had been whispers of a big pike taken there. These seemed to be confirmed by the bailiff who sold us our day-tickets. ‘ Beautiful fish, well over 30lbs,’ he confided to us. ‘Caught by a bloke from Rotherhithe.’
Any idea of his name, I asked? Was there a photo? Any witnesses? A pike of ‘well over 30lbs’ would certainly be the largest taken in London this season. No, on all counts said the bailiff. The bloke didn’t want any publicity.
Bill the Vet and I cast out. Bill the Vet has yet to catch his first pike. His ABU Cardinal rod has yet to buck in his hands and the Berkley Trilene monofilament line has yet to sing under the tension of a hard-running fish. Indeed, Bill the Vet is beginning to doubt the very existence of pike. That day did nothing to change his outlook. We hunched into our water-proofs and Bill the Vet smoked and I wondered about the man from Rotherhithe. Pike lore is full of characters like this, pale riders who turn up out of nowhere, do battle with monstrous fish, and then depart as mysteriously as they arrived.
We talked to the only other angler there, a die-hard London piker who, it turned out, spends four or five days a week in a wind-swept vigil on this bank. No, he said, to his certain knowledge, no pike of over 20lbs has come out this season.

Click here to read previous ‘Pike’ entries.
Luke’s book ‘Blood Knots’ (Hardback) is on sale in the Caught by the River shop, priced £15.00

Originally published in the London ES magazine on the 13th of December, 1996.

This column, as I hoped it would, has stirred some childhood memories. Among those who have written to me is James Gunn, the son of one of the gamekeepers at Kenwood House before the war. Like the others of his five-strong gang of keepers’ sons – they called themselves the Kenwood Rangers – Gunn was a keen fisherman. Early one morning in the Thirties, armed with a bamboo pole, a length of catgut and a single hook, Gunn and a fellow ranger were poaching the Lane Pond on Hampstead Heath, where fishing was forbidden. Both were about eight years old.
‘It was my turn with the rod,’ writes Gunn, ‘and Bertie had gone prospecting along the banks and returned breathless with the news that the Great Immense was basking in the weeds just a few yards out. This was the name we had given to a pike we had encountered from time to time. Looking back, I suppose he weighed about five pounds, but to us he was the Great Immense and about as obtainable as the Holy Grail. But this was our chance, and there he was. We searched desperately for something to tempt him, and Bertie unearthed a very dead and half-decayed small roach. This I attached to our precious No. 10 hook, and dropped it almost on top of the Great Immense, who, to our astonishment, seized it and made off. Weak at the knees with excitement, I was attached to my very first pike…’
Forty years later, in the mid-Seventies, a legendary one-eyed pike named Nelson ruled the Hollow Pond in Waltham Forest. Alan Silverstone, a local schoolboy, fished for Nelson for five seasons without success. One fine May evening, bored of revising for his O-levels, he went for a walk. ‘I was passing an inlet on the Snaresbrook side,’ Sliverstone writes, ‘when I saw him. Four feet long, and with huge mottled flanks and gills. I stared into the water at the massive fish and there was not the slightest movement from either of us for ten or 15 minutes. Then his tail-fin gave a slight shudder and, like an ocean liner heading out of Tilbury docks, he was gone.’
This is the pike fisherman’s joy, that every outing is a return to childhood. For, waiting out there in the dark water, there is always a legend, always a Nelson or a Great Immense.

Click here to read previous Pike entries.

‘Red Arches’, which takes its name from the viaduct spanning its northern end, is the smallest and most secluded of the Hampstead Heath ponds. I have chosen Red Arches for my first outing in search of a giant pike because I have caught a couple of pike here before. Not big pike – 4lb and 6lb in fact, mere pikelets compared to the object of my quest – but pike nevertheless. You used to be able to scramble down the side of the viaduct and cast a bait under the far bushes, but last year the heath authorities ‘landscaped’ the pond and fenced most of it off. There’s still one fishable bank though, and by 10am I have tackled up.

There are days when you just know you aren’t going to catch. A good pike-water in season has an air of chilly, slightly forbidding expectancy. Today, it’s just wet and muddy. Small roach nose around the lily pads near my bait, which they certainly wouldn’t dare do if there was a pike around. There is a big pike here – everyone says so – but today it is deep in the weeds, deep at the bottom of the deepest hole, not stirring. It begins to rain, and fortifying myself with coffee and only a very small amount of Calvados (it being early in the day), I huddle over my rod on my folding seat. Soon, I am dreaming the pike dream, the one where the line twitches briefly and then is drawn slowly and evenly away…
‘But with Stella, of all people. I mean she’s just so common!’ The voice is strident and female – West London, I guess, rather than local. On the other side of the bush two tall figures are moving slowly along the path beneath an umbrella. In my drab waterproofs, I realise, I am invisible to them. There is a tiny pffft of a match flipped on to wet ground. ‘Those horrid, cheap little sweaters of hers. She irons them, you know.’ Another match hisses. ‘I mean, why?’
Again he doesn’t answer. Poor Stella, I think, imagining the frosted lipstick, the acrylic sheen of those ‘cheap little sweaters’, the miasma of hair lacquer, fabric conditioner and air freshener that surrounds her. And then, listening to the falling rain and the man’s silence, I am not so sure. Triumphant Stella, perhaps, driving into the sunset in her perfectly hovered Renault Clio.

The couple see me and lengthen their stride. I fish on until dusk. Nothing.

‘Blood Knots’ by Luke Jennings is out now and on sale in the Caught by the River shop, priced £15.00.