The school holidays are here, and for young anglers everywhere this means it’s time to go night fishing.
Grown up anglers tend to take after dark fishing far too seriously. They go off to Welsh rivers to cast flies at sea trout, or cosy up in bivvies with bite alarms set to wake them should a fish happen to bite. Even sea anglers will line beaches in the pitch black—bells on rod tips and the hope of something big on the flooding tide.
As children though, we just want the adventure. Once we’ve been tingled by the electricity of dusk we want to dive in and see the whole night. The owls and bats and meteors—the luminous glow of a starlight-topped float and the crack of a twig beneath the foot of a goblin. There is not a hope that we will sleep and with our eyes all but useless our other senses explode. We can hear carp slurping on the far side of the pool and can smell the sweet dew clinging to the meadowsweet in the field behind us.
And in the morning comes the delirium. The shifting water and surreal journey home. We crawl under our duvets and have never felt a bed so cosy, and we know we’ll be asleep before we can even count to…..zzzzz….