‘It’s said that the memory records nothing more accurately than a smell and, yes, on the odd occasions that I encounter the scent of decaying sweet flags, it conjures up bright haloed images of yellowing sword-like plants, golden alder leaves drifting on the opaque waters like pennies from heaven‘
As with many of us the pageant of the seasons is important to me. From the first late winter stirrings through spring and the ‘High Tide’ of summer, its sense of continuity and relative stability brings reassurance that ultimately Mother Nature is in charge and the world is turning as it should. I couldn’t contemplate living somewhere that has little distinction between the four seasons. How utterly boring would that be? Having said that, as I’ve grown older I do sometimes wish winter could be shortened a little!
This brings me neatly to a frequently posed question; what is your favourite season? A tricky one this, as each season has its individual attractions and I have as much difficulty as the next person making my decision. As an enthusiastic angler and gardener, ultimately it has to be spring with everything in front of us for both activities.
However, if it wasn’t for the growing then autumn, for me, would run it very close. With the heat of summer on the wane and most of our favourite species coming into the peak of condition it’s an exciting time to be an angler. And for many people, myself included, the perch is the fish that most symbolises autumn. The species has a long association with the season, particularly amongst some of our greatest angling writers. Mists and mellow sunshine, russet leaves, acorns and horse chestnuts crunching underfoot; the imagery is inextricably linked with quiet tree-hung backwaters and a brightly painted ‘bob’ float slowly meandering across the water’s surface.
It’s well documented too that a perch, probably a small one, would have been most anglers’ first fish, greedily obliging as they tend to be. This wasn’t the case for me, however, as the pond I was fishing didn’t hold any. An eel was my first capture, a tackle tangling slimy little wriggler of half a pound and I couldn’t have been happier!
My first encounters with perch came when I graduated to the larger Park Lake which was thronged with four to six inch specimens, bold and easily tempted but requiring a deft technique with the disgorger! There were big ones too which my companions and I had some success with years later, when our skills had been honed to a reasonable sharpness. For the time being, however, we were content to busy ourselves amongst the ‘tiddlers’ and the reeded area was the most prolific part of the lake for the little ‘stripeys’. The reeds weren’t actually reeds at all but sweet flags which, in autumn, when beginning to die back, gave off a tangy, fruity, almost metallic, scent that for me became synonymous with sunny September weekends. Weekends, because by this time a new school year would have begun and the freedom of summer weekdays was behind us.
It’s said that the memory records nothing more accurately than a smell and, yes, on the odd occasions that I encounter the scent of decaying sweet flags, it conjures up bright haloed images of yellowing sword-like plants, golden alder leaves drifting on the opaque waters like pennies from heaven and a battery of solid glass spinning rods reaching out over the margins, all pointing at a flotilla of variously painted bob-floats vying for the ‘hotspot’. The bait was always a worm grubbed up surreptitiously from an immense heap of leaf mould in the park workers’ ‘dump’ at the opposite end of the lake. These were brandlings and gilt-tails of course and hugely attractive to the hungry perch and to an occasional and highly prized roach.
We were fortunate in Wales at that time as our perch seemed to have, in the main, escaped the ravages of the perch disease that was rampant further East. Most of the angling books written around then bemoaned the disappearance of this much revered fish. Just outside our town an attractive disused canal wended through a large area of bog land (now an S.S.S.I.) with vast swathes of Norfolk Reed studded with alder and willow, and the canal, gin clear and gently flowing, holding shoals of pin-bright perch. The clarity of the water was a revelation to us after the murk of the Park Lake. We learned a lot about perch behaviour on the canal; particularly intriguing was their habit of following the worm to the bottom then just looking at it. A jerk of the rod top would twitch the bait and invariably the perch would engulf it so quickly it looked like a magic trick! It’s a ruse I still use to this day in water either clear or coloured.
Mr Crabtree had it right of course, with mid-autumn perching firmly in his angling calendar and who could forget the wonderfully dynamic illustration that accompanies the recounting of his assured success? Bernard Venables, Crabtree’s creator, was no slouch at the game either and this was admirably illustrated in the autumn episode of A Passion for Angling. Bernard, well into his eighties, used a split-cane rod to die for in order to catch some lovely, vividly coloured, river perch; fishing simply with worm and bob-float and a wealth of infectious enthusiasm!
So when does autumn really fall? Are the seasons shifting? The scientists answer this question with a resounding ‘yes’, pointing to climate change/global warming as the main contributory factor. Certainly, just in my own lifetime, I’ve noticed autumn coming later. As recently as the early ‘80s I recall late September fishing days after a sharp overnight frost and this in the relatively mild climate of South Wales. My diary (started in 1991) has always recorded the weather on fishing days and others.
Looking right back through to the earliest entries, nowhere can I find a frost recorded in September, and October ones are fairly rare too. November seems to be about the norm nowadays. As I write this in late November there are mature oaks lining the towpath close to home that still hold half their leaves and a pretty picture they make too.
Consequently the fishing has changed too. September, once considered the month for big carp, is now more an extension of late summer and October has taken its place as the real opportunist time when many species begin to feed in earnest against the onset of winter. This shift has meant that my annual infatuation with the tench lasts longer now, well into September this year with its four heat waves! Curiously, on my penultimate visit to the canal at Pelsall, as well as two tench, I also caught a pound and a half perch on breadflake! And a sparkler it was too, coming from the ultra-clear water at this venue, a surprising way to kick off my perch season.
The attractions of perch and perch fishing are manifold; the fish’s physical appearance plays a major role in this. It’s so different from all the other species, excepting perhaps the ruffe which, like its larger cousin, bristles with indignation at being caught! Ubiquity is another factor in favour of the perch; it can be found in every type of freshwater habitat and even the brackish Baltic Sea has its quota. From Scotland’s Lochs through Cumbria’s famous lakes, Cheshire’s meres, the canals of the North-West and Midlands right down to the hallowed chalk streams of the South the perch is omnipresent. And happily, the perch can grow large in the tiniest, most overlooked water, providing a pleasant surprise for the adventurous angler. A little pond on the edge of a common near our provincial town, barely twenty yards across, held a few perch to nearly three pounds; rugged old ‘sergeants’ they were and difficult to tempt on anything other than a little minnow, the only other species the pond held.
Through my match-fishing years the tensions, the cut-and-thrust of competition rather diminished the inherent delight in the capture of anything less than extra special. Team fishing particularly exacerbated this disconnect between the true essence of angling and the win-at-all-costs attitude. A Passion for Angling was, for me, a breath of fresh air and a timely one too, coinciding with a growing disenchantment with an increasingly fragmented local match scene. And it was the autumn episode with the perchfishing that triggered something profound within me. In no time at all I was on a different, yet vaguely recognisable, path. A carbon pole was sold to fund the purchase of some suitably vintage tackle and, with autumn fast approaching, a good old mull over past successes with Perca Fluviatilis!
In deference to my re-discovered appreciation of the joy derived from simply fishing, where I fished was paramount to the whole experience. It needed to be quiet, peaceful and preferably secluded. The Park Lake (not always tranquil) was out of the picture anyway, an unsympathetic council having stopped angling there just months earlier. The old canal would have fitted the bill nicely but the perch had become very elusive; I did want to catch something despite my newfound Karma. Then I remembered Clyne Pond and several mental boxes were ticked. It lay half a mile from the nearest road, deep in a wooded valley and dug out on the course of a tumbling, picture perfect little trout stream. It dated from the mid-nineteenth century and has a brooding “Old Copper Mine” atmosphere, enhanced by the all pervading silence. A long and narrow pond, quite deep, tree hung and sheltered from most winds, it was constructed as a trout pond by one of the Lords Swansea but for a long time now only coarse anglers have trodden its banks. I came to it first in my early teens, a time when it was thronged with little rudd, maybe a tench or two and some exquisitely marked, wild, brown trout of no great size.
The stock gradually changed over the decades and there came a time when the perch came to the fore; not huge fish, nothing to set the specimen-hunter’s heart racing, but nice quality fish, beautifully marked from the lightly peat stained depths. I took my cane rod there one bright late October day. A light frost had precipitated a gentle leaf fall and clots of yellowing oak leaves drifted imperceptibly on the dark waters. An orange tipped bob-float completed the scene and for a while all was serene, just the lightest of stirrings of the topmost branches which, in places, almost met overhead.
Then the fish started to bite, the first a lovely roach, black on the back and silvery bronze down the flanks, a true product of its environment. Then the perch began to boldly submerge the float, bob… bob… and down it would go; six times in quick succession, each fish larger than the last, culminating in the capture of a one pound six ounce stunner, all green and gold with inky black stripes. Perfect!
I fished there several times in autumn and winter for nigh on twenty years with varying degrees of success. The stock evolved further and following the introduction of a small number of tench and crucians, the summer fishing held my interest for a few seasons until it became apparent something was wrong. The summer fish appeared to have gone and only the tiniest of perch and roach were being caught. We knew that cormorants were visiting in the depths of winter but that had been happening for some years now. Then, one summer dusk, a pal, one of the few to still visit, saw an otter slip quietly down the feeder stream and into the pond leaving a trail of bubbles on the darkening waters. I didn’t fish there much after that but one winter’s day, with a move to Staffordshire fast approaching, I had to go there one last time and surprisingly, after not too long, my proffered worm was taken by something that tugged quite hard and sinuously; a brown trout and at nearly two pounds, the best I’d ever seen there. Lord Swansea would have been pleased!
Writing & Images Paul Huxtable, Late Autumn 2025
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