Posted today in the Andrews of Arcadia Scrapbook to usher in the new coarse fishing season. Used with kind permission.
Found in the opening chapter entitled ‘Colliers and Carp at Dawn’ taken from John Hillaby’s Within the Streams (Harvey & Blythe London 1946), a description of a dawn fit for June 16th and every midsummer morning to come:
‘Walton Hall at four o’clock in the morning was other worldly.
When the mists drifted off the water and it was light enough to see, huge beds of surface weeds crinkled and popped as myriads of air bubbles rose and burst. Perhaps the dank airs of the night sustain the gasses from the vegetation; it may be that certain water plants open out with the sun; I don’t know. To-day, when my mind travels back to the large sheets of water fished in the past, I can hear the soft patter and crackle of weeds half hidden in the mist.