February piking with the fly

Almost thirty years ago, when I was an impoverished research student doing a bit of teaching on the side, I got an unusual phone call.
‘I am looking for somebody to stuff a pike. Do you known anyone who could do the job?’
My work involved stuffing birds that I had collected in my research and I had done a few mammals for the museums, but I had never stuffed a fish. Yet here was the chance to make a few bob.
‘No problem!’ I exclaimed. ‘How big is the pike?’
‘Eighteen pounds.’
I did a quick calculation. If I charged two pounds per pound that would be thirty-six quid, and the voice on the other end of the telephone didn’t sound too poor. It wasn’t, for my suggested fee was immediately accepted.

The pike arrived. A beautiful female, with lots of bright yellow markings on a green-olive background. It had been caught by the son of the man with whom I had spoken and who delivered the fish to the lab where I was based. All I had to do was preserve it. But how?

I checked Reg Wagstaffe’s huge tome on preserving animal specimens for museums. Reg had been one of my mentors at Liverpool Museum and his book was essential to the venture.

The first part was easy. I laid the fish with its best side down on my bench and skinned it from the only-slightly-worst side. Now I had the skin, with all fins and head attached. The next part was less easy, for Reg suggested pickling the skin in seventy percent formalin for three weeks. So I took the pike skin home together with a Winchester of formaldehyde, filled my bath with the preserving solution and laid the pike therein. For three weeks visits to the bathroom resulted in running noses because of the formalin fumes, and bathing involved temporarily decanting the noxious fluid into buckets. I also carefully prepared the inside frame around which the empty pike skin would eventually be moulded, using chicken wire, cotton-wool, plaster of Paris and a black plastic eye (no eye on the worst side) and the skinned corpse as model.

After the allotted three weeks I slipped the skin over the synthetic body, stitched up the cut along the worst side, turned the thing over and looked at what should have been the best side.

The one great advantage of stuffing birds and mammals is that they have feathers or fur to hide crinkles and lumps in the skin. I discovered that, not having fur or feather, crinkles and lumps in the skin of a being-stuffed pike stick out like sore thumbs! So I cut my stitching on the worst side and began to add and take to the inside in an attempt to make what should have been the best side look reasonably smooth. I started that task after tea, and it had gone midnight by the time the thing looked anything like reasonably smooth. I laid the pike aside for the skin to dry off.

There were a few obvious crinkles a fortnight later when the skin was completely dry, but it was too late to do anything about them. I went to the model shop in Southport and purchased some Humbrol enamel paints and fine paintbrushes. It took a winter’s weekend to paint the fish and then, when the paint was dry I gave it two coats of clear varnish.

Having completed my task I looked critically at my work. To me it was dreadful. I thought of telling the man who commissioned the work that it had been stolen, or lost in a fire, or chucked out accidentally by a lab technician. But I needed that thirty-six pounds. The man phoned me up almost daily and I prevaricated almost daily. But the day of reckoning had to come.

I arranged to meet him on a late January evening at seven o’clock on a car park by the Ribble Estuary where I was doing my research. There, it would be dark! He arrived and I took the stuffed pike and handed it to him. He peered at it in the starlight (I had widely chosen the night of a New Moon).
‘That’s grand! My lad will be pleased!’ And he gave me four crisp new ten pound notes and added, ‘Keep the change!’

I heard nothing more of that embarrassing pike for about ten years. Then, I met a youngish chap at a local anglers’ meeting in a pub not far from the car park by the Ribble.

‘I once caught an eighteen pound pike from the Rufford branch of the Leeds-Liverpool Canal,’ he announced, on a small plug.
‘That’s a big canal pike,’ someone commented.
‘Yes,’ he confirmed. I was only eleven at the time. My dad had it stuffed. It’s on the wall in my living room.’
I felt myself blush and timidly asked, ‘Who stuffed it for you?’
‘Oh, my dad got the expert from Liverpool University or Museum. He did a great job.’

Not true! Believe me! I have stuff only one fish since, a burbot I caught in Norway and that tubular fish was easy.

But the reason I tell you this true story is that I go fly-fishing on that same length of canal and, just before the present icy spell of weather hit, last week I had a great day there with the fly rod. Nine pike, on four-inch long streamers made from white marabou, white and drab olive bucktail, a some red and pearl Crystal Hair built up to imitate the diminutive roach that live in the canal. The weedbeds are gone, so a sinking line and five-foot leader takes the unweighted flies down. Nine pike, but not one approached eighteen-pounds in weight!

Malcolm Greenhalgh