What a weekend! Play hard and work almost as hard. What am I talking about? Let me tell you.

On Saturday, My friend Rob and two of his colleagues,(both called Geoff) joined me at Bewl Reservoir for a day's pike fishing. The day was cold and bright with an intense orange and pink sunrise. We got into a couple of motor boats and headed off for a quiet bay.

The Geoff who shared the boat with me is South African and it was his first time pike fishing. As soon as I stopped the engine, he cast his lure, and bugger me if he didn't catch a pike on the first cast.

We thought, great, we are going to do well here. I should know better. We caught nothing more for three hours. We started drifting into the shore so I got out an oar to row us quietly back to the middle and heard something plop into the water. "What was that Geoff?" "It was your other spinning reel."

I never did recover it, expensive accident.

We decided to try trolling for a while, motoring along very slowly trailing lures behind us. I got hungry and tried to eat while steering the boat. We nearly ran aground a few times and went in circles a few more. About an hour after fishing, Geoff complained that he couldn't move his fingers. I think this is his first winter here and his hands were frozen already. Luckily I had some mittens which I didn't need and lent them to him. It seemed to help. Soon after he caught a trout. We were supposed to fish with big lures so that the trout would ignore them, but the trout don't read the rules.

I was playing with a lure on the surface later on when a pike came up from the depths and almost took it from the top, but changed it's mind at the last moment, turned over and returned to the bottom.

We tried another bay with no result and then trolled a bit further when Geoff caught another pike. As you can imagine, I was getting a bit despondent. However, I knew of a bay with a stream running into it which often held pike. I caught a pike just as we entered the bay. We decided it would be easier to fish the bay from the shore so I opened the throttle up fully and beached the boat half out of the water. Less than half an hour later I caught my second pike. I was a bit careless and it bit me on the finger. I thought nothing of it until five minutes later when I realised my hand was covered in blood. For some reason it would not stop bleeding for 2½ hours. Maybe pike teeth have an anti-coagulant.

We were still fishing when the sun went down, so we motored back for about 15 minutes past the darkening shore with it's forests and meadows to the fishing lodge. It was so beautiful watching the sunset and listening to the silence all around us on the water.

We met up in the George and Dragon pub in Lamberhurst for a well deserved beer and headed back home, four very satisfied chaps.

I had one hour to wash and dress the fish and myself before meeting Louise for a meal in the Turkish restaurant. I then noticed that my body temperature was quite low, not surprising, because we were on the water for over 7 hours and the temperature was about 3°C (37°F) during the day, getting colder as it got dark. The result was that I ate too much and didn't sleep too well. I had to take it easy on Sunday morning, I was feeling very tired from the fishing and lack of sleep. Worse still, I had to work from 4pm until midnight. It was grim, but luckily, I had little to do, just be there in case of emergency.

On Monday I had to go into work at 8am, so I was dog-tired.