HISTORIC VENUES
Llandegfedd Reservoir
BACK IN 1989 a select party of keen pike anglers descended upon the mighty Llandegfedd Reservoir in South Wales. Among the group, invited by Welsh Water to fish the place for a day on an ‘exploratory basis’, were the doyen of Welsh rugby, Gareth Edwards, along with Fred Buller, Pete Climo and Bob Jones.
An established trout water, the 440-acre venue near Pontypool had opened the year before to pike anglers for the first time… and hit the headlines when it produced four fish over 40lb!
It was hoped that the band of predator fanatics who went afloat that day might be able to delve a little deeper into the reservoir’s outstanding potential, yet nobody could have forecast what was to happen that day. By the time the group departed, Gareth Edwards had broken the British pike record with a massive fish weighing 45lb 6oz.
Dream debut…
When pictures of the mighty predator appeared in Angling
Times, the great and the good of the sport made a swift beeline for the venue, each fostering the hope of getting their own names inscribed in the annals of pike angling folklore.
In October 1992 an angler from Middlesex did just that. On his first session at Llandegfedd, Roy Lewis boated what remains to this day Britain’s biggest-ever pike weighing 46lb 13oz. Details of how the catch came about are the stuff of boyhood dreams, and testament to the sheer unpredictability of angling. Just 15 minutes after leaving the shore, Roy clipped on a lure that he ‘threw into his tackle box at the last minute’, and shortly after casting it into the reservoir’s considerable depths, an aggressive take saw him doing battle with the giant fish, which repeatedly dived beneath the boat in which he and fishing partner Terry Stiles were seated.
“It was a short fish and as fat as a pig, and it had a simply enormous girth,” recounted Roy.
“We physically struggled to get it into the boat, and I think it was then that we both realised that this pike was something rather special.”
The drama continued when it came to weighing the monster, until a local farmer saved the day when he drove to the rescue in his JCB with a set of farm scales in tow!
Changing times
This truly golden era of Llandegfedd, which ran from the late 1980s until the early 1990s, was all too brief, and within a few short years the true monsters had disappeared and were never caught again – including Roy Lewis’ historymaking fish.
Sport remained patchy at best, with the occasional 20-pounder caught, for a decade or more, before the pike fishing was stopped following poor results at the venue’s annual pike trials around 2010. Llandegfedd has since reopened for pike fishing, and although a scattering of fish are caught each year, none have come close to the size of those caught in the glory days.
Former British record-holder and all-round pike expert Neville Fickling believes that, while nothing can be ruled out, it remains unlikely that catches will ever produce anything to match Roy Lewis’ fish.
“I went two or three years ago and we had a few fish to low-twenties, but they weren’t in great shape. You have to remember that pike stocks are finite, and those fish from the early 1990s were part of a well-established population, fish of a good age, that had thrived unmolested on the trout and other coarse fish in the venue.
“One day it could well begin to fish like a ‘normal’ reservoir, and produce fish of 20lb, 25lb or even 30lb each year, but in my opinion there’s very little chance of it ever returning to how it was 20 years ago,” Neville said.
Over the past few years Llandegfedd has become synonymous with big catches of other species, most notably bream and hybrids, with nets of 150lb-plus not uncommon.
So, who know what the future holds? All it would take is for a new generation of the descendant pike to add big bream to their diet of rainbow and brown trout, and it could be game on once again!