Held to Ransome

It’s the first day of the season and Simon Garnham makes a start on the stretch of coastline immortalised by a classic children’s story

As so often happens when an ambush has been planned, I slept badly. Again and again I went over in my mind a host of possibilities. Will the teal move off Southall and hug the coast? Is there water on Cunnyfur Meadows to tempt in mallard? Will Tendring Wildfowlers make the trip out and push birds back inland? Am I better on Bull’s Ooze, tucked in and nearer to the reservoirs, or on the Ness where I might get a crack at a goose?

Nights before a special shooting occasion still have the ability to stir that atavistic instinct, “goose fever”. Digging out waders last seen before the Beast from the East, finding steel and bismuth loads not needed since before summer and seeking goose calls at the bottom of the game bag, elicit the same sense of excitement and anticipation I felt when I first headed on to the marsh as a boy.

Then, as now, I sought to emulate my shooting heroes: James Wentworth Day and BB, whom I knew only through their writing, and John Humphreys and Julian Novorol, whom I have been fortunate enough to know and accompany on shooting adventures. Julian, a wildlife artist, chairs Little Oakley & District Wildfowlers and is a wealth of knowledge on all things wildfowl related so a pre-season phone call is always a good investment. He suggested Boat Creek — a mile along the sea wall and half a mile out across the treacherous Essex marshes — which teal tend to use as a marker on flightlines across Hamford Water.

Hamford Water is the inspiration for Arthur Ransome’s novel Secret Water and is the perfect setting for a childhood tale of adventure, voyage and discovery. Evocative names such as the Dardanelles, Honey Island, Bull’s Ooze and The Wade are reminders that this national nature reserve has tales to tell from Roman and Viking invaders through two world wars and on to the present day. It is a labyrinth of creeks, gullies and treacherous mud, with the distant lights of Harwich Harbour casting eerie shadows to the north. The cranes at the Port of Felixstowe loom like the ancient mastodons imagined in Ransome’s classic story.

Plan B

Preparation for 1 September — the first day of the wildfowling season — takes on a special significance. It is one of the few days when you can expect to have company to left and right of you on the marsh and is all the more sociable for this. But it is important also to get timings and locations clear in your head and to have a “plan B” in case you arrive at a preferred location and find someone already crouched in the oily depths of your chosen creek.

By 31 August, I was already on plan B. Ed Avery — a wildfowler of extraordinary ability and enthusiasm, with whom I’ve been fortunate to shoot since we were both boys in the 1980s — decided that pneumonia was good enough reason to miss the hallowed 1st for the first time since he was capable of holding a gun and standing upright in a creek. Though I tried to persuade him that pushing a boat up some of Essex’s finest gloop might be just the thing to clear his lungs, he was uncharacteristically following doctor’s orders.

Wild places

Boatless, the photographer and I crawled into the truck at 3.30am and set off down darkened lanes and past sleeping cottages. There is a magic to these dawn patrols. Under a half-moon our head torches were redundant. We could’ve been the only people in the world in those wild and lonely spaces that fowlers prefer.

At the gate to the lane, I met

Mick Simons, making the annual pilgrimage. “I’m going to go over the sea wall and plonk myself there, mate,” he said. “I’m 72 now you know, not used to these early starts.”

Amazed that Mick is only 72, I drove the mile of winding track through stubbles and sugar beet fields towards the shore. Like a military operation, night vision needs to be established and maintained, so

As dawn starts to paint the sky, Simon readies himself for a flight of mallard or teal