Success! Well, almost.

Brian at work.

It wouldn't be true to say that I have spent the whole of this season pursuing Tommy Ruffe, but they have been on my mind a lot and I dedicated three whole sessions to not catching them.

I put the feelers out by asking every angler I met if they had seen one recently. Most had never seen one  but some had caught them, maybe 10 years ago. Otherwise, most of them didn't know what I was talking about.

It looked like this little, perch-like bait fish had become extinct, at least in these parts, and so I lost heart. I went back to fishing for over-sized rainbow trout and put my dainty coarse tackle back in the shed.

Then I got the call from Richard.

Tommy Ruffe

My friend Richard lives in a cabin-home at a local marina. I'm sure the other owners will hate me stereotyping like this, but its pretty much a retirement community where life centres around the river. When the men are not out in boats, they are fishing. (The women have plenty of things to do, such as cleaning the crud off the bottom of the boat, servicing the engines and painting the superstructure.) There's a swimming pool and a gym on the site, so there's no excuse for waddling around like me, looking like a sack of ground bait on skinny legs.

Most afternoons theres a gathering of four or five of the faithful out on the pontoon where they spend a few hours catching a lot of fish; mostly perch. Its like a French angling club with the members sitting themselves a respectful distance apart. They communicate messages down the line in a respectful murmur, but mostly they don't say much; they just enjoy the fellowship and the peace that comes from staring at a tiny float for too long.

On Monday Brian (who sits next to Richard) remarked that he had had caught a tiddler and wasn't sure what it was. Was it a Tommy Ruffe? Before it went in the keep-net its image was transmitted to me by phone, but I didn't get the message. However, Richard popped by the next morning and showed me the photo on his phone and it was unmistakably a ruffe, or pope; the fish I hadn't seen for years.

Eye-lens caught using a camera flash.

Brian kept it in his net for about 24 hours until I could get away down to the marina to photograph it. By then the light of a foggy autumn afternoon was fading but I tried a lot of camera settings and the flash so I got some photos but they weren't great.  We released the little chap who seemed none the worse for his adventures.

As I let him go, I noticed the curious texture of the fish. Ruffe have a few spines in their fins and gill covers and some rough scales, but there's a softness about them. They don't have the pugnacious fighting stiffness of a perch. Perch advertise themselves with a big mouth, bold stripes and crimson fins and they back it up like true fighters. Ruffe are delicate, gentle little fish, near the bottom of the food chain. You hardly see their mouth or eyes and their colour is totally designed to provide camouflage.

The small mouth is low on the face.

This one reminded me of a little zander or a walleye. The speckled cream-brown, pepper marked skin was the same and they both lack muscular body tone. Most interestingly, they share the strange zombie-eyed look. I didn't notice it until I used the flash, but ruffe, like zander, have a thick reflective lens in the eye, designed for life in low light. This may be a clue as to why I haven't been catching them. They probably hate the sunlight.