Fishing Lines: The worm turns for the worse

MY FATHER would probably nominate the whiting I left in his car boot as the worst smell he had ever experienced. My wife claims the defrosted sprats, victims of a blown fuse in the garage bait fridge, whiffed so strongly that she could detect them from the far upstairs bedroom. My former boss on a fishing magazine will no doubt remember with fondness the mackerel remnants I dumped in his office wastepaper bin after cutting them up for bait (I was sure the cleaners came round on Friday evenings). But the worst pong I know is that of dead worms.

Almost every fisherman has experienced the fetid fragrance generated by a can of ex-worms. This is because one dead wriggler rapidly infects all the others. You have to check a bait tin regularly, because a seemingly healthy vermicule will often unaccountably shuffle off its mortal coils. If you are not alert, all your bait transmutes into an unbelievably noxious liquid. The humble garden worm is very good at this. But for speed and pungency, the lugworm is even better.

The lug is the sea-fisher's equivalent of the maggot. It is the worm that makes those neat walnut-whip markings on muddy beaches. It lives in a U-shaped burrow and chomps happily away on mud, extracting the prime dirt and depositing unwanted bits in one of nature's most artistic excretions. Sightless, the thicker front and middle sections dotted with small hairs, as if it had shaved badly, the lugworm looks like a giant black or red legless caterpillar. The Sandworm, star of the science fiction epic Dune, was probably inspired by the lugworm. But this unlovely creature is arousing deep passions in Berwick-upon-Tweed, where fishermen and conservationists are squabbling over the worms of Budle Bay.

A public inquiry is considering whether a conservation order imposed by English Nature last year to stop anglers bait-digging is lawful. The bay, a protected wildfowl site, houses some of the best lugworm beds in the country. English Nature claims digging releases toxic pollutants from the sand, disturbs nesting birds and takes away their food. Anglers say the Magna Carta bestowed a common law right to fish and collect bait, and that if the ban is upheld, it would be extended.

It is mainly professional diggers who ply their trade on the desolate shore. In the glamorous jobs list, 5bait-digging comes somewhere between rural sewage disposal and maggot farming.

I always used to dig my own worms - even did it 'professionally' during my school holidays when my grandparents lived at Southend. But the worm has turned, and discomforts involved in collecting sea bait now outweigh the cost for me. Your work is governed by tides, so it often means getting up at 4am, even digging at night. I've never dug at Budle Bay, but I've done so at enough places to know that there are few harder ways of earning a living.

It means digging sometimes three feet down into mud that grips your fork like a drowning man. In many areas, you need to 'back-dig', throwing the treacly mud behind you and treading it down so you can work through pools left by the tide. Otherwise you can't spot the lugworms because the water overruns your digging like the incoming tide swamping a child's sand-castle.

An expert digger, racing against the incoming tide, can collect as many as 500 lugworms in a few hours, earning about pounds 40. But there are tides and times when the worms lie deep or disappear, and 200 is a good haul. Add the discomfort of shovelling mud at dawn in February, gale-force winds driving the rain into your face, and it's easy to see why even jobless school-leavers are not flooding the professional bait- digging firms with their cvs.

It also accounts for the growth of lugworm farms. Purists claim that farmed worms do not emit the same yummy amino acids that attract everything from cod to skate to sole. But they're a sight easier to collect, and the difference isn't that great.

I miss those curious discoveries: a flounder trapped in a few inches of rock-pool; the occasional edible crab; weights lost by other anglers; once even a reel. But I don't miss the aching back, or sorting through the repulsive blighters to discard those with even the hint of a cut from the digging fork. And I certainly have no regrets that I shall never again go into my garage and encounter, like a physical barrier, that awesome smell generated by 500 dead lugworm.