Late August Capture Update, New Angling Star Article & New Website Article

Well, after a couple of weeks off - first being away on holiday (rarely, without any tackle!), then attending the Leeds Festival for the August bank holiday weekend - I have done very little fishing of late.  However, during the week before I went on holiday, I managed a couple of sessions which saw me bank a few good fish...

Firstly, I targetted barbel and although I managed to lose two fish in a snag, once I'd switched to using "hit and hold" tactics with a single rod, I managed to extract this excellent 9lb 5oz barbel.  Check out the way its tail fin is so long that it arcs over at the top, like the dorsal fin of an Orca Whale!

The following evening I had a couple of hours to lure fish for perch - just before sunset - and although conditions were difficult, I did land a few good fish in the shape of a 2lb 12oz perch, a 2lb 5oz perch and - just as I thought I'd spooked the remainder of the fish in the swim - my first 3lb+ perch of the season at 3lb 1oz...

Perch shown in capture order:

2lb 12oz

2lb 5oz

3lb 1oz

Angling Star & Just-Fish.co.uk update

I have a new, double-page Barbel feature in the current August/September issue of the Angling Star.  If you want to check it out but don't have a retailer local to you, send me a message and I may be able to get a copy to you.  Alternatively, you can order back issues and also set up a quarterly or annual subscription to the magazine at the following link:  Order Angling Star Subscriptions & Back Issues

Meanwhile,  I've uploaded a new article to my main website, www.just-fish.co.uk.  It's got the stupid title of "Feeling Flexible" and it can be viewed from the following link:  http://www.just-fish.co.uk/fishing-articles/
This article originally featured in Angling Star magazine back in February of this year.

More sessions planned soon, so stay tuned for the results!

National Fishing Week - Event @ Barlow Lakes this Sunday

With National Fishing Week/Month (heck, why don't they go the whole hog and make it last all year, every year and maybe re-brand the country Great National Fishing Britain or United Fishing Kingdom!) upon us, I shall be once again lending a hand at an event being held at Barlow Lakes near Chesterfield.  The day is being organised by my friend - and qualified NFA angling coach - Kevin Miles.  In the past these events have featured tackle stands, taster sessions for novice anglers, fun matches and displays by the Environment Agency.  This year I am not so sure about the setup (I'll post more details once I know them), but I know that a local floatmaker is coming down, there are demonstrations of various floats and methods - including the unveiling of a new design of self-hooking controller float - and I'll be in attendance from 10am 'til around 1pm (the event is open until 3pm), so if you want to chew the fat, discuss tactics or ask me questions on any aspect of fishing then pop down.  there's no entry fee and the lakes are open all day for fishing if you want to combine the trip with your usual Sunday fishing trip.  I'll hopefully see you there...


Barlow Lakes is a lovely little complex set in a mature wooded valley.  There are 4 coarse ponds to go at and I believe 4 or 5 trout (fly only) ponds to fish too.  There are plenty of carp up to mid-twenties and some HUGE grass carp to catch, besides bream, tench, chub, crucians, roach, perch and gudgeon.  A true "mixed fishery" in every sense!  Most of the fishery is very wheelchair-friedly, including disabled toilets, and there's also a snack bar cooking hot food all day, every day.

If you fancy coming along and don't know how to find Barlow, take a look at this page of their website:  http://www.barlowlakes.co.uk/maps.htm


Other News

I've been fishing 4 evenings in the last fortnight with very mixed results; the first night I managed to land a pike of around 5lb on a Halibut Pellet, hooked clean in the lower jaw!

The very next night I fished the Tidal Trent for the first time this season and managed a barbel of around 5lb and my friend Crofty notched up his first barbel of the season too.  This week I lost 2 barbel in 2 nights through breakages (I'm pretty sure I was to blame through not changing hooklength regularly enough), which meant I blanked one night but managed to salvage the night with an 8lb 5oz barbel from the same spot, on the same bait as the fish I lost 15 minutes before.

Check out the size of its MOUTH!  This could be a very big fish in the future...


National Fishing Month runs from July 17 until August 15, 2010

http://www.nationalfishingmonth.com/
http://www.nationalfishingweek.co.uk/events/
http://www.anglingtrust.net/

Near-3lb River Perch on the Fly!

After a few Summers of catching a decent number of 2lb+ perch on lures I decided it was time for a slightly different kind of challenge.  I would still visit my favourite Summer swims which took many blank sessions to find, but now I know where the perch are at this time of year they've been very reliable and with only a few repeat captures.  The main difference is that instead of conventional lure fishing (which I'm fairly proficient at), I would try for them with a discipline which I'm far more clumsy and out of practice with; fly fishing.

I asked my good friend and fly fishing instructor, Kevin Miles, to tie me up some flies replicating perch fry, after seeing a good perch spit one out in my landing net a few weeks ago.  The resulting flies - tied onto size 2 Nash Fang hooks - were really good too!  I should have really taken some photos of them before I started destroying them by hurling them into undergrowth and such like!

I was using my Fox Predator XS fly rod, which I bought when it was on offer a couple of years ago and it's been gathering dust since, just begging for me to get around to using it.  To this I attached a Greys GRXi large-arbour fly reel loaded with clear sinking line.  I then used a "Rio Toothy Critter" leader, which has a coated wire trace section at the tippet.

Anyway, I had about an hour of fluff-chucking and had just a single take, but it was from a big perch - my biggest of 2010 so far in fact - 2lb 15oz of fry-eating, fly-crunching, prime Summer stripey!

River Chub Brace

I recently captured my best-ever chub brace, landing this 5lb 2oz specimen (left), followed by a 4lb 8oz fish while I was setting up my camera!   I risked life & limb to land the latter fish, because I was fishing a peg with a very steep - almost vertical - bank leading down to the water.  I wanted to rest the chub in my landing net, in the margins, but as this wasn't possible where I was fishing, I took the net and fish a couple of swims downstream where the margins were shallow and calm. 

As I was setting up the self-timer function on my camera, the alarm on my other rod screamed!  I was left to battle the fish in a deep, fast-water peg with no landing net!  Standing between me and the net were 3 trees, overhanging the water.  There was no way over or around them, so I had to (in the dark), scale the steep bank, test the margin depth with my toe whilst holding onto a tree with one hand and the rod in the other.  Luckily there was a narrow, rocky ledge about a foot under the water, so I slowly shuffled along this, negotiated the trees and a reedbed and finally reached an area I knew was shallow, where I jumped in feet-first and managed to reach my net!  It's a good job it wasn't a barbel or I may have been waterskiing! 

I later went on to catch a barbel and another 4lb 8oz chub, all caught on a variety of pellets.

This brace of chub were 5lb 2oz (left) and 4lb 8oz (right)

Not something you'll see often!

This posting is about something that you won't catch me doing very often, but last weekend I fished a MATCH at Glebe Fishery (part of Ray Marlow's Mallory Fisheries) and managed to come second out of 11 entrants.

It wasn't what I'd class as "proper" fishing - just lobbing a bait at a bunch of far-too-enthusiastic water pigs and reeling them in - but it was quite enjoyable to get a decent bend in the rod a few times.  I mainly caught bream and carp, although there were a few roach and the odd perch amongst them, but others also caught crucians, rudd and barbel.  I ended up with 72lb 6oz, with my largest fish being a 9lb 6oz mirror carp. 

Part of my 72lb Glebe Fishery bag

The Environment Agency has released an extremely handy feature on its website, for checking river levels.  I believe it's based on the same data they use for their "rivercall" telephone service, but it's more up-to-date and it's free to access!  The interactive map isn't the greatest unless you have the length and course of your favourite river permanently etched into your brain, it can be difficult to pick the right one out but with practice it's a decent system.


EA River Levels

The only problem is, for some reason the service has been "unavailable" this week!  Maybe the website boffins got caught in an unexpected flash flood... 

Speaking of rivers, they're back on the agenda for my next blog!

River Season Starts with a Bang!

How great it's been to sit by a river in this glorious heat to while away an evening or two!  After such a cold, long, snowy winter I'm not really surprised that the extremes of weather have gone full circle and now some of the reservoirs are dangerously empty!  Normally with such dry and bright conditions the fishing is difficult but I've either been doing something really right (granted, I have changed a lot of my setup) or I've been extremely lucky (or more probably a bit of both) in my first couple of sessions of the season. 

I fished last Tuesday & Wednesday evenings on the River Dove for my first sessions of the new season and unusually, I managed to hit the ground running!  The first evening I only had a couple of hours fishing because I was so disorganised, I didn't cast a line until half past 9!  The very first cast I had some tip rattles on my upstream rod which seemed like a bite given by a chub mouthing the bait.  After the bite continuing for a good few seconds I struck but failed to connect.  Next cast, a similar but more forceful bite resulted in a bizarre scrap on the surface, which I struggled to win.  The fish turned out to be a PB 2lb 12oz rainbow trout!  Not what I was expecting, but my season was officially underway and a blank was thankfully off the cards...

Officially my first fish of the 2010/11 coarse season - a surprise Rainbow Trout!

With my next three casts I hooked & lost a barbel (hook pull), landed a chub, then lost another barbel (another hook-pull!).  I thought that was it, my chances of a barbel were done for the evening, when a last-gasp screaming run turned out to be a really special fish for me; after 7 years fishing the Dove, I landed my first "double", at 10lb 5oz!

The pinnacle of 7 Summers on the Dove 

The next evening I fished the same stretch, but arrived around 19.45 so I fed the swim for an hour by removing my hooklengths and casting & re-casting my swimfeeders.  An hour and a half passed with not even a twitch on the rod tip.  After my instant success the previous night, I thought I must have over-done the baiting and was starting to accept that the session would be more of an experience-builder rather than a fish-catcher, but I still held some hope of a bite from the swim I was fishing.  At almost dead-on 11 o'clock my only bite of the session came.  What a battle it was too!  Four times I thought I had the fish beaten, but each time it came anywhere near the net, it swung out into the white water down the middle of the river and bolted back downstream.  At least six or seven minutes passed and when I finally saw the long white belly flop over the net rim, I knew I'd landed another big fish.  The scales proved me right; I'd not only beaten the previous evening, I beat my Personal Best too!  This specimen weighed 10lb 10oz, was completely spawned-out and had a humungous mouth!

The Dove snatches my PB back from the Trent!

I'm saving the full story for the Angling Star, but this is a brief description of how things unfolded.  I'm now setting myself a target of a double from my 3 nearest rivers in the same season.  Given that my barbel fishing is limited to after-work evening sessions in the summer, I think this would be a huge acheivement.  Just the Trent and Derwent to go...

A Couple of Closed-Season Gems

Well, I didn't get fishing too much over the closed season, but two of the more notable sessions were fishing for Crucian carp at Carr Vale Pond near Bolsover and Tench fishing with my friend and erstwhile www.anglerstoday.co.uk editor, Kevin Miles.

I tried fishing light for the crucians, as is normally required to hook one, but for some reason couldn't connect with the bites.  When I eventually swapped to fishing the lift method (which is one of my favourites for close-range fishing) and swimfeeder, I did start hooking fish.  The first came to the lift method on a single grain of corn and it went 1lb 4oz.  Later on, my "sleeper" feeder rod, which I'd loaded with a big hook, a whole lobworm and a grain of corn in the hope of a big tench, was nearly dragged in by an absolute screaming run, which I assumed must be a tench or carp.  After a good scrap for 30 seconds or so, the fish seemed to give up, almost like a bream would.  I brought the fish to the net wondering what on earth I'd hooked.  it turned out to be another, bigger crucian at a PB weight of 1lb 14oz.  It's no Marsh Farm fish, but heck it's not a bad 'un for North Derbyshire!

My two crucians which preferred crude over refined!

On June 2nd I was joined by Kev Miles on a private Midlands reservoir which I'd been lucky enough to secure access to for a day.  It holds some monster tench and with my PB for this species being pretty meagre, I went all-out to try for a big one.  A 5lb+ fish would have been brilliant, but the potential was there for fish up to 9lb!

What a view!  How can an angler fail to be impressed by this!

What a water it was; reed and tree-fringed, weedy, clear and holding big tench - what more could we have asked for?!  It was a baking hot day with clear skies so we spent most of the day sheltering from the sun beneath a brolly.  With the weather so bright and the water so clear, I'm guessing that the tench were similarly seeking refuge deep within the weed cover.  We only had one run during the day, which came to Kev who was using a method feeder over a big bed of groundbait with imitation sweetcorn as hookbait.  The fish managed to embed itself in the weed a couple of times, but without too many nerves wrenched, the fish was landed and weighed 6lb 12oz.  I'd never seen a tench bigger than 5lb before, so I was thrilled to see such a beautiful specimen, which seemed to be spawned out, so may well have been even heavier just a few days before.

The business-end of Kev's Tench

Being late June and being a fan of river fishing, naturally I've been out on the rivers already and I'm pleased to say I've been catching!  I'll be posting news of my best-ever brace of barbel soon...

See, I can still catch perch!

Sorry everyone, this post is almost 2 months late!  I started typing it shortly after the session and then never got the time to finish it!  So for now, here's a slightly rushed post, but I've a fair bit of fishing planned in the near future so expect a flurry of activity on here very soon!

A couple of weeks after the rivers closed I headed to local fishery, Tibshelf Ponds, to target the resident perch which are numerous (It used to be my local water and I would catch several every time I fished there as a child), but I had an incling that there were some really large ones there to be caught too.

I set up with a combination of a swimfeeder rod (switching between a groundbait feeder & maggot feeder) and a heavy pole float fished on a new bolognese rod that I'd bought and was keen to try out.  Bolognese rods have never really taken off in the UK, they are designed to fish the deep canals & slow rivers of mainland Europe, and they're basically a telescopic whip (mine's 6 metres long) with a reel seat and a rod ring on every section.  They're not very good for casting, but I bought mine to allow me to fish very light with the sensitivity and precision of a pole, but with the playing abilities of a rod and reel, especially beneficial when a large fish is hooked.  In reality, it's not quite as good as a pole or rod & reel, but I don't like relying on a piece of elastic to "play" my fish for me, so it's a useable substitute for a pole that caters to my own desires and stupid prejudices!

Over the course of the day I landed most of my perch on the float and was amazed at the fights on the bolognese.  Even modest 6oz fish would feel like 1lb+ brutes as they fought against the huge rod; it made catching small perch so much more fun and then when a 1lb 3oz fish finally took a liking to my worms, it gave me a proper tussle!

The bites dried up around the middle part of the day, as they so often do with perch, but eventually my air-injected lobworm started receiving some serious fishy attention.  I missed bite after bite - probably small perch - whether I struck immediately or let the run develop made no difference, I just couldn't connect!  Then I managed to connect with the next three consecutive bites!  The first fish kept me guessing all the way to the net.  It was fighting hard but didn't feel like a perch and I couldn't decide between perch, tench or carp.  A flash of green gave me a moment of hope, but as it surfaced properly a rubbery yellow mouth gave it away; it was a tench.  Next cast I struck at a very perch-like sharp, stuttering run, which turned into a head-thrashing, hectic, perch-like fight.  After a close encounter with some submerged Norfolk reeds a perch looking easily 2lbs graced the net.  Unfortunately, this pot-bellied, thuggish-looking perch (check out its protruding bottom lip!) had recently spawned, so that pot-belly was empty and she weighed 2 ounces shy of 2lbs, making it my biggest bait-caught perch to date (for some reason, all my biggies take lures!) and a personal best for that water. 

Darkness was fast approaching and the fish were hard on the feed, so I quickly re-cast.  About 10 minutes later I got another run which turned out to be yet another species, a chub of around 3lb.  It wasn't what I came for but it was a lovely fish and would be one of the fish I used to catch in my teens, which were stocked at about 4oz, 15 or so years ago.  I still have photos of my beaming face behind a tiny chub at Tibby ponds!

Anyway, here is the photo of the perch.  A bit more writing to follow soon I promise!

"The End of the Line" - Free DVD in The Sunday Times this Sunday

Are there people you know who have not yet seen "The End of the Line" yet but you think they should? Well they've come up with a clever way of helping you spread the word this weekend.  If you pick up a copy of The Sunday Times this Sunday (11th April) you will find a clever little voucher for The End of the Line DVD.  All you need to do is take that voucher to a Waitrose store and you will be given the DVD in exchange.  Nice and simple!  You can either keep it or give it to someone you want to see the film.

The End of the Line trailer on YouTube

The Kennet (and my last trip of the river season 2009/10)

As day was breaking I arrived at the Reading & District AA car park and was sorting through my worms as Will pulled up. Will not only has a string of massive perch to his name, he is also the angling development officer for Reading, a bailiff and coach for RDAA and is a founding member of a small specimen group based around Reading called SAS Angling! Over the past year, you may have also seen him feature in one or two of Ian Welch's articles in Anglers Mail too...  Right from the off I got on really well with Will, who's a genuine, amiable chap, not to mention knowledgeable!
 My first glimpses of the Kennet gave me instant optimism and I couldn't wait to get set-up.  It was slightly couloured and with plenty of perchy features.   We set up in a shady area of overhanging near-bank trees, which provided the margins with some shade as the sun rose behind us. The roots were quite terrifying to offer a bait towards, but they were blatant perch (and chub!) holding features. 

Before long, Will was getting bites which he was suspicious of.  Eventually after an aggressive tap on the rod tip, he found the culprit to be a signal crayfish, which apparently plague the Kennet (and many Southern rivers), but the species was completely new to me.  Obviously I've read and heard about them, but never actually seen a live one.  They are aggressive wee beasties with pretty formidable claws loaded with sensory hairs, which allow them to accurately grab at prey in extremely low light levels, while small barbs on the claws help them cling on to their prey once captured.  These crayfish are far larger than I expected and besides the fungus they carry (detrimental to our native white-claws), it's easy to see how these creatures have just taken over in so many rivers.  The signal was duly despatched and removed from the vicinity of the river, and so were the others which followed.  It didn't take too long until I'd caught one myself, which gave me a savage take!  Have a look for yourself at these close-ups I took, paying special attention to the size of the cray in comparison to Will's hand!

Eventually Will got a bite which was definitely not a crayfish, but within seconds his rig had been pulled into the tangled mass of tree roots and the fish was lost.  Apart from crayfish, the swims went dead and we decided upon a move onto the nearby Kennet & Avon canal, to pass the early afternoon before returning to these tree-lined swims later on.  It was quite a hike with all the tackle, but after about 20 minutes walking we ended up at a "Perch paradise"!  This place was straight out of the textbook; if someone sketched an example swim with features to look for, this place would have more features!  On the near-bank there was a mixture of overhanging bushes, trees & brambles and moorings; on the far bank there were these, plus a resident barge; downstream the water shallowed and upstream a small stream flowed in. 

The banks were high and steep and the water was really clear, so we set up well-back from the water and crept up to our pegs to cast.  After the slow morning (and previous day!), seeing this place was an inspiration and I began to get quite excited at the prospect of what perch lurked within this stretch.  Will also said he had a good feeling about the place, so we decided to stay put for the rest of the day and see what happened.  Will had a bush in front of him, growing well out into the water and sheltering around this were thousands of minute, freshly hatched fry.  Something had been spawning recently, but we couldn't tell exactly what species they were.  Could they possibly be perch fry, meaning any perch we caught would be a fair bit leaner and lighter?

I was first to get a bite here, as the bobbin on my right-hand rod jerked and lifted a few times promisingly.  On this rod I'd cast an air-injected lobworm fished in conjunction with a maggot feeder, under the barge on the far bank.  The bite never progressed into a proper run, so I twitched the bait back a few inches towards me.  A few minutes later the same bait was taken again, but I failed to connect with the culprit.  We managed to catch a single gudgeon, which we hoped would be enough to tempt one of the large fish - which was no doubt lurking beneath the barge - out of its lair for an easy meal.  It wasn't to be though, and as it happened we probably caught this gudgeon half an hour too early.  As the light began to disappear, the perch finally came out to play, but by this time the gudgeon had seen better days.  Five or six sprays of fry from all around our swims signalled that the perch were actively chasing the fry we'd spotted earlier.  They had been there all along!  How big perch manage to keep a check on there natural urges for hours until the time is just right (it had been overcast for most of the afternoon, yet still they waited for dusk!), I'll never know.  All of a sudden our worms started attracting attention.  First, Will hooked into his first positive bite from the peg and landed a fish of just below a pound.  We knew there were larger ones lurking and Will's next bite turned up a completely different beast.  This one was fighting hard, trying its best to snag Will's line on one of the many snags/sanctuaries (depending on the angler/fish viewpoint!).  Luckily we both had extending landing net handles and I managed to coax this fat, round perch off the overhanging grass it had snagged in, and into the net.

Finally, a very good perch lay subdued in front of us.  How good exactly we shall never know; we both thought it looked over 3lb and a couple of days later, Will's scales were shown to be weighing 7oz light at 3lb.  On the day they weighed this fish at 2lb 13oz and I think we could conservatively call it 3lb.  Here's the photo, what a beauty!...

There was still enough time for me to have what seemed to be a promising run on the near-margin rod, but it turned out to be very violent but too quick for me to strike.  I stood poised, waiting for it to go again, but unfortunately it didn't.  We fished on slightly into dark, but I managed to end the second river season in a row with a blank session!

Will is soon to be offering guided perch trips on the Kennet and K & A canal, which I'd recommend if you want to be in with a chance of latching into a real beast of a stripey.  With his vast knowledge of this species in particular, you're bound to learn some key tactics to help you in the future too.  When his guiding is in operation, I'll post more details on here but meanwhile if you'd like to arrange a day fishing with Will, email me and I'll put him in touch with you.