| PROFESSOR BARRIE RICKARDS | |
Professor Barrie Rickards is President of the Specialist Anglers Association (SAA) and President of the Lure Angling Society (LAS), as well as a very experienced and successful specialist angler with a considerable tally of big fish to his credit. He is author of several fishing books, including the classic work ‘Fishing For Big Pike’, co-authored with the late Ray Webb and only recently his first novel, ‘Fishers On The Green Roads’ was published. He has been an angling writer in newspapers and magazines for nigh on four decades. Barrie takes a keen interest in angling politics. Away from angling Barrie is a Professor in Palaeontology at the University of Cambridge, a Fellow of Emmanuel College and a curator of the Sedgwick Museum of Geology. |
Fly fishing for coarse fish
I read an interesting letter recently from a man who seemed to have discovered for himself that flies caught coarse fish. It was his tackle I found of interest: a fly on the end and several 3AAAs shot on the line to give it casting weight. He retrieved as though spinning, although the fly shouldn’t spin much with such a rig. And he caught a variety of fish including perch and pike. I tried this back in the 1950s, but my preferred method was to use a former on the line (a tapered piece of dark-coloured hardwood, like a slim pike float). This enabled you to fish at exactly the depth you wished, and also enabled you to fish the fly sink and draw style. Fishing over the tops of sunken weed beds was a real winner.
Both methods work well, and should help convince anybody that coarse fish take flies readily, so if you want to set up real fly gear for coarse fish it will work well and you will not have wasted your money on the tackle. Not so very long ago I caught rudd after rudd on one lake, using a very light fly rod, a no 4/5 line, and a little red nymph. Richard Walker used another method of presenting the fly to coarse fish on a river: he trotted the fly down on a float rig! This also worked well, apparently, although I haven’t yet tried this out myself. This sort of angling – like pike fly fishing itself – just adds to the variety of angling, and on occasions will give you an edge over the fish.
Another interesting debate I bumped into recently concerns the colours of lures, especially plugs. I have never really rated blue plugs although, as Richard Walker explained many years ago, blue is that part of the colour spectrum still visible at depth when other colours have disappeared. So it ought to work where the deep water predator has vision. Armed with this theory I used a bottom-bumping blue plug and fished some deep gravel pits from which I’d had pike over twenty pounds on baits. Not a sausage. I caught pike on deep fished spoons and spinners, and plugs too – but not on blue ones. I found the same on many other waters, with one exception, and that was catching perch on blue minnows (of the trout and salmon variety). In the end, I didn’t bother with blue lures unless some came in a batch and then I tried them. In fact, with the Nile perch I haven’t done too badly on blue shad raps, taking about eight fish over 70 lbs on them. Then I read an article by an angler who I respect greatly, and who had really come to rate blue lures, especially plugs. We have to keep an open mind on these things, so I’ll try again this summer and autumn.
Someone recently said that lure fishing had reached a peak. If so then it’s a very high peak, or plateau even. I’m not so sure. Lure sales in the bigger companies are still rising and anglers are using lures in the sea, for game fish, and for other coarse fish than pike. In the last year I’ve had fish on lures just about everywhere, small and large fish, saltwater and fresh and some lures are almost baits, so natural are they.
That Closed Season again
Angling Times recently did an interview with Dafydd Evens the head of fisheries at the Environment Agency. In it he said, on the close Season, “When we asked last time, the majority of the angling public were supportive of keeping the closed season. Our precautionary position, coupled with the lack of demand for change, means that we aren’t looking to alter the river closed season.”
Now, isn’t this exactly the opposite line that the EA took with respect to fishing stillwaters? After all, a substantial majority were opposed to the change – all the polls showed this – yet the EA changed it anyway. What happened then to the “precautionary principle”. The fact that the majority of anglers then went and fished in the then non-existent closed season is irrelevant: they’d do just the same if the rivers closed season were abolished. The EA scientists are supposed to be the experts. They should decide themselves after full consideration of the science. The “precautionary principle” has the whiff of politics about it, and are they going to use the same principle on other matters where the majority are against them, such as gill-netting, for example? Mind you, it’s nice to see the EA prosecuting closed season poachers. They never used to bother to any degree, especially in the Fens where on several occasions I have caught these people. Only once did they bother to come out and apprehend the culprits – and then they let them off with a warning.
Controversial Charlie Bettell?
I read an interesting interview recently, I think in Pike and Predators, with the “controversial” Charles Bettell, famous Norfolk lure angler and guide. Maybe he is or has been controversial but like so many experienced (and professional) anglers, he always seems to me to talk a lot of commonsense.
One thing he said made me think, and I’m not sure he is correct when he says, “In my opinion, enthusiasm for lure fishing is governed by predatory fish activity”. He goes on to explain that he is partly thinking of the changing climate when things might get too warm for the pike. Well that could be a very slow process, and lure fishing enthusiasts who only fish in the summer could extend their activities to the late autumn and winter. In fact winter lure fishing has been comfortable and productive for at least fifteen years now. It may have been so before that, but we didn’t have the lures then or the understanding. And, most certainly the first lure fishing boom, before Charlie’s time was quite unrelated to predatory fish activity, or so it seems to me, because pike were very active before the boom, during the boom, and after the boom. It declined for some other reason, and I think that that reason was the increasing success of deadbait fishing. It eclipsed lure fishing for a decade at least. In fact, it did so to the extent that most anglers thought lure fishing to be less productive in terms of big, fish, which is probably wrong.
Pity the lone angler?
James Holgate, concluding the above interview, also raised an arguable matter, stating that he pitied the lone angler, suggesting that much more could be enjoyed by fishing with companions. I have done both for a long time, several of my old friends only being with me in spirit now. But I have always done a lot of fishing on my own, not least because I have arranged my working life so that I can get a half-day off midweek and one’s friends cannot always do the same. There’s no need to pity me at all. I enjoy fishing on my own, for several reasons.
Firstly, all wildlife comes much closer to you, not always even aware of your presence. On one recent trip I had four kingfishers – a family I guess – in the bushes only two yards away. They realised I was there only when I very slowly began to creep towards my video camera. On another occasion a fully-grown buck with big antlers, swam across the river between my two floats, only yards away from me. And last autumn I had a Marsh Harrier try to take my lure as I swung it above the reed beds prior to casting. And there’s another thing too. Four of my thirty-pound pike have come very very close to where I was sitting, not to mention other big ones. Had two people been present, especially if one of them was rather heavy footed, I don’t think I’d have seen those fish. So I reckon a bit of both is what you need. I certainly learn a lot when I’m on my own, and maybe I concentrate better too.
