With rain falling on an almost continuous basis it would have been easy to have joined the ranks of many others in simply bemoaning my luck at the disruption to my river sport and doing a mini hibernation during February. However, there’s only so much of being cooped up indoors and catching up on ‘proper’ work that I can stand before starting to get a little ‘stir crazy’, so it was time to revise my plans (again) and look at alternative venues to the bit of river where I’d been hoping to continue my search for a 1lb dace and to the River Lea, where I’d hoped to concentrate some efforts on for a monster chub.
The Gt. Ouse has started to throw up some very good chub in recent years for the guys willing to put the time and effort into locating and fishing for them and with it being much closer to me than the Lea, it’s always worth keeping in mind as an alternative venue. Unfortunately though, it was in a similar state to the Lea, with the main river carrying too much extra water and color, even in the upper reaches. However some of the tributaries can be less affected by the extra water and by searching around I was eventually able to find some water worth fishing.
I’m glad I’d made the effort as early in the month, fishing a swim I’d never fished before, as I was rewarded with a big ‘wrap around’ bite just minutes into a late afternoon/evening session. The chub that had clearly hooked itself put up a respectable struggle in the strong current but eventually found its way into the landing net and then onto the scales. It was a chunky fish in great condition and weighed 6lb 10oz – I’ve had longer fish that have struggled to go much more than 5lb!
Obviously, so long as they hadn’t been physically flooded into by an adjacent river, the stillwaters were generally less affected by the continuous downpour. With a full day at my disposal and the forecast showing a relatively dry day for once, I decided to pay a visit to my winter pike syndicate pits at Bluebell Fisheries and to spend the day slinging big rubber lures around to see if I could stir up some interest from a big pike.
Being really mobile and chucking out the heavy lures all day can be really tiring and with my arthritis related issues it can eventually become quite a painful exercise. However because it can be such hard work, it’s a tactic that tends to be overlooked and can be very worthwhile putting into operation if it’s not been tried for a good while. A few years ago I tried the very same tactics on what was at the time a new pit for me and was rewarded with a lure caught PB of 29lb 2oz, so it can be really effective at the right place at the right time.
The Bluebell trip didn’t throw up anything massive and was as hard work as I’d predicted, especially as there were little branches broken off by the strong winds that had to be cleared from the margins of nearly every swim before a proper cast could be made although I did have a few fish up to low doubles, so again a bit of effort was rewarded.
If you fancy having a go at this particular method yourself, but haven’t really tried it before, I’d recommend a spod rod rather than one of the single-handed lure rods that are sometimes claimed to be the rods to use. It could be a personal thing, but I’ve tried both and the spod rod is much easier to use, allowing me to cast the really big rubber lures further. It rather makes sense when you think about it, as a spod rod has been designed to cast a heavy spod over and over again and the really big rubber lures that I prefer can be a similar weight to a small/medium sized spod laden with spod mix and I use a similar casting style to when I’m spodding to thump out the heavy lures.
I team the rod up with a big pit type fixed spool reel loaded with braided main line and a heavy duty tungsten trace at the end fitted with a chunky snap link swivel to facilitate changing lures without too much fuss.
Obviously, with all the extra water in the rivers and relatively mild temperatures things looked good for a spot of barbel fishing. At least initially they did, but I think that with the conditions being so similar for so long, the barbel were soon well fed and able to spend long periods of time simply feeling full and not really feeding again with any amount of enthusiasm, despite the seemingly ideal conditions.
That was my excuse anyway, as the time I did go out on the river specifically with barbel in mind failed to produce a bite with the exception of the odd greedy chub. Perhaps it was my venue or swim choice that was at fault, as there aren’t exactly loads of barbel in the stretch that I’d decided to concentrate on. Whatever the reason for the lack of action it was all a bit disconcerting to be sat there in what appeared to be excellent conditions but with no barbel related activity to get excited about.
With the winter slowly slipping by and not much dace fishing being done, I was getting desperate to have a go for them before the close season. As it was in the upper reaches, I had a speculative trip down to my dace stretch in the middle of the month to see if it was fishable. Despite the effort I made to get there, including some major diversions around flooded villages, and having to wade down a flooded access track, the river was still ‘out of sorts’ and not really in a fit state at all.
With the water over the banks float fishing was rendered almost impossible and trying to fish on the bottom would have meant using gear more suited to barbel fishing, so eventually I was forced to pack up, but not before making the discovery that my boots had sprung a leak – providing me with a nice cold, soggy sock to wring out when I was eventually back at the car.
Fortunately later in the month we had a relatively dry spell that lasted long enough to make a return trip to the dace stretch viable. This time the river wasn’t in ideal condition, and the fishing was pretty slow, but eventually a few nice roach started to show up along with the very occasional good dace.
It was early afternoon when a bite produced another good fish that fought like a big dace, but had me fooled into thinking it was a roach when it first ‘flashed’ near the net due to its depth. However right at the net it revealed itself as a really fat female dace, obviously getting close to spawning. To be honest, it was one of the fattest dace I’ve ever seen and my estimate of the weight was initially a bit on the low side. I’d originally guessed at 11 or maybe 12oz at the most, so was worth getting the scales out for, but I was really surprised when the scales revealed a PB equalling 14oz!
I mentioned last month that I was one of the Predation Action Group (PAG) committee members due to meet up with Mark Lloyd and other representatives of the Angling Trust (ATr) down in London around the middle of February. This was a meeting that we had all been really looking forward to as we were hoping to obtain ATr’s support for our ‘The Big Picture – Predation: An Ecological Disaster?’ document and to discuss all manner of things related to predation issues, with a view to working together to tackle these problems.
Unfortunately, on the evening before the day of the meeting, it was cancelled due to the travel disruption caused by the flooding and rearranged for the following week. I was bitterly disappointed as there was no way that I could make the hastily arranged new date for the meeting, not least because it fell on my 50th birthday! The good news was that the meeting was a success, support from the ATr for the document was obtained and an initial ‘next steps’ action plan agreed.
Following my birthday things were due to be quite hectic for the last week of the month. On the last Monday evening I was scheduled to do a slide show as part of a charity fund raising event, quickly followed by a couple of days pike fishing at Chew Valley Reservoir.
The charity evening, originally the idea of my good friends Bob Church and Mike Green, has become an annual event which is chiefly organized nowadays by Graham Inwood and his team from the Sandy (Bedfordshire) based King’s Arms Angling Club. The purpose of the event is to raise funds for the nearby St. Johns Cancer Care Hospice and has become a very well organized event that has raised a significant amount of funding for the hospice over the last few years.
Over time the event has grown and nowadays there are two main guest speakers alongside other presentations, an auction, mega raffle and a whole load of other things. Bob and the guys had been asking me to do a slide show for the event for several years, but by the time they’d confirmed the date I had always been committed to something else, but this year Bob and Graham said that they were prepared to arrange the dates around my other commitments, so finally I could say ‘yes’ to doing my thing for the charity evening.
Leading up to the presentation itself there were a couple of minor panics. My presentation was to be about the fishing in the 14 month period that lead up to being the first angler to be awarded both the Fox Cup and the Drennan Cup prizes and it meant that it would all be based around the photos/slides taken quite a number of years ago. I thought that my slide collection from that period was in pretty good order, but a quick check on the contents of my (rather large) box containing the slides soon revealed that my assumptions were based more on wishful thinking than any association with real life.
Over the years I’d managed to forget about the plundering of those slides for various newspaper, magazine and book contributions, plus other slide shows and presentations over a fair period of time. It looked as though some of the slides I’d sent off to various publications had never been returned, while others were returned, but jumbled up and some had been scratched. Meanwhile, a couple of house moves clearly hadn’t done anything to help with the organization of either my slide or photo collection, so basically I had a right mess to try and sort before I could even start putting the basics of the slide show together. (I know that feeling only too well Tony! Ed.)
At around the same time I was also putting together the images to go with a guest chapter that I’d been asked to write for a book that’s due to be published later this year. Some of the subject matter for the guest chapter included a historic view of some of my bream fishing exploits, so the associated images also required a delve back into my photo/slide archive. With all this needing to be done rather promptly I eventually decided to dedicate several half days out of my schedule to sort through my entire collection and identify both the images for the guest chapter and the slides required for the slide show.
After all of this was sorted the next bit of bad news was that the slide projector we had originally assumed would be available for the show was now unavailable. This meant that somehow my slides needed to be scanned and turned into digital images to be used on a modern projector that would be available at the hotel Fortunately Graham Inwood had some scanning equipment hooked up to his PC that he was reasonably familiar with, so after a trip over to his place to drop off both the slides for the show and the photos and slides for the book chapter, it was left with Graham to do several hours’ worth of scanning and copying. Fortunately Graham’s hard work paid off nicely and we were eventually all set for the evening.
Everything went pretty much according to plan on the evening of the charity ‘do’ itself and it seemed that a good time was had by all. Working for many years in IT management within the banking industry has meant that I’ve had to make more than a few presentations in some pretty senior boardrooms. I’ve also done my fair share of fishing related slideshows and presentations over the years, so I don’t get particularly nervous about doing this type of thing.
Due to time constraints the follow up questions had to be cut a little short as the hotel staff were keen to get us out and the place locked up and this led to a rather impromptu question and answer session in the car park, but it was all good fun and eventually I was able to make my way home.
The late finish meant that I could have a lie-in the following morning and only a few short hours after finally getting to bed I was up again to make my final preparations to my piking gear before Ian was due to pick me up for our trip over to Chew Valley.
However, as the word count is creeping towards my maximum allowance I’d better save the details of that trip until next month…
Until then, if you’re on the bank somewhere…happy fishing!
