Barrie Rickards’ Angling – Comment from the Prof

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.

Electric Plugs (no, not three pin with a fuse)

Recently, in an interview, I mentioned some electric plugs on which I had been catching fish and was a little surprised not to be pilloried for using unsporting methods.

These lures are the CFR lures (which stands for something silly like Critical Feeding Response – I ask you!). The lures, though, are good, being extremely well made, robust, and in a range of colours. To give you a comparison; they are bigger than a Big S and dive more deeply, perhaps to around twelve feet or so. At intervals of a second or so they emit a light flash which has the effect of illuminating a more or less translucent body, and an electrical pulse is given off too. The first outing produced no takes at all – on any of my lures. But the second, of about an hour’s duration, resulted in two small fish around 3-5 lbs and one of 20 lbs 12 oz. They all took in exactly the same way, simply sidling up to the lure and engulfing it. No big slamming take, not hit and run tactics.

These are not the first electric lures. About eight years ago a salmon-style big minnow was produced which also emitted a flashing light and an electrical field. These were very successful for me, producing a variety of fish, including twenty-pound pike and good tigerfish. When you had the fish on the bank, lying in the net, you could see them twitch in unison with the discharge. I was a bit worried about this, so filled my mouth full of tea and popped one of the spinners in. I couldn’t feel a thing so the discharge must have been low, even though detectable by the pike. Many fish hunt by detecting the electric fields surrounding their prey, so it would be interesting to know whether pike used this method. Just to give you some idea of the effectiveness of the electric spinner I had six good doubles and a twenty on one in a single afternoon.

I haven’t done so well with the CFR lures, but I haven’t yet had many trips with them. They don’t seem to make the pike twitch so much so the charge is probably even lower than on the spinners. (Again I could not detect it in my mouth). In the spinners water is needed to complete the circuit in order to flash the light and emit the electric field. But with the CFR lures all that is necessary is to hold the two trebles in your hand: that is enough to complete the circuit. I’ll be using mine all winter on and off so will report at the end of the season.

Bream Puzzle

I saw a brief article recently by Dr. Stuart Clough dealing with the observations of an angler who had seen big bream lying on their sides on the surface. There’s a deal we don’t know about bream. I recall, back in the early 1960s an article by Don Wary (D. L. Wary) on some Great Ouse bream, big ones, that he had observed lying on their sides on the bottom, in winter. Like the above fish they were alive and when scooped out in a net were seriously alive. Stuart was puzzled, and so am I. One point he makes is that at the surface, if sunbathing, part of the body would dry out, and presumably, reduce the effectively of the mucus layer. I’m not sure that is true, because on one of my carp lakes the big carp sunbathe for hours with several inches of their backs out of the water. You can see that they are quite dry and, I guess, rather warm. But they seem to suffer not at all. It’s a good job angling is full of these little mysteries. On the same lake I have also watched our big bream sunbathing, but always in the ‘normal’ orientation. I put normal in inverted commas because the position we regard as normal may be irrelevant to fish. I have seen them head down often, suspended. Rarely they will be tail down (as with eels in a thunderstorm). And then there was that famous goldfish which lived for years in an upside down position! Fish are much more versatile than we give them credit for; anyone who has watched tench feeding off the surface will have noticed that they approach the feed quite vertically.

Another Walker First

I was interested in the recent report of the take-off of Kayak fishing. For me its better if the boat is closer to cruise liner size than a kayak, but it takes all sorts – a sort of subset of flat tube fishing I suppose. Interesting too to note that this was done way back in the 1970s (Kayaking I mean) and by no less a person than Richard Walker – he was first in so many things. Talking of whom, several people have been in touch to ask when ‘Richard Walker: Biography of an Angling Legend’ is coming out. Probably in March next year. We were going to do it this autumn but decided that such a book did not need Christmas sales necessarily. If you want to ‘express an interest’ in a copy you could do worse than let Jon Ward-Allen at Medlar know (01691 623255 or books@medlarpress.com.

Angling Sabs

You may have noticed that from time to time I take a gentle pop at Martin Salter, the government’s spokesman on angling, largely because I think his views on angling are very narrow. There’s no doubting his commitment, however, as a recent interview in Angling Times makes fairly clear. It was a long interview with little to take exception to, except for two points, firstly, “its a nonsense to suggest angling sabs have only existed since hunting was banned.” Well that’s a nonsense too, because I haven’t seen anyone, anywhere claim it to be true. What they do claim is that attacks on angling will now increase, and it is clear that they already have, and when was that term ‘angling sabs’ first used? I wouldn’t be surprised if it was in M. S’s interview! And doesn’t that in itself tell you something.

Secondly, he tells us that he recently joined the ACA (why not years ago if he’s such a keen angler?) and he says, “The organisation was very, very badly treated by its former employees….” Well, as a life member since the 1960s not a Johnny-cum-lately, I don’t know that. During the recent kafuffle I was told little or nothing along with many other ACA members. So perhaps the new regime has informed Martin Salter more thoroughly than they informed their old members at the time. Perhaps they could now bring us up to date publicly.

Nuisance Fish

With signs today that anglers are beginning to turn away from the big-fish-at-all costs mentality, thus reversing the specimen hunting trend started by Richard Walker over fifty years ago, it comes as a bit disappointing to read of bream circa 15 lbs being regarded as nuisance fish by some carp anglers. The chap in question in a recent report was only a young man, so he has time to grow up and, as they say, get a life. All manner of odd, unintentional catches are made when angling and even a few bream caught when carping should be regarded as bonus fish and a pleasant interlude. There’s really no need to take things quite so seriously.

Troubled Irish Angling

One of the saddest things in angling has been the decline of Irish fishing. I haven’t been for a few years now but even when I was last there the signs were everywhere that freshwater fishing was seriously in trouble. My own feelings have been very carefully put by Mick Brown in ‘Pike and Predators’ for October. It is a wonderful country, but too much is going wrong with its fishing. In the 1960s the fishing was quite superior to that in the UK. Now it is vastly inferior, taken in the round. What is needed now is a high level study of the practicabilities of what to do about it; many of the causes of the problems are actually known, but the real problem will be political will and clout.

Boilies for Pike

Another Mick Brown topic (bless you Mick) is the subject of boilies for pike. Anyone who has done sume boilie fishing knows that pike take them quite often. In my case it’s Tutti Frutti boilies they seem to like. A goodly number of years ago now, at the instigation of Fred Wilton, I decided to make some big boilies for pike. I didn’t use fish meal or anything logical, just bog standard HNV ingredients. The baits were about as big as a mandarin orange and coloured more or less whitish. They had a ‘marker’ smell but it wasn’t fishy (and it’s a smell hardly used at all by carpers as far as I can tell). And they worked – in winter, in the cold, on drains, they worked. I only stopped doing it because fish deadbaits didn’t need the preparation, but I might try again using fishy ingredients, or simply, halibut pellets.

Bob Nudd and that Pike Cull

Finally, let’s have a look at Bob Nudd, who seems to have put his foot in it, in his column, in a national newspaper, where he suggested that rive pike needed culling on some of his waters. I’ve known Bob long enough to realise that he is not antipike, but like so many match anglers, he may be unaware of the consequences of culling – any culling. The consequences happen in a couple of years, namely a new upsurge of small pike. Nobody likes these upsurges of small pike but the way to get around it is counterintuitive to many anglers; either you must leave things as they are but do not remove any pike, or you put in a few big pike (big doubles or low twenties) at say, 2-3 per half mile of river. The bigger pike will soon solve the match anglers problem by eating the jack pike, if you don’t do this then you have ongoing problems.