How did you get on?

[flightliner]

I've been quite busy of late so finally got round to do this.
A friend of my wife shared a day out in Buxton on saturday so in the morning I cut my lawns and took off to a lake I've joined for the afternoon.
On arrival I got waylaid by another angler and it was 2—30 pm before I started to fish which only left until 5-30 before I had to pack up and leave.
All I wanted to do was float fish a waggler set up for some roach, so, all ready i started.
It was a frustrating session as i started fishing on the bottom with the intention of feeding maggots every cast then following any fish up thro the water column but tho I tried the roach wouldnt come up in the water as they tend to fishing these tactics.
In truth they seemed to come in twos and threes then move out elsewhere for some some six or seven minutes then return for me to get a few more.
It was'nt till I was nearing packing up that i felt the bite of the first mosquito then another three in quick succession had me putting my gear away as quick as i could.
It wasnt too

bad a result but it could have been better if the roach had played ball.

 

[S-Kippy]

Having walked round the aquadrome at the weekend it seemed rude not to have a go if only to use the red maggots I found in the freezer.
Note to self….maggots do not keep like fish fingers.
So….I had my favourite spot but rubbish bait. I spodded in some pellet and corn plus the least skanky looking maggots and chucked 2 method feeders on top baited with the best maggot I could find. 5 hours later I gave up and swapped to rubber corn which eventually gave me a decent tench…..which morphed into a bloody carp at the net. About 5lb and an hour later I had an even smaller carp of not more than 2lb. The tench were either not present or not interested and speaking to the only other angler on the lake the place just hasn’t fished at all this year….hence the lack of anglers. This bloke had been there since Sunday and was biteless. I kept plugging away but a dead swim went even deader so I gave it best and went home.
On the plus side the boat didn’t come out. Hurrah ! Nice spot though

 

[seth49]

Not a bad day yesterday, on my own as mick was busy on his allotment, on our usual fishery for a change as the rain etc has resolved the low oxygen problem which caused a few fish losses, went on a sheltered peg as it was very windy at times, especially when it rained for half an hour at lunchtime.

started with corn on the pole, over ground bait had a few roach but it was slow, so changed to chopped worm with half a worm on the hook, this improved things as well as more roach, I had 4 crucians good positive bites on the worm as well, they seemed to prefer the head end too, also 3 F1s, and foul hooked about 4 carp which swam into the line, giving a positive bite but coming of after a few second.

Id been feeding the left hand margin with a few pellets, and the carp showed up before long, so later on after taking my keepnet out, I tried for them with corn, as the small perch kept grabbing worm if I tried that, I couldn’t get tight to the edge because of the irises so I foul hooked another three or so carp, before one took the corn and I landed the 9lb 10oz carp, after a good scrap on the pole, so a good day out and nice to catch some decent roach,

 

[@Clive]

I had a day on the Vienne today. Yesterday afternoon I put in some bait on my way home from mole patrol and went back this morning. I intended to fish from 10:30 to noon using a 2lb ish cane salmon rod, Okuma Trent reel and 12lb to 10lb line in order to give me a chance against the zoo creature that trashed my tackle last week. First cast resulted in a 4lb common. As my cover had been blown I baited up with hemp, maize and pellets and re-cast a The Source boilie that had been halved and the halves mounted on screws on a hair. Nothing more came by noon so I leaned the rod against a tree and set up the Alcocks Wizard with 5.5lb to 4lb hook link, 6mm The Source soft pellet on a 12 hook. I bet you can guess what happened next? Yep! The zoo creature was waiting to mock me again! At least this time all I lost was the hook link.

That gave me a dilemma. To continue trying for carassins, bream and chub on the light tackle and risk being trashed again, or sit it out with the big tackle. I chose the former.

The afternoon brought 4 barbel, 2 bream and a strange carp that I think might have been a hybrid of sorts.

On the bird front, I saw an osprey and a lone swallow both heading south.

 

[nottskev]

Too wild and windy to fish the river so it was back to the res, hoping the really bad weather would hold off til evening, which it did. The gusty wind was behind me and the margin, full of stumps, trees and bushes, was mostly unruffled

It turned into more or less a repeat of Monday afternoon, but the fish were a bit bigger and I tried out a couple of mod's to the simple business of free-lining a couple of feet from the bank. When I complained about the poor quality and high price of hemp, Clive suggested bulking it out with groats. A couple of local farm/pet supplies shops told me they no longer stocked them - price up thanks to Ukraine war - but I found some, soaked a kilo in a bucket, at a cost of £1, and fed them with a bit of hemp. The fish came on them, and while they look a bit bland and white, it won't be hard to colour and flavour them. And I found a better way to pin the line to the bottom. The little blobs of putty I'd used kept falling off when playing fish, so I threaded on a few little (5mm) sections of sinking rig-tube, locked between float stops, and that lasted the whole session without further fiddling around.

I started at 2pm and I was happy enough to pack up when the rain started at 5pm, with three barbel and eight carp the total. These were the most photogenic.

It's a lovely place to fish. Even the drive out through the estate is a pleasure

 

[Keith M]

My son Stuart and I spent a few hours late afternoon until it got dark doing a bit of Carp fishing down at our local private estate lake.


It was an overcast evening but the wind that had been battering the rest of the country missed us and it was fairly calm where we were.

It was fairly quiet with only a couple of Carp in the teens; except for my son who broke his personal best with a nice gold tinted Ghost Carp of 27lbs 4oz on his Cell flavoured boilee.

<Picture of Stuart’s PB carp to follow when I get it from him>

Keith

 

[seth49]

Back on club fishery again yesterday, same peg as Tuesday as it’s sheltered from the west wind, and it fished ok on Tuesday also, usual method of half a worm over chopped worm and groundbait, with the added attraction of hp sauce and 5 drops of geranium essence added to the water used to mix the groundbait, this worked well I’d twice as many fish as mick, in the first couple of hours, and had at least double his catch at the end of the day.

i also had a 10 lb 8oz carp, pick the worm up on my lighter tackle set for the roach and F1s, which was fun and games for a bit, but I managed to land it ok after a good scrap, it really stretched the size 13 dura slip elastic but I managed to keep it out of the vegetation around the island, by use of the puller kit.

so 1 carp, 5 F1s, and twenty four assorted roach, ide, and skimmers, nobody else on the fishery, and the weather wasn’t bad, windy at times and then flat calm, and warm enough as well, another good day with a variety of fish caught.

 

[Alan Whitty]

It’s a really lovely spot. Last time Phil and I fished the Bridge Pool we were hailed from the bench and damn me if it wasn’t Old Jack who used to work for Phil and fished with us on works matches. He’d retired and moved to Christchurch and didn’t seem even slightly surprised to see us. He was a technical glassblower and a bloody good one too according to Phil.

My wife showed me a video of the bridge pool yesterday of a what looks like a female sika deer swimming past the punt(there was an angler on it) and standing next to the gravel bar where the picture was taken looking very confused, I believe it was a very recent occurance...apparently it went for a paddle in the mill stream too...

 

[flightliner]

I overlaid by an hour yesterday which is unusual for me so It saw me rushing to get off to the tidal Trent for a day after a few Barbel.
On arrivel I was happy to see that the tide was in flood, I usually check the tides from Albert dock in Hull but not on this particular occasion which was remiss of me and could have saved me from rushing to the river which in the area I was going to is where some 3hrs and 15 minutes needs to be added to the times given to Hull. (Between each point along its length consider walking at a very brisk pace,maybe even before breaking into a trot to keep up with its flooding)
I set up my normal two rods with heavy leads as the river has, when ebbing a really fast pace, with my intended bait being luncheon meat dusted with a hot curry powder attached to a number four super specialist hook to a 12lb bottom.
Finally ready I dropped the upstream rod in some 12 to fourteen feet of water and the downstream one in 5 foot which was a huge bed of gravel that i had seen on a low tide on a previous visit.
A drink and a bikky was welcome as the wind had a slight chill to it blowing from the S/W that had me reaching for my winter snood in the car behind me.
Some two hours later my downstream bait on the gravel had the unmistakable three foot twitch of a Barbel that found me playing what felt like a good fish, and so it prooved as on the scales after long rest it it went 13lb-14 oz.
I was chuffed as near fourteens dont come along every day of the week.
Mid afternoon another, smaller Barbel from the gravel took my meat baited hook, not much bigger than 3.5 lbs but just as welcome as his bigger brother/sister!

ps, I put my artery forceps alongside the head of the Barbel for a sense of scale (they are 7")

 

[nottskev]

Back on the river trying to catch perch this afternoon. The river has been slow to drop, but I took a chance and the swim I wanted to fish was ok, I just had to put my box in a few inches of water and take care where to step. Last time, the session was gatecrashed by big barbel and I feared for my aged float rod, so today I had a peculiar combination - a Fred Crouch pin and a Shakespeare pellet waggler rod. (I felt pleased to have found a use for it). With some 4lb Pro Gold on the reel and a 4no4 stick float, the set up worked fine and the only fish lost cut me off in the rocks.

Bait was just 2 pints of maggots, dripping in half a dozen every few seconds. I started off with a run of perch, but no monsters. I'm getting a perch inferiority complex, seeing the posts with two and three pounders

The perch action fizzled out, and the next decent fish, aside from the bleak, chublets, roach and dace building up in the net, was a bit of a surprise

I never mind catching bream, and the bream in this river are fit and handsome. After searching around at various depths and failing to find any perch, I put 4 maggots on the hook, put a foot on the depth and laid on at the bottom of the rocks. There was no doubt what the next fish was, even though I didn't see it for a good while

Another one of these just wouldn't give up and eventually cut the line on the rocks in the edge. Meanwhile, a bit of a commotion was going on around my keepnet - no surprise, as jacks have tried to get at the fish in the net each time I've fished the swim. But it wasn't a jack that snatched the next little chub. I don't know what it weighed as I had no scales, as usual, but the mat underneath it is 36" long. The hook, by some chance, transferred from the chublet into the pike's mouth. How this thing, on a 14 hook and 4lb line ended up in my net, I don't know, but since my Big Perch Challenge is going nowhere, I'd like to enter it for this year's Big Pike Fluke award.

 

[Philip]

I was chuffed as near fourteens dont come along every day of the week.

What a cracking fish! Whopper & mint conditioned too. Your seem to have the tidal well sussed out which cant be easy.

Well done

 

[Hugh Bailey]

Huge head and shoulders. It’s got to be uppish teens min.

 

[peterjg]

Seth, good to see that your using the HP and geranium, yes it does really work! Try it with Morrison's macaroni over wheat - its a winner!

 

[flightliner]

What a cracking fish! Whopper & mint conditioned too. Your seem to have the tidal well sussed out which cant be easy.

Well done

Thanks for the nice compliment Philip but once I got yo five years old it took me nearly seventy three years to do it!

 

[Ray Roberts]

I took my eldest granddaughter Lexi lure fishing today. I intended having a crack for perch and mission accomplished with the second cast. The only one of the day. Lexi had a Jack early on and lost one in the afternoon. I had some heavier lure gear and had two jacks and lost a couple on the way in. We gave it our best shot and on the very long walk back there was a pretty sunset and the moon was a bright orange colour. It was the most orange that I can remember seeing. I tried my new Daiwa Ninja reel on my light lure rod and it worked perfectly. It’s the 2000 size which suited my 3 - 7gm rod. A few more fish would have been nice.

 

[John Aston]

A last day of 2023's river flyfishing for me. In gorgeous surroundings - a wild river in a steep wooded valley and a Cistercian Abbey almost glowing in the sunlight. In decades of fishing the Rye, I've never seen the river look better than it has this summer. We were worried about loss of ranunculus lower downstream and all it took was strong , well oxygenated flow to restore growth . Too far upstream for weed today, but every stone looked like it had been newly polished . and you could hear the river long before you saw it. What a contrast to the hideous summer of 2022, with no rain for months and the river on its bones.

I am delighted that the state of our rivers is now of national concern, but I do get tired of telling new converts to the cause that not every river is full of sewage and in terminal decline. We should focus on the rivers that do need help and be thankful we have ones like this one. A century ago its main tributary , the River Seph was dead from lead mining pollution - and now it is a glorious little trout stream. So not all bad. And even thirty years ago I wouldn't have bene serenaded by the mewing of buzzards .

The fishing? Lovely - upstream nymph on a 7-6 #4wt and deep wading (water bloody cold already )produced a steady flow of gorgeous , hard fighting wild browns to 10/11" and some decent grayling to 16 " . I tend to weigh them if they look two pounds and I think this one was nearer 1-12 ish.

So ..now to perch, barbel , pike and chub . And some winter grayling

 

[Mark Wintle]

My wife showed me a video of the bridge pool yesterday of a what looks like a female sika deer swimming past the punt(there was an angler on it) and standing next to the gravel bar where the picture was taken looking very confused, I believe it was a very recent occurance...apparently it went for a paddle in the mill stream too...

I've had sika swim across the upper Stour a couple of times and also a couple of them swam out to an island on a Isle of Purbeck pond on another occasion. They swim out to Brownsea Island in Poole Harbour. As 'sika' means deer in Japanese no need to say sika deer!

 

[Alan Whitty]

Whatever sika means in Japanese the British deer society quote sika deer throughout there waffle on the species Mark....

 

[nottskev]

Whatever sika means in Japanese the British deer society quote sika deer throughout there resume on the species Mark....

You can always irritate anybody referring to the River Avon by telling them they've just said River River, as Avon derives from the Celtic words for river, Afon and abhainn.
I believe Thailand's Mekong River amounts to River River River.
The internet tells us Sika Deer refers to a far-eastern version introduced here in the nineteenth century.

 

[Peter Jacobs]

You can always irritate anybody referring to the River Avon by telling them they've just said River River, as Avon derives from the Celtic words for river, Afon and abhainn.
I believe Thailand's Mekong River amounts to River River River.
The internet tells us Sika Deer refers to a far-eastern version introduced here in the nineteenth century.

As in the African Desert Desert then