How did you get on?

[The Runner]

Please please please no more photographs of picturesque places up there its making me (and I would think many others) very envious

Well, if I do go down to Armadale will be fishing from the ferry terminal which I suspect may well reduce the picturesque factor a bit ??????

 

[no-one in particular]

I watched a guy float fishing sand eels at the back beach at Teignmouth this year, be warned the sea gulls make this quite hard work if they are savvy and no doubt they will be

I read accounts of boat anglers fishing over reefs using these live big sand eels just free lined with them hooked in the tail, pretty deadly for big bass. I might have been tempted to try that off the beach, just lob one out and let it swim around except I would feel sorry for it. I have caught these greater sand eels on tiny hooks and a tiny bit of fish skin on the hook under a float of a sea wall but they are such a nice thing I put them back. Thy could be cut up into smaller pieces of bait. I have seen small pouting caught off piers and used as live bait and seen some big bass caught on them but I have not seen pouting of any size for years, seem to have disappeared, used to catch loads of them. I watched one bloke use artificial prawns once and catch a load of bass, it was made by Storm Lures and was pretty deadly but the most deadly bait of all are live prawns if you can get them, a couple fished under a float kicking about and bass cannot resist them. I have heard of Chinese blokes come on a pier with their hand lines and a bucket of live prawns and empty a pier of bass. Its always a Chinese bloke, clever those Chinese or is it inscrutable, other anglers on the pier had an Anglo Saxon term for it.

 

[theartist]

I read accounts of boat anglers fishing over reefs using these live big sand eels just free lined with them hooked in the tail, pretty deadly for big bass. I might have been tempted to try that off the beach, just lob one out and let it swim around except I would feel sorry for it. I have caught these greater sand eels on tiny hooks and a tiny bit of fish skin on the hook under a float of a sea wall but they are such a nice thing I put them back. Thy could be cut up into smaller pieces of bait. I have seen small pouting caught off piers and used as live bait and seen some big bass caught on them but I have not seen pouting of any size for years, seem to have disappeared, used to catch loads of them. I watched one bloke use artificial prawns once and catch a load of bass, it was made by Storm Lures and was pretty deadly but the most deadly bait of all are live prawns if you can get them, a couple fished under a float kicking about and bass cannot resist them. I have heard of Chinese blokes come on a pier with their hand lines and a bucket of live prawns and empty a pier of bass. Its always a Chinese bloke, clever those Chinese or is it inscrutable, other anglers on the pier had an Anglo Saxon term for it.

I've caught bass on supermarket prawns and many on bread but nothing over 3lb yet, although I've had big doubles slurping bread off the top from under a pontoon yet they left mine alone this proved first hand about their amazing eyesight. The reports of Chinese come from every pier usually during mackerel season but they will take schoolie bass too, according to the local who always mentions it so there must be some truth in it, they can't catch everything and sometimes the info you get is curve ball if your on someones mark.

 

[bullet]

Live Prawn is a deadly bait for Bass, especially over intertidal reefs, where, conveniently, you can usually find some at low water with a net and fish the tide back in with them. Live sandeel also deadly but harder to come by,( unless at Teignmouth and wrigglers is open).
Live mackerel are also very good at this time of year.
It's amazing the size of Bass that will take them, but it often sorts out much better fish.

 

[Derek Rutherford]

Caught my first ever ruffe today - at least I think that's what it was (by a process of elimination). Didn't realise it at the tie but it was a specimen - about four inches long. Picked up some maggots at the bottom of the Severn, pulled the rod tip around, then did nothing - when I reeled in I didn't even think a fish was on the end. Kind of like a pale perch, with speckles of colour. The little bleak I was catching actually put up more of a fight. Still, nice to catch one.

 

[mikench]

This was the scene at 8.00 am this morning and it was perishing!

View attachment 5716

I continued with my curried chick peas and had three separate takes which just resulted in the loss of the bait and no fish! Each was a real tug from something smart which just mouthed the pea and not the hook! After this not a thing!

I reverted to the float and at one stage I had more branches than Angling Direct! Maggots at least spared me a blank with several small roach and perch! The sun never really made it out of the cloud but it remained dry and with little or no wind!

Mind you the whole experience was infinitely better than clearing out my daughters bedroom!! came home early for the Liverpool/ Man City game!

 

[bullet]

Friday saw a friend and I make the two and a bit hour journey to the Wye.
We arrived about 9, and got set up in the only swim which could accomodate 2 anglers comfortably, although one of us had to fish up and behind the other a bit, but it was fine.
River was very clear and fairly low.
My friend has never caught Barbel before, so I was very keen for him to see a bit of action.
First cast in, and after around 10 mins I get a decent bite which turns out to be a barbel of about 5lb.
Good start.
After about half an hour, he gets a rattling , bouncing bite, which he hooks into and after a bit of swearing and clutch adjustment, and me telling him to get stuck into it( he's a bit prone to fannying around with fish) , he lands a nice one about 7lb.
Mission accomplished!
Anyhow, we fish on until about 12 with nothing more to show for it,but a great place to be,kingfishers flitting about, hornets going back and forth into a nest in an ash tree, and an armada of swans upstream.
We change swims and i get a small one and he loses one, but apart from this nothing doing, so about 4 we head back to where we started...
Mr Chub turns up....


A right clonker by our standards, then just as we are thinking about calling it a day, I get a real slamming bite, which after a great fight turns out to be a nice deep,chunky barbel..



Back to reality today, but the river is only 10 mins away..



I'm going to stop going to the Wye, it might make me start questioning where I live..!

 

[peter crabtree]

Club fixture today on the Thames at Windsor in the shadow of the castle. A chilly start with the all in at 10am. Set up sliding waggler on 15' rod with size 18 Drennan crystal hook. Casting about 1/3 of the way out into 8' of water. Coloured today and with good flow after yesterday's rain, I balled it with a kilo and a half of VDE Dark super roach GB to start. Flow was left to right.

Double red maggot on the hook I was soon into bites, perch and chublets mainly. Started feeding maggot and hemp quite heavily via catty every cast, the roach soon homed in and they were quality too, 6 to 8oz each . After 3 hours I guessed I had 8 to 10lb, I had no idea how the rest were faring but I felt confident. At 1oclock I tried a tare to see if I could tempt a bigger roach, the bites were lightning fast and I was retrieving smashed up tares or just the skin! So I tried double caster instead and boom, a 12oz roach immediately.
I carried on for the remaining 3 hours on double caster and the stamp fish kept coming, some pushing a pound, well 14oz probably....
By the end at 4pm I was totally knackered, my thoughts were I should frame with my netful but experience told me not to count my chickens...
There's some very good anglers in this club.
I pulled the net up for a preview and it was heavy, when the scales arrived I had just broken the 20lb barrier... Walking with the scalesman it soon became evident I'd won the section of 10.
Back at the carpark I waited tentatively for the downstream section results, I know the down pegs are usually favoured but not today, the biggest weight there was 12lb.
In short I won the day with 20lb4oz, 2nd had 17lb and 3rd 16lb.
£95 better off tonight and well chuffed...

19 fished.....

 

[103841]

Top angling PC!

 

[neil1970]

I managed to get out yesterday, just before it started getting dark.
One bite, one fish, nothing big, but lovely condition.

 

[108831]

Lovely looking lure too...

 

[john step]

Still trying for the perch challenge. Lots of perch but nothing to shake the world about. I had a small tench and a goodly roach as well as a mirror about 7.

Perch are funny things. They are so finicky at the moment that those hooked on maggot were just about hooked on the tip of the mouth.
Again no bites on prawn until I hair rigged them and then the bites were good and the float sailed away.

I wonder if the lack of rain over the summer has left the water deoxygenated and it is still having effect??

 

[bracket]

Last Friday saw this veteran angler walking the banks of an Autumnal River Stour. There was a heavy mist and
in my home town of Nottingham, conditions like this are called "Goose Fair" weather.
Strange how a bit of mist makes everything so surreal, got me to thinking "How many bloody years have I been doing this". The answer of course is "Never enough". I opted to fish a peg with a steady flow and about 8ft deep.
I tackled up with a closed face reel, 14ft Acolyte, 7 No 4 stick float, 22 hook and a bait apron full of red maggot. Third run through got me a little roach and from then on it was a procession of

roach

dace

and perch

I finished up after 3 hours with 65 roach, dace and perch plus a raft of gudgeon, which I didn't count and a sprinkling of bleak. No big fish to brag about but a nice session just the sort I like, plenty of bites and action. So as I trudged back to the car with a warm feeling of satisfaction, I was reminded of Thomas Gray's Elegy:

The curfew tolls the knell of parting day.
The lowing herd wind slowly o'er the lea.
The ploughman homeward plods his weary way
And leaves the world to darkness and to me.

But that would be you not me. I was off to ASDA with my Lady for 90 minutes of trolley rage. You can't enjoy yourself all the time and you need to keep them ladies sweet. Pete.

 

[flightliner]

A big tide today on the Trent so returned to same swim I fished last Friday .
It was four foot higher than my previous visit and I felt confident using the same approach as last week.
It worked fine but keeping in touch with the roach was typical of how skittish they can be at times.
One minute close in, then further out, up in the water then lower down, hard work but in the end I ended up with a decant bag of redfins despite a ruddy pike that was determined to try robbing me several times of a roach.
Nice day tho, not long before the hemp n tare will give way to other baits, strange how it can alter from water to water.
image hosting website

 

[stillwater blue]

I had a very quick morning session on the river and boy was it cold. At day break the perch where going nuts hitting fry everywhere and it was a fish a cast on a straight retrieved shad, it didn't last long and after 15 minutes the perch had disappeared. I swapped to a bigger lure in hopes of a zander, I got a single bite as the lure was falling through the water after casting out and for a zander it fought pretty well.

 

[Tee-Cee]

A really lovely post, Bracket......

 

[mikench]

A really lovely post, Bracket..

I couldnt have said it better Pete!

 

[fishplate42]

I spent yesterday, with my brother (Tim) on The Medway, upstream of Maidstone town centre, attempting to catch a fish! Neither of us did. We started off having a go at dead-baiting for pike, as Tim had bought a few frozen roach and skimmers. This was a big learning curve as neither of us had tried this before. Just trying to get the single circle hook through the body of the fish (now unfrozen!) was a bit of a palaver - it would have made a poor comedy sketch. Non of what you see on YouTube is as easy as it looks, and this is no different.

Armed with a good few hours experience, we need to go back to the virtual classroom and see if we can move on a stage. The bait was getting attacked, we were just not feeling a bite or when we did, we were not connecting with the fish. Hay Ho. After a few hours of 'feeding' the fish we decided to pack it in and go back to float fishing and chatting - sort of what we do best, the chatting that is!

We still blanked, not even a twitch. I guess Saturday's heavy rain had changed the river, that was the clearest I have seen it since we first fished here, back at the beginning of the summer. This part of the river is above the first lock so the flow is governed by when the lock is opened or the rate water that is allowed to pass. Now, call me thick, but I have just realised that maybe we should be fishing this stretch of the river more like a canal than a river...

Lots to learn yet, fish or no fish we still had a great day!

Ralph.

 

[mikench]

Forget Whitehorse and Mortimer and watch Ralph and Tim!!!

I too want to chance my arm( figuratively speaking only) at Pike but plan to lure fish first and if the weather is vile later in the week, so only a fool like me ventures out, I will have a lake to myself and have a go!!

 

[103841]

Pleased to read you made it and had a days fishing Ralph, albeit a blank apart from a spanner in the works!

My knowledge of piking is not much more than yours Ralph only having started last season, using circle hooks I immediately found that hooking most dead baits like roach etc was a hopeless task, one decent cast and the fish would depart from the hook having torn through the skin.

This was quickly remedied using a hair sewn through the fish a few times with a quick stop at the finish. One bait that doesn’t require this having a skin like leather is lamprey and is full of blood which hopefully attracts the preds from far and wide.

PS walked the town stretch this morning, Millers full of chub which I hope stay there til Thursday.