2.45am is a ridiculous time to be getting up, but time and tide wait for no man and I had an appointment with a boat at 5.15am a hundred miles away.
Early rising in June brings thoughts of misty dawns, beautiful estate lakes, tench bubbles and quill floats, but today we would be sea fishing.
17th June doesn’t automatically bring to mind thoughts of tope, but a big spring tide and the run of tope approaching its peak meant that there was a realistic chance of a few fish, so barbel fishing would have to wait for a few days. Ron (not ‘The Hat’) and I stumbled, bleary eyed, out to the car clutching mugs of hot tea and set off for Rhyl. 2 hours later we were motoring out over the bar into the rising sun.
It’s still a bit early for mackerel but we eventually caught enough and out went the uptide rods for tope. To a coarse angler like me there is something strangely familiar about tope fishing. A mackerel is lobbed uptide, the rod is set in the rest and you sit back to await the screaming clutch: sort of like barbel fishing on steroids. The first run came to the father and son team at the back of the boat and 15 minutes later an elated 12 year old was wrestling with his first tope for the camera. My rod went next and I had to endure the agony:
“Don’t strike! Wait for it to stop.”
It seems like an eternity.
“Now wait for it to run again then tighten up into it.”
Only it didn’t – a dropped run to me.
The guy on the other side of the boat had a small one then all went quiet as the tide eased. I dropped a light snatching rig over the side in the hope of a decent gurnard or a flatfish. After an hour with no action we had a quick conference and the skipper suggested trying the shallows on the flood.
It was still quiet on the shallows and I amused myself taking pictures of the seagulls.
The loud buzzing sound started to get irritating and I kicked Ron awake so he could wait for it to stop and tighten into the fish. The tope obviously had other ideas and Ron was forced to tighten into it before it emptied his reel. Ron and the tope slugged it out like two Wiganers fighting over the last pie, but the tide was on the side of the tope and Ron was looking a bit the worse for wear as he finally got the fish to the net.
After a short battle on the deck Ron was proudly displaying his first tope, a fish of just over 33lb.
Now comes the river fishing….
One o’clock on Friday afternoon seemed a much more civilised hour to be going fishing. I stopped for fish and chips in Boroughbridge on my way to re-acquaint myself with the Swale. The river was very low, but it had a tinge of colour from the rain earlier in the week. I knew that the fishing had been hard over the past few days so swim choice would be critical if I was to catch. I spent the first hour driving round North Yorkshire before I found an unoccupied swim that I was happy with, so it was nearly 4.00pm before I was fishing.
The swim I chose is particularly popular, partly because it is close to the car park and partly because it does produce a lot of fish. What most people who fish it don’t know is that this apparently featureless expanse of smoothly flowing water has a sweet spot: about a third of the way across a large boulder reclines comfortably in a bed of gravel. In normal conditions all you can see is the tell-tale boil, but when the river is as low as it is today you can see its elongated form crowned by a mop of weed.
The key to consistent success is to place a bait close up against the rock where barbel love to hang out with their buddies. With the river as low as this I had no real expectation of a fish before dusk so I catapulted a few pellets over to the rock and wandered off to see if I could see any barbel on the shallows. There were no fish showing so after half an hour I returned to my swim.
My plan was to fish one rod hard up against the boulder and another a few yards downstream of it. Given the conditions it was really important that I didn’t over-feed. Both rods were fished with a 20g medium cage feeder filled with dampened pellets with 8mm drilled pellets on a short hair. I intended to recast the upstream rod every half hour or so to build up a small bed of bait, but to leave the downstream rod for at least an hour and a half between casts.
Time passed slowly and I gradually relaxed into the new season, absorbing the sights and sounds of the river. At about 8 o’clock I had a gentle pull on the downstream rod which didn’t develop. At a quarter to ten I was beginning to think about packing one of the rods away when the tip of the downstream rod slammed round and line poured from the centrepin.
The fish hung in the current for a while before surging unstoppably for the far bank. My thumb began to get unbearably hot and I was forced to palm the reel to keep the pressure on. As the fish got close to reaching sanctuary in the trailing branches of a bush I lowered the tip of the cane rod, bringing all the power of the butt into play and just managed to stop it in time. After that it was a matter of staying patient and working the fish back across the river. It looked a big fish in the net, but it just missed double figures, showing 9lb 14oz on the scales.
I then realised I’d forgotten my camera so the above picture was taken on my mobile phone which explains the noise and the slight ‘softness’. The fish took an age to recover and it was still in the net when my upstream rod began to buck in the rests. I decided to leave the fish in the net and grabbed the rod, lifting into another heavy fish. This one gave me a few heart stopping moments when the line snagged on the weed fringe on the forehead of the boulder. Luckily it pulled free and as I worked it back towards me I realised it was a very long fish and that I wasn’t going to get both fish in my net comfortably.
I took a decision and eased the first fish out of the net into the marginal reeds and bullied the hooked fish into my net as fast as I could. I let this fish recover in the net for a while whilst holding the tail of the other fish. Then it was a matter of putting the first fish back in the net whilst I unhooked the second fish, weighed it at 10lb 7oz and took a quick snap on my mobile.
This fish wasn’t quite as pretty as the first fish and if you examine the photo you can see the scarring and a pale area just in front of the dorsal fin which appears to be due to it being grabbed by a pike at some time in its life. I returned this fish to the net and carried 20lb of barbel a few yards down the bank to some faster water where they soon recovered and swam off strongly.
I dropped a bait back out against the boulder, but my heart wasn’t really in it anymore and after ten minutes I packed up in the gathering dusk and headed for home. What a brilliant start to the season!
Sean Meeghan
