Well another month has slipped past and here I am again and what a month it has been!
Things were very much up in the air at the start of the month as I was waiting on the possibility of a job change that would have seen me relocating “oop north”. Sadly this never came to be and so I will be targeting the rivers and drains of Cambridgeshire and acting as Assistant Editor here for the foreseeable future…
So what of the fishing?
Well, after having the cream of the rudd fishing to ourselves word, sadly, seemed to get out and all of a sudden a few new faces started to turn up on the opposite bank. Now there was nothing that we could do about that as the opposite bank is not under our control but personally I found it all a bit sad.
There really is no shortage of big rudd in the river and with the bare minimum of legwork you can easily find them. But no, a few sad individuals decide that it’s far easier to match up pictures they have seen in the press or pull in favours etc. to find out where we were catching from.
Well congratulations to those involved as they have effectively killed the goose that laid the golden egg as that rudd have now done the off and found quieter pastures. I did manage a couple of decent trips early doors, including a trio of two pounders but results really dropped off to the point where it’s now time to look elsewhere.
With all this going on and no carp showing to lessen the blow of the disappearing rudd it was time for pastures new. So it was that I teamed up with a mate of mine, Ray Best, to target the tench, rudd and eels at a local sand pit. Now I will state quite clearly here that I am no great fan of eels as I have had a lifetime of the dreaded tackle tangles, as a small boy on the local river to the present day on either Bawburgh when tenching or on the Fens when zandering, eels seem to follow me wherever I go!
However this pit’s population of eels are of a size where they become interesting with fish reported to over 7lb and with the tench to occupy the daylight hours it seemed as if getting my string pulled wouldn’t be an issue.
I think you can probably guess what happened next! Yes – the tench decided to be ‘peggy’ – although the fact they chose to be so within the confines of one swim was somewhat more surprising. No matter what I did, and we were on similar tactics, the tench were obviously entering the swim to my left because Ray proceeded to land fifteen and lose another seven over the next 36 hours whilst I landed just the one!
Now Ray put it down to many factors including, of course, vastly superior angling ability but the reality was that I had caught similar numbers before from the same swim in the same place as I was before, the only difference being that he wasn’t there before. That’s my excuse and I am sticking with it!
With the tench being a no go it was down to the eels to save the day but even here I managed to get things slightly wrong.
The first night wasn’t too bad and I managed my first eel from the lake at around 3am and at 3lb 12oz although it wasn’t the biggest eel in the world it was a new best for me. There followed the usual bout of eel wrestling. Now before all you eel fanatics start emailing, I know the correct way to handle eels; the problem is that either I am not doing it quite right, or, no one has deigned to tell the eels that laying them on their back and stroking their flanks is supposed to keep them quiet! Where I went wrong though was through events that took place just a few hours earlier.
As dusk had descended I got a lot of attention on my legered lobworm that I at first put down to small perch. Finally though I connected with one of the lifts and pulls that I was getting and to my surprise, and Ray’s amusement, I landed a 6oz rudd!
Now the capture of a rudd of that size wouldn’t usually be of much interest but there are some staggeringly big rudd in this pit and there was no degree of certainty that there were just small ones out there; after all they were tackling double lobworms.
So, with the idea of a big rudd swimming before my eyes I decided to rig up to try and catch one the following night. That may seem like a funny time of day to be fishing for rudd but my past experiences of rudd are that the big ones are extremely nocturnal, especially to get them feeding in the bottom layers, and it’s only really when they are feeding up in the water that they are catchable in the daylight.
The best laid plans as the saying goes and my efforts were to come to no avail as the rudd didn’t show on the second night and with no eel rods out it was a pretty quiet night – and that was it for the session.
So after a few setbacks my last trip before deadlines loomed was back to my beginnings and one of my favourite species – perch, on one of my favourite methods, jig fishing. I was guest for the day on my mate Steve Rodwell, otherwise known as Rodders’ boat.
This in itself is somewhat of a pleasure as this is no ordinary fishing boat but a 17ft Alumacraft American aluminium boat and is decked out with all mod cons, including a 90, yes you did read that right, a 90 horsepower engine, usually seen pushing around a Ford Fiesta!
We met mid-afternoon at Denver to launch, something Rodders has down to a fine art, and we were quickly off to our first spot – one of the many bridges on the river. If there is one certainty in perch fishing it is that perch and structure go hand in hand and so it was to be today. We tried many spots over the course of the afternoon and evening and we caught perch pretty much wherever we went.
Most of the fish it has to be said were pretty small but that’s the beauty of jig fishing: with such light gear everything gives a fight and it puts the fun back into lure fishing. We had a boat full of perch over the course of the day with the best being just a bit shy of 2lb but great fun – almost as much as the journey home in a boat that can do 40 mph, but of course we were doing nowhere near that speed…
Next month sees the onset of autumn proper and so it’s time to break out the perch rods in earnest and if the weather’s kind then the first trips of the season in search of zander are on the cards.
See you next time.
