There’s probably a feeling that those who earn their living from fishing, or those of us who write about it regularly, must be pretty much immune from making the mistakes that the average angler makes and that the angling writer is as about near to perfect as can be…
Well, let me take the chance to completely dispel that myth once and for all!
To say that this month has been a struggle would be putting it mildly. Sure some things have gone to plan; I had a great day’s fishing with Ian and Cheryl Tomline which was documented elsewhere on this site. I also had a great outing with Gareth Goldson for Rudd on the River Cam where Gareth managed to winkle out some cracking rudd on the day, including three over two pounds and to complete a great day this was then followed up with a good catch up over a pint and a pub lunch.
I also saw an otter on my local waters for the first time. Now just the mention of that name stirs the emotion of anglers these days, but if there is any river that can easily handle a pair or two of otters then it’s the Cam so, personally, I look at the sighting of one as what we should really all think – a rare occurrence that added to the day.
So that is the good days taken care of – yes they were that few this month – and as usual with most things in a bloke’s life, it was a woman that put paid to a lot of my fishing exploits, well at least it had a woman’s name – Hurricane Katia! Thankfully not the full force but the dying embers of her swept in mid month, just at the time I was looking forward to getting to grips with some pike or zander on the Anglian Water reservoirs.
Sadly big waters and high winds do not mix at all well, especially when you want to be vertical jig fishing because to get the best from the method you really need a very slow moving boat. The best days for the technique are those that have a light breeze, just enough to move a boat without the need for any aids to slow the boat down. Of course these rarely coincide with when you can go, but if the wind is a bit stronger then a drogue – a water parachute – tied to the boat can be used to slow the speed of the drift.
However with a hurricane whipping across the Fens it would have taken a hell of a lot more than a drogue to slow the boat down, not to mention the fact that we would have been thrown about like a pea in a whistle! Therefore Grafham and Rutland have been carried over and put on the ‘to do’ list for October when, hopefully, I can lock horns with a big zander or two, not to mention a large pike!
So with the reservoirs out of the game plan it was to the Fens that I looked at for the next target with zander being back on the hit list.
I have probably spent more time hunting big zander over the years than any other species, but to be honest my interest in catching them on baits has waned a bit over the last few years and these days I prefer to spend my time lure fishing for them in the day as much as doing long nights on the Fens for them. However this year I intend to do a bit more bait fishing for zander to see if I can threaten my personal best of 15.01.
Since I caught that particular fish the river has seen a population explosion of silvers of epic proportions and the chances are that there’s a really big zander in the 17lb range swimming about locally to me and I would dearly love to catch it. My first trip though was somewhat of a damp squib. Not being able to do the whole night I fished until midnight, but not so much as a bleep was registered. I wasn’t alone, friends on other stretches were not reporting much either, but I suspect that this will change as the weather gets that bit cooler.
So, to the final disaster of the month and it was another trip out with Gareth – this time to a commercial fishery in Suffolk after large perch on live and, interestingly, deadbaits. Now I have never caught perch on deads before, in fact I wouldn’t bother fishing most of my favourite perch areas with deads as they just don’t work but Gareth assured me that they actually favoured deadbaits over lives on this particular water to the extent that he had never even had a run on a livebait. So it was looking like being a very interesting day, one I was looking forward to immensely, as it turned out, too much!
The night before we were due to meet at the lake I made sure that all my gear was in place and ready and trotted off early to bed like a good boy, ready for a 5am start to be at the lake for 7am. Sadly it all went wrong from there as looking forward to the trip made my head start swimming with all of the possibilities and by 4am I hadn’t managed a wink of sleep! Now with a 5am alarm call and then a long drive, it wouldn’t have been smart or clever to have tried that on one hours’ kip, so I texted Gareth and let him know that I would be late.
I eventually arrived at the lake around 11am whereby Gareth informed me that he had caught a perch of 2.15 on prawn and loads of smaller samples, again on prawn, the deadbaits being studiously ignored.
Now some of you may know Gareth is a tennis pro coach by trade and, despite the fact that I rarely see him without a packet of Maryland cookies in his hand, he carries no weight and is as fit as a butcher’s dog. On the other hand, I would be best described as built for comfort and since my sporting days ended I haven’t so much gone to seed as to an entire football field! So when Gareth assured me that it was a hundred yard walk to the swims I foolishly forgot all of these facts – and so it was that I ended up walking at least five times that distance and knowing all about it by the time I eventually got settled in my swim!
To give you a blow by blow account of the day would take forever, but suffice to say the morning perch feeding spell was completely over and for ages the pair of us couldn’t buy a bite. In the end I scaled right down and used a prawn to get a cracking bite that I just couldn’t and didn’t miss. Sadly it wasn’t the hoped for 4lb perch, but at first look it seemed I was attached to a big rudd. However when it finally hit the net it proved to be a very pretty rudd/ bream hybrid of about 2lbs. Gareth was catching a few tiny perch and a skimmer of around 2lb and an F1.
Eventually with the deadbait rods proving useless I switched over to using a livebait and the result was instantaneous. The bobbin slammed into the blank and the strike resulted in the satisfying head shaking thump of a good perch. It wasn’t the desired four or even three pounder, in fact it just cleared the two pound mark, but it fought well in the shallow water and with the witching hour of dusk to come things were looking up, enter Captain Cock Up.
The Captain first announced his presence as I suffered that problem of float fishing with one rod and legering with another. My attention was distracted from the float for just a second and the next thing I knew I was chasing my rod down the bank as a carp attempted to make off with it. I have to say that the reel on that rod, a rear drag Stradic, has a track record for trying to escape.
Once before at Grafham I managed to lose it over the side of the boat when I was trying a sleeper jig rod. Despite our best attempts at getting it back on that day we failed and on a water the size of Grafham I thought that was the last I was going to see of that, so you can imagine the look on my face when my boat partner Olly hooked the same rod the very next day on our first drift! In the words of TV comic Harry Hill “What are the chances of that?”
I managed to catch the errant rod on this occasion before it got wet, but the carp had the upper hand and snapped the light hooklength off very quickly in the overhanging trees. Still carp were not what I was after and after a quick re-tackle both rods were gain fishing.
Gareth had to make tracks at 6pm and he bade farewell and covered the distance back to the car park a lot quicker than I had – and I was coming downhill! Gareth had probably just about made the car park when my livebait rod was off again, only Captain Calamity struck again as in the process of picking the rod up, I simultaneously jammed the handle into my trouser pocket causing the feeblest strike you could ever hope to see and bumping the perch off in the process.
Muttering and grumbling to myself I noticed that the float had also gone. Eager not to deep hook the fish I picked it up and struck, but forgot to take up the slack first, resulting in another feeble strike and another bumped perch.
By this time that angling Olympian Dean Macey would have been asking me for javelin tips such distances had the rods flown. I had cocked up two blinding chances on a water where there was every chance of a personal best and, worse still, I had an uphill yomp back to the car with full kit. Sometimes I bloody hate fishing!
Next month looks like being an extremely busy one with the PAC annual convention at the start of October, followed by a two day session after big zeds with Bob Roberts and a whole host of guiding clients as the predator season kicks off in earnest. I just hope that the Captain buggers off elsewhere for a change!
