The Alternative Angler – Thinking Anglers

Thinking anglers – They were here once, but not any more

I posed the question of crack-offs on an American website, figuring that they do a bit more lure fishing than us, and the answer came back that this type of thing ‘just happens’ with braid, so that’s alright then. Note to self, maybe shouldn’t have put Americans and thinking together and expected a meaningful result!

Perhaps I’m wrong, but I suspect that a problem of this sort would have been devoured, disseminated and a deduction arrived at by someone like Dick Walker, but these days we are happy to take the line of least resistance, or in this case, the answer is to just increase the line’s resistance until the problem goes away.

And that’s not the only thing. How many of us like to watch a float? A red-topped quill or perch bob, these have to be one of those almost timeless images of fishing. Unless the water is moving, even ever so slightly. Then these days, of course, out goes a lead, job done. The question is, are we developing more efficient methods to catch fish, or do we just take the easy option every time if there is one?

Float fishing – is it too much trouble these days?

Just how many barbel are caught on float tackle these days? Perhaps, more importantly, could you catch a barbel using float tackle these days, or has the quarry been so conditioned to finding the riverbed awash with pellets, that they will only take baits that are nailed to the bottom. Anything moving towards them would be almost unnatural so would be treated with suspicion and therefore ignored.

Of course, serious carp anglers abandoned the float years ago, and now spend their time developing ever more fiendishly complex end rigs to outwit their cunning adversaries. That is after you have completely disguised yourself in camouflage, then hurled in enough free offerings to try and tempt the little beauties and raise the level of the lake by a couple of inches.

All you have to do then is (stay out of sight, of course) wait for the fish to find the banquet you have set out for them, then just hope and pray the carp is clever enough to pick out your bait amongst the thousands of others. Now, what if the carp stuff themselves on all those free offerings before getting to your bait, or do you hope that that the carp gets to your bait first, in which case what’s the point of all those free offerings? With all those different imponderables it’s no wonder you have to be so clever to be a carp angler.

Here again, you can always use a ‘pop up’ so that your bait is sitting up, and therefore so more visible than all those freebies, or maybe ‘zig-rig’ that will allow you to fish at different levels from the bottom up to the surface, and far more effective than using a float, say, to fish a bait at different levels from the surface down to the bottom.

And there is no way you would ever want to be using a float as a bite indicator, when you have so many electronic alarms to chose from. Coming as they do with the added advantage that they can wake you up, which of course, a float is useless at doing. In fact, those fishing for carp on commercial waters have found a serious flaw that occurs when float fishing the baggin’ waggler. Although it is a useful method of actually catching fish, sometimes the first indication you get of a bite is either the reel handles spinning round, the rod butt hits you under the chin, or the rod get towed into lake.

Joking aside, I’m not saying that the float is the answer to every fishing situation, far from it. But just because it is not quite so simple as chucking out a lead, and involves a little bit of work from the angler concerned, it is, or at least should be, an option that we shouldn’t always automatically overlook.

And almost finally

Even in this high-speed age of technology, one of the most basic means of communication is still available. It wouldn’t really be too much trouble for a few of us to write to the old bugger. Just a note that expects no reply would surely be more than welcome.

Surely one of the members on here would be kind enough to act as a collecting point and then hand over the letters next time they get to see Ron, or are his wide ranging contributions to FM not worth the price of a stamp?

I mean, if letter writing was good enough for Dick Walker…….. The collective Clay/FM letters could even become the subject of a book, now there’s an idea!

And really finally