The Fishing Coach

It is ten years this month since I completed my PAA coaching course at Brooksby College in Leicestershire and I have been thinking back over those years and how my coaching has developed. I have been very lucky to have been able to turn my lifelong hobby (some would say obsession) into a business and another career was the last thing I was looking for when I retired from the Police but I am now working five days a week, often weekends as well.

The coaching now falls into three categories - taster days usually for the Environment Agency; Local Government work and private work, often through my website. I would like to share some examples with you over the next few posts and I will start here in reverse order.

My private work is funded by the students concerned (or their parents if they are minors) and usually is the result of enquiries through the website, although sometimes by recommendation from tackle shops. These students fall into three categories - beginners who have never fished before; returners who maybe fished when they were younger and for some reason left the sport and the more experienced angler who wants to learn a new skill or fish a new venue.

One of my favourite courses is to teach young people and their parents together and I recently taught a father and son, Colin and Joe, on a fishery very local to me. Frobury Farm is a little over a mile as the crow flies from my home and a nice change from my usual one hour drive to “work”

They were able to learn together with just a little competetive edge but encouraging and helping each other at the same time.

This sport is perfect for a father and son to share and hopefully Colin will be able to share it with his grandchildren as well.

A very enjoyable day and I wonder if Joe realises what a great dad he has.

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Local Government work can be very challenging as it often involves young people with problems but recently I am getting more and more schools using my courses as a reward for good behavior with all the other pupils. Sometimes I have just one student at a time and sometimes a small group of up to four. In the latter case, when not everyone likes to handle maggots or fish, I am often rushing about all day unhooking fish and re-baiting hooks. This is particularly true if they are all catching lots of fish and I choose my venues very carefuly to try and ensure they do.

One of my favourite venues is Royal Berkshire Fisheries in Winkfield near Windsor. This is a series of three lakes full of fish and coveniently close to Slough where a lot of my Local Government work is currently located.

These photos show that the venue has a good head of roach, sometimes a single young angler can catch twenty or thirty as well as some big perch.

The fishery sometimes produces a really nice rudd and carp are always on the cards, but beware, the cafe in the background is closed on Mondays.

I also did some work (I can’t help laughing every time I use that word) with a school from Wallingford in Oxfordshire at a new venue Orchid Lakes where I was ably assisted by Nick Watkins.

Few fish were caught by the eight students and I was disappointed with the fishery as I was assured by the manager when I visited it a month before that it was full of silver fish. On top of being charged £10 per student there was another cost. It mentions on the website that…

As an added service to anglers, transport is made available to take you and your tackle to your chosen swim

…but it doesn’t mention that it costs £3 per angler, nor was it mentioned on my first visit.

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Taster days are designed to introduce new anglers to the sport and are organised on a fishery by the owners or controlling club and are usually well publicised in the local press. They are funded by the Environment Agency and organised by the old (now defunct) NFA but it is hoped that the Angling Development Board will take over soon. A group of coaches set up around the fishery and are sent a member of the public or two for a period of twenty minutes free coaching.

They can be very hectic but great fun and a chance to fish new venues or old favourites. One recent one was held at Sparsholt Agricultural College near Winchester where their Fisheries Studies Department have created their own lake and stocked it generously. This is only normally fished by the students and their guests and is an opportunity not to miss. I managed to get a place on both days this year and took my assistant Tayler Clark.

He caught his first stillwater barbel as well as a thirteen pound carp on a float.

I even managed a carp on the float using a centrepin as well as a lot of bream.

One of the other coaches brought a young lad who caught the first golden tench I had ever seen in the wild - I would have swapped that for my carp any day of the week!

The days are really for the public and that is really where the rewards are, look at the size of these roach.

Unfortunately this lad didn’t want to hold his carp so some old publicity hound held it for him.

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The summer is on its way and it really makes a change to be able to leave my fleece and waterproofs at home when I’m coaching. I’ve also had a couple more days at Marsh Farm and my season’s best crucian is now three pounds nine ounces.

I had forgotten my camera but Nathan Walter, a fellow Wasing member, took this picture for me. He told me that an article I wrote some years ago for the magazine Coarse Angling Today had been reproduced in a book called Barbel; A handbook of techniques published in HARDBACK (a proper book like you get in libraries!)

I am so chuffed about this that, as those of you on my mailing list already know, I have emailed everyone I can think of using the same title as this post. Some off you have not realised I was making a joke at my own expense and have replied asking the date of the signing, I hope I am not going to have to organise one. The downside is that because I was paid for the original article I get no royalties when this book sweeps the best seller list…

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Once again my tackle store come workshop has become a victim to my untidy nature and I have been having trouble just moving about in there, let alone looking for things. It was time to call in my tidy up expert Tayler Clark who happened to be on Easter holidy from college. He came to stay for four days and expressed an interest in learning to fly fish.

We could not fish the rivers due to the close season, so I took him to Moorhen Trout Fishery which is set in the beautiful Meon valley in Hampshire. This is not the type of fly fishing that I usually do, being a still water but is the ideal place to take a beginner. The banks are kept well cut, there are not too many trees to catch the beginner’s back cast and these places are usually well stocked.

On Thursday morning we arrived at the fishery to find the staff very helpful and I began Tayler’s first casting lesson on a large lawned area beside the lodge. I have been coaching Tayler for nearly eight years and he is already an accomplished caster with a fixed spool reel and coarse tackle but he found fly casting a very steep learning curve. However, within thirty minutes or so he had grasped the basics and was ready for a fly with a hook instead of the piece of wool he had been practicing with.

On the lake he struggled with his timing as all beginners do but was soon casting a long enough line to fish with and we worked on the finer points of his technique and his timing throughout the day. Unfortuately the fish did not cooperate, probably due to my inexperience in fly choice but he did get two takes and a couple of follows which were enough to generate enthusiasm for this branch of our sport. His casting improved by leaps and bounds through out the session and as we packed up at the end of the day we were discussing what to do the next day, the owner told Tayler that as he had not caught he now had a £10 credit towards his next ticket. This made his mind up and he wanted to come back in the following morning.

I telephoned Keith Dipper a friend of mine who is a fly fishing coach and asked him if he would come the next day to polish Tayler’s casting and try and make sure he caught a fish.

On Friday morning we picked Keith up at his home beside the river Itchen in Winchester and drove to Moorhen once more. I paid for all the tickets since we were partially using Keiths coaching skills and I decided to fish as well. Tayler must have been practicing in his sleep or at least thinking hard about what he had learnt the day before because his casting was much improved apart from the occasional lapse of concentration. Keith was very surprised that he had only touched a fly rod for the first time the day before.

Small black buzzers were the going fly and Tayler caught his first trout under Keith’s guidance, it weighed two and a quarter pounds and my warnings about the speed of these rainbow trout had not prepared him for the vigorous fight.

His second trout was four ounces bigger.

I was fishing with a lighter five weight outfit as I do not own the same range of fly fishing tackle as I do coarse tackle and this four pound rainbow took quite a while to bank.

When I add these two days to another good day at Marsh Farm it was a pretty good week.

A three pound six ounce Crucian carp caught at Marsh Farm it was one of two caught both over three pounds on a size twenty hook to two pound line.

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I have just got home from a long, difficult coaching session and I found the following email waiting amongst the usual load of spam.

Hi Martin,

You probably don’t remember me and my son Charlie. You tutored Charlie on two fishing trips, the first at Thorpe where I brought a friend’s son with us. The second trip was to a lake in the Wokingham/Arborfield area, where you spent all day making sure charlie caught fish and enjoyed himself (I had fun that day too!).

Well to cut a long story short, I finally gave up with the golf clubs and decided to take up fishing again properly. Initially this was because I now live 50 yards from the beach in Rustington West Sussex and I was gifted some sea fishing tackle. However I recently purchased a job lot of coarse tackle from ebay and I now do both types of angling.
The great tution that you gave Charlie in those two sessions meant that he was keen to come coarse fishing with me and we had our first expedition together on Wednesday at a local day ticket water (Passies Ponds). I have always been sport mad but Charlie never really enjoyed any of the sports and so it has always been difficult to find something that him and I can both do together. It was therefore a very special day for me. It couldn’t have started any better, Charlie caught an 8lbs Mirror first cast! This was followed by 5 Bream up to 5lbs. The highlight of the day came toward the end of our session when Charlie caught an 18lb 2oz Common! He did everything himself, playing the fish beautifully on 10lbs line, a size 10 hook and using a 1.5lb test curve quiver rod. All through the 10 minute fight he kept saying “Martin told me to keep the rod up, Martin told me not to panic, Martin told me………..etc etc. I have attached a picture (he wasn’t confident enough to pick the fish up and didn’t want to hurt it!)

Thanks to the introduction to the sport that you gave him, we now have a hobby that we can share together for a long time.

Many thanks

Terry Clark

Makes the whole thing worthwhile.

It’s great to hear from you Terry - I found this picture of you taken on my course - Charlie’s carp is it a bit bigger, isn’t it?!

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It’s been a busy Spring of coaching for me and I haven’t had a day’s fishing for myself since before the end of the river fishing season. On Monday night last week I had a last minute phone call cancelling the next day’s coaching, so I reorganised my tackle and set off early next morning for Marsh Farm, hoping for some more crucian carp and perhaps some tench.

I knew that caution was the order of the day as far as feeding was concerned because the weather had not been wonderful and the water would not have warmed up enough for the fish to be feeding in earnest. A few tiny betaine pellets, a little hemp and a few casters were the initial feed and I thought the chilly wind would let me get away with a 2gm pole float fished on my 15ft spliced tip Harrison GTi. The centrepin (of course) was loaded with 2.6lb line with a 2lb hook length and an 18 hook. Tiny baits were most likely to get the bites so I started off with a single caster which was shelled on the first cast with no indication on the float. The same happened to the second bait and I stepped up to double caster- no bites at all!

I suspected little rudd taking the bait on the drop so I switched to a 4mm soft tuna flavoured jelly hooker pellet - still no bites. I cut the next pellet in half and missed the next bite as the wind had picked up and I misssed the float tip not reappearing between waves. I hit the second bite about twenty minutes later and was soon involved in a very recognisable fight, my first crucian of the year.

The fish weighed three pounds four ounces and was in perfect condition.

The swim went quiet and fearing that the tench were moving in I switched to a heavier rig with a small lob worm. The float slid away and I was grateful for the six pound main line as the culprit was a five and a half pound tench.

By this time the wind was blowing a mild gale and the pole float was invisible in the choppy waves so I changed to a more robust waggler but the bites were still very hard to see. I switched back to the heavy rig and caught two more tench about four pounds on whole shelled prawns. Had it not been for the wind I am sure I could have caught some more crucians, but you have to play with the hand the weather deals you.

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I have always been a champion of the BBC and the whole TV licensing system and have argued their case on a number of occasions. My argument has always been that the output of the Natural History Unit in Bristol is worth the license fee alone and that their other programmes are way ahead in quality compared to anything broadcast by the other channels.

This argument has been reinforced by the latest programme about angling, Extreme Fishing with Robson Green, shown on channel 5. This is obviously aimed at the lager lout element in our sport and the few episodes I have seen say little about the sport that I recognise. The presenter shows few angling skills and does most of his communicating screaming at the top of his voice. There is little to learn from this programme as it does not seem to wish to educate, merely to shock.

However Mr Green, being a minor TV celebrity, has been chosen to front this series over someone with real angling knowledge and talent and neither he nor the content do our sport any favours.

We have seen how our sport can be favourably portrayed in “A Passion For Angling” made by Hugh Miles, but the television companies are seeming to ignore his new series, “Catching the Impossible”.

Now insult has been added to injury by the BBC of all people. They invited Mr Green onto their Breakfast programme and during the interview he stated that that he saw no point in “pulling a fish out beyond recovery” and he said that that in such an instance, the fish would die 9 times out of 10. This as any coarse angler knows is absolute rubbish - commercial fisheries would close overnight due to lack of stock, the record fish list would be made up of much smaller specimens and the carp guys would not be able to give their quarry pet names. It is often used as an excuse by those elements amongst both game and sea anglers who choose to slaughter everything they catch.

Once again Mr Green has damaged our sport, this time by allowing his arrogance as a “celebrity” to take the place of any knowledge of the subject about which he spoke. The public who think that his ability to play Robson Green in a number of different roles makes him special will believe his statement.

Weller of the Yard drew my attention to this as I was coaching on the day it was broadcast but he wrote a letter of complaint to the BBC, here is the trite reply he recieved:

Thanks for your email about Robson Green’s appearance on ‘Breakfast’.

He was invited onto the programme as an actor and television presenter, to talk about his enthusiasm for fishing and the programme he’d made about it.

Most of the interview was chatty and anecdotal - but he was asked one question about the issue of throwing fish back after catching them. He was never invited to give anything other than a personal opinion: our presenters put to him “People have differing views… What’s yours?”

He prefaced his statement with “I don’t want to impose my view” and then explained that he saw no point in “pulling a fish out beyond recovery”, implying that it would be out of the water for an extended time. Then rather confusingly he added that in such an instance, the fish would die in 9 times out of 10. We think he must have been using “9 times out of 10″ in a casual sense, because if the fish were literally “beyond recovery” it would presumably die 10 times out of 10!

Later in the same answer he emphasised there were “different views, different practices” and again emphasised his personal objection to “pulling a fish in beyond recovery”. In the TV clips he was shown twice catching fish, and - quite happily - throwing them back. We’re sure there is a complex debate about the optimum time to keep a fish out of water but it seems that Robson Green was trying to sidestep this in repeatedly stressing “beyond recovery”.

We’ve reviewed his contribution and it seems he held absolutely to his intention not to impose his view, though we agree that, if taken in isolation,
the phrase “9 times out of 10″ could have been misleading. But whatever interpretation might be put on one phrase, the overall impact of the
item was very pro-angling: it seems perverse to suggest it was damaging to the interests of the sport. Both in the TV clips, and in his interview with us, Robson Green was passionate about fishing and lyrical in his description of the experience, and what he called the “primeval feeling”. It was an extremely positive view of the sport and very likely to encourage interest.

Nevertheless, we’re sorry if you were concerned and appreciate the time you’ve taken to get in touch.

Regards

BBC Complaints
____________________________
www.bbc.co.uk/complaints

The BBC should have broadcast a retraction of this misinformed statement and they have gone down in my estimation for failing to do so.

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I have just had an email from Robert Waters.

He writes:

Hi Martin, thought you may be interested in seeing these photos. It was a great last eve of the season at the spot on the Thames in Chertsey. The Carp was 26lbs, the Bream both 6lbs, and the Eel 3lb 5oz. They all fell for the same tatics as the 7lb 4oz Chub the previous weekend.

That’s the way to end the river season - perhaps I’m doing too much coaching and not enough fishing!

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In previous posts I have encouraged everyone to get behind the newly formed Angling Trust. Here is a link to one of their press releases.

Fish Legal, the legal arm of the newly-formed Angling Trust, has taken decisive action against a team of poachers operating in Eastern England. The poachers were found guilty but were fined just £60 and had their equipment confiscated. Fish Legal’s lawyers have threatened the poachers with an injunction to prevent them returning.

Angling Trust chief executive said: “one of the priorities of the Angling Trust is to fight for better protection of fish stocks from poachers and other illegal activity. This action should send a clear message to all poachers that we mean business and will use all legal means to prevent them damaging our members’ interests.” [Read more…]

See I told you, they’ve started already! If you haven’t joined yet, why not?

Note: Any comments about the nationality of the miscreants will be immediately deleted!

If you have a moment and want to stretch our new found muscles visit this link and sign the petition. Remember it might be your fishery next!

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As a result of my previous two posts I was sent a picture of this 7lb 4oz chub caught by Robert Waters from Molesey in Surrey.

He says:

It was caught on 6/3/09 on the river Thames at Chertsey Surrey on ledgered hair rigged punched luncheon meat to 6lb line at approx 7pm. I have caught large chub to 5lb 2oz carp to 10lbs and Bream to 7lb 10oz in the same swim previously. Bread use to be the bait here, but they seem to have developed a taste for plain luncheon meat recently.

Well done Robert, it’s great to know that someone else reads this rubbish.

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On Sunday I drove up to the river Colne to Little Britain at the request of Hillingdon Council to provide coaching sessions on the river. This is usually a summer event but this year they wanted to hold an additional one in the winter. The format is similar to the days I do with the Environment Agency in that beginners book in and I give them a twenty minute taster session. This is much more challenging on a river than on the usual stillwater.

The weather was not kind and the river was quite low and clear but this could not be helped as the event was planned weeks ago so I did my best to try and show absolute beginners the intricacies of trotting a float, starting first with a whip then with a rod and one of those horrible closed face reels. To give these youngsters a centrepin reel would be a receipe for disaster.

Time after time various students trotted the float down the river without sucess so I set up a feeder rod and cast a maggot feeder upstream into the weir pool. Once the youngsters had tried trotting for a while I sat them next to the feeder rod whilst some one else had a go with the float.

The only fish caught by my proteges was a bream of about four pounds, which put quite a strain on the light feeder rod meant for roach and dace.

During the day one of the council staff showed me a picture of a fish he had caught from the same stretch a few days previously.

It weighed 7lbs 2oz and was caught on 2lbs 10ozs hook length - well done John!

The day ended in torrential rain driven by the high wind. How I’m looking forward to the summer…

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Nature has just reminded us what winters should be like at this latitude and the whole country collapsed. I had to cancel several coaching sessions and change my winter fishing plans. That amount of snow is only enjoyed by children and dogs, certainly not by drivers.

Once it had melted I resumed my coaching and was able to renew old friendships and make some new ones - these young ladies from a school in Slough had their first taste of our wonderful sport and caught their first fish too.

Longmoor Fishery near Wokingham recovered very quickly and produced carp, tench and rudd just as if it wasn’t Winter and this year’s “ice age” had never happened.

I also took some old friends to Longmoor and they had their first pole fishing experience.

A friend of mine called Danny has also had some good sport since the thaw, starting off with this fine river Kennet barbel at 13lbs 8oz.

He has also had a good chub from the Dorset Stour and some big grayling to 2lbs 5oz from the river Itchen.

5lb 12oz Chub

All I could manage was one windy day on the Hampshire Avon with Nick Watkins that was too windy to float fish and I lent Nick my feeder rod, so apart from a couple of minnows who aren’t so fussy about bait presentation, I blanked. Nick caught some chub and a nice roach, on my rod, the only feeder rod we had with us! Get my drift?

The Mr. Nice Guy theme continues!

Yesterday I took one of my early students for a day chub fishing on the river Thames near Windsor. I first taught him about eight years ago and he has become a very capable angler.

I have searched my photo archives and found an early picture of Russell with his first Crucian Carp, taken in 2002.

As this was not a normal coaching session I fished as well, albeit in the next swim, so that we could catch up on old times. I caught the first three fish - 5lbs 2ozs, 5lb13ozs and 5lb 14ozs - but as Russell was not getting many bites I moved him into my swim for the last couple of hours.

5lbs 14ozs Thames chub

We had both been fishing with heavy maggot feeders with short hook lengths, casting to the far bank and I was impressed with his casting accuracy - I must have done a good job all those years ago! I had stopped fishing as there was not enough room for two rods in the swim I had been fishing.

Russell hooked a very powerful fish but the rods I had provided were Shimano Technium Specialists with three ounce carbon quiver tips and with ten pound braided main line with 6lb co polymer hook lengths, to size 14 Drennan Super Spades, he was able to keep it out of the tree roots. Once in mid river the fight was a formality and the fish rolled into the net.

It weighed 6lbs 13oz.

At this stage I would like to point out that Danny travelled all the way to Throop Fisheries on the Dorset Stour and I believe stayed a couple of days, to catch a 5lb 12oz chub and we caught three chub bigger than that half an hour from his home!

Serves him right for catching a bigger barbel than I have ever caught.

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I can’t emphasise strongly enough how important I think the new Angling Trust is to us anglers, not just coaches but all fishermen and women across the country. Below is this week’s press release which asks us to spend a few minutes completing an online survey. Yes, someone is finally about to ask what you the individual angler thinks and wants. I told you times were changing!

Two things you must do now, join the Angling Trust, if you aren’t already a member and/or register to be part of this survey. If you don’t act now never let me hear you complain about the state of angling again.

For Immediate Release

Wednesday 18th February 2009

—BEGINS—

Sport England Calls on Anglers

The Angling Trust is calling on all anglers who are members of an angling club, and young anglers, to take part in a new survey. One thousand anglers must register for the survey if angling is to be eligible to receive the promised four year funding package of £1.56m from Sport England and any future funding.

Sport England has commissioned the survey to establish what is important to people when they take part in sport and how satisfied they are with the quality of their experience. The survey goes live in March 2009, however we need anglers to register their details now so that Ipsos MORI who are conducting the research can contact them directly.

The registration process takes about two minutes. All personal details supplied will be held in the strictest confidence and used solely for the purposes of this study.

There are two surveys:

one for members of an angling club which is a member of Angling Trust (or which was a member of NFA, NFSA, S&TA): www.anglingtrust.net/clubmembers

and another for young anglers aged 16-18: www.anglingtrust.net/talentpool

For more details about the survey and electronic links to the study please visit the Angling Trust website, www.anglingtrust.net.

Mark Lloyd, Chief Executive of the Angling Trust urged every club angler in the country to complete the survey commenting: “This is an opportunity for anglers to have their say about their experience when they go fishing. The results will help guide our work over the next few years and will affect future funding decisions from Sport England for angling. Please help!”.

—ENDS—

Angling Trust

The Angling Trust is the new, single organisation to represent all game, coarse and sea anglers and angling in England. We lobby government, campaign on environmental and angling issues and run national and international angling competitions. We fight pollution, commercial over-fishing at sea, over-abstraction, poaching, unlawful navigation, local bans and a host of other threats to angling.

As the governing body for all angling, the Angling Trust will seek government funding to develop the sport from grass roots participation through to elite performance. We will develop programmes with clubs to increase participation, particularly amongst groups who have yet to discover the joys of going fishing. We will protect the rights of all anglers to do what they love most. The Angling Trust has been formed from an historic merger of six angling and conservation organisations in January 2009. Other bodies, including the Angling Development Board, will merge with the Angling Trust in 2009.

For more information about Angling Trust: www.anglingtrust.net

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I am writing this post in reply to a comment posted by Weller of the Yard. He states:

“Looks like angling unity have their first fight and it is for Sea Anglers S47 EU Common Fisheries Policy.”

I looked this up on Google because I know little about sea fishing but I could find no references to the exact wording of this section and Les and I both know how important the exact wording of such sections in law can be!

Today I was watching Countryfile on BBC1 and this very thing was the subject of a part of the program. It seems that the EU want to include the catches of recreational anglers in their country’s catch quotas and anglers are worried that if the quota is exceeded then they will not be allowed to fish. This apparently will not apply to shore anglers (at the moment!).

Firstly we must worry about the definition of “recreational anglers”, since apparently in some parts of Europe this covers more than a couple of lads, in a boat they normally keep in their garage, going out to sea and catching a few fish for their dinner with rod and line. This pursuit can hardly be a threat to fish stocks to any extent but it looks like the EU is trying to formulate a very broad piece of legislation to cover everything with the aim of only enforcing part of it as it suits them. This could be a very dangerous precedent and infringe on all sorts of personal freedoms, such as telling you when and where you can fish and what you can fish for.

It seems that the target of this is fishermen who catch fish under the umbrella of recreational angling but sell the fish once ashore in greater quantities than would be normal for the aforementioned two lads. This may well reflect on our commercial charter skippers who I have heard sometimes keep the majority of the fish caught by their customers to sell for themselves. The skipper featured in the Countryfile episode caught a small cod on camera and threw it into a bucket to suffocate and instead of saying it was for his dinner he said it was for the dinner of one of his crew - with the current price of cod in the shops, the cynical old ex-copper in me would not be surprised if this fish ended up on a fishmonger’s slab. A small point I know but we anglers must think more about our public image, we cannot fight this sort of thing without the public on our side. This of course may have been the way the piece was edited and we must be careful about this too, but if you fish for commercial gain then you must expect to be subject to the current commercial restrictions.

As for the definintion of recreational angler, how about: an angler who fishes with no more than six hooks and only keeps fish for his own non commercial use. This could then enable us to claim an exemption from inclusion in catch quotas.

See SACN for more details

One of the great weaknesses of any argument that sea anglers can offer must be that they seem only to be taking from the environment and making very little contribution in return. Now I know that I am being controversial and I admit that I know very little about sea angling but I am looking at this from the same point of view as any other member of the public. Freshwater anglers are seen to pay for the creation of fisheries, the maintenance of the fish stocks and general management of these same fisheries by their day tickets, club or syndicate membership fees. Their National Rod Licence fees fund the Environment Agency who manage the rivers and provide many other services for angling in general and some of us belong to other agencies such as the ACA now called Fishlegal (part of the Angling Trust) and fishery consultative bodies. On top of this we make every effort to return the fish we catch alive and healthy.

This is not meant as a critiscism of sea anglers because I cannot see how any worthwhile contribution could be made to an environment as vast as the oceans whilst they are being raped by the international fleets of commercial netsmen, I am merely pointing out the weakness of your case.

Before my fellow freshwater anglers start to feel superior, just think where all the fishmeal comes from that goes into your groundbait and pellets - it comes mostly from a small sea fish called the capelin which once was a major part of the marine food chain. Salmon parr and trout in fish farms are fed this pellet too!

The one thing you could all do is to join the Angling Trust as an individual member even though you probably already belong to what was the NFSA (if not, why not?) which is now part of the Angling Trust. The more members they speak for the louder their (our!) voices will ring in the corridors of power. The Angling Trust is already fighting against this piece of legislation on our behalf, you can give them more power to make our voices heard in Europe.

How many bird watchers do you know? Would it surprise you to hear that the RSPB is the most powerful conservation group in Europe? This is because bird watchers are not afraid to put their hands in their pockets every now and then to support their hobby and this gives the RSPB power to protect their interests.

If the Chief Executive of the Angling Trust, in the near future, could say to Government that he represented two million anglers his voice would carry more weight and our wishes would be taken into account, because what political party could ignore two million potential votes. It really is up to you, all of you, coarse, sea and game anglers alike, to join the Angling Trust - get your voice heard or stop complaining and watch our sport die!

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Earlier in the Autumn, a friend and occasional house guest, Martin James, recommended a stretch of the Hampshire Avon at Britford near Salisbury for big roach and put me in touch with the LAA’s river keeper who looks after the stretch. Stuart Wilson has a vast knowledge of his stretch of river and is always ready to help visiting anglers - he has met me in the car park, put me in the most likely swims and even helped me carry my tackle. A real treasure compared to some of the commercial fishery managers I have met.

It is a beautiful piece of river with a view of one of my favorite buildings, Salisbury Cathedral, but it is far from easy. Some of the best river anglers in the country fish here and the big roach that can be found in this part of the famous Hampshire Avon have seen it all. So much so that I have fished it four times this winter and have never mentioned it here before. I have always caught fish but only small roach and dace. It has been a very steep learning curve but the other anglers have always been very helpful and the venue has such great potential that I persevered and even joined the LAA.

After the dreadful cold spell at the start of the New Year I was desperate to do some river fishing and needing a challenge after my last two spells on the river Itchen. I waited until just after the first South Westerly weather system and made my way to Britford last Friday. I had phoned Stuart the day before and he had assured me the river would be perfect and apart from the down stream wind, it was.

I fished on the main carrier at Rectory Farm and as the big roach were to be my quarry, red maggots, caster and punched bread were to be the baits. The maggots (or gentles as Martin James still calls them) were my first choice as the resident minnows shell casters and devour punched bread if they are present and they take two or three goes to destroy a double maggot bait. As the roach are so “educated” I make sure that my baits are as good as I can get, particularly the maggots - old maggots have a hard skin and are not as plump and juicy as fresh ones, so I buy my bait from a reliable source just after a new delivery. I then riddle them a couple of times in different sized riddles to remove all the dead ones and any other rubbish including old saw dust and feathers. Next I add fresh, finely ground maize meal for a couple of hours to clean them and riddle that off and replace it with fresh meal. Last thing at night on the day before I am going fishing I again riddle off the maize meal and add a little tumeric which big roach in particular like and it also disguises any ammonia smell - don’t add this sooner as it irritates the maggots’ skin and causes it to harden.

I much prefer to fish for big roach with a float and the rod I chose is a new addition to my armoury, I have mentioned before on this site my fondness for the Harrison GTi 15ft match rod I have owned for years, well I saw a listing on ebay for two Harrison rods offered by a chap who had inherited them from his Father. He described them as follows:

2 Harrison Advanced Fishing Rods in excellent condition with cloth carrying cases and plastic tube.

Rod 1 - 13 foot GTi Match rod made from HR40 Carbon.

Rod 2 - these rods were my dads and I don’t know anything about fishing. This rod is 15 foot but only has Harrison Advanced marked on it. It looks identical to rod 1.

Hoping to get two GTi rods I ended up bidding more than I had intended and when they arrived, although they were both GTi rods, they were spliced tips instead of the hollow tip I was used to. I had heard some bad reports about spliced tip rods (this means that the top foot or so is solid carbon instead of hollow) but a day on the Itchen showed that the 15 ft is a joy to use, being a little faster but less powerful than my old hollow tip rod. This has proved to be the ideal rod for trotting with the tiny hooks and fine hook lengths required for big roach.

The reel, of course, was a centrepin and although the river was flowing more steadily than on previous visits, the down stream wind still required a 5BB avon style float even with a fifteen foot rod. Below this was a size 20 Kamasan B510 to a one and a half pound hook length.

As I feared bread and casters were destroyed by the minnows, double red maggots survived most trot downs but no proper bites came for the first half hour during which I fed the swim lightly but regularly. Suddenly half way down the swim the float dipped sharply and although suspecting another minnow, I struck instinctively, the rod arched into it’s fighting curve as the stike was met with a solid but mobile resistance, the fish took a little line but then just thumped in the flow against the bend of the rod as it kited in the current. The fish then rose in the water and rolled on the surface, it looked huge but was soon in the net (we don’t fish for roach for their fight).

Two pound six ounce Avon roach

A passing fellow roach enthusiast was kind enough to take the picture and witness the weighing and he asked if I had a keep net. When I said no, he warned that if these big roach were to be returned to the swim they would spook the rest of the shoal. While I was composing myself after the weighing and tidying up the chaos around my swim he returned the fish well down stream.

Thirty minutes later I caught my second two pound Avon roach (just like buses, you wait for a long time then two come along at once).

Two pound three ounce Avon roach

The rest of the day passed in a state of euphoria but the trotting practice will come in handy because on hard fished waters like this the presentation has to be right. I did catch a couple of dace and small roach just before dusk.

I am dreading my mobile phone bill as I think I phoned everyone I have ever heard of.

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On Wednesday last week I attended the public launch of the Angling Trust, a new angling body which will speak for all UK anglers with one voice.
If you never read anything else on the web then read this.

I believe this new organisation will give us anglers a unified voice that will ring through the corridors of power and give us the political pull that two million anglers deserve. No more squabbling amongst ourselves, we will have the same voice as the RSPB and the boaters and the chance to secure the future of our sport as future governments will have to take our wishes into account when making policies.

How many bird watchers or boat owners do you know? Not as many as there are anglers but why are their interests considered by government both local and national before ours? They have organised better than us and they have one spokesman for all their members, until now there has been too many angling organisations all fighting amongst themselves and too busy protecting their own empires to look after the interests of the sport. As you will see from their website, six of the major angling groups have amalgamated to form this new body.

If you are really enthusiastic about our sport then put your hand in your pocket and join the Angling Trust or stop moaning about the state of our rivers, the cormorants and eastern europeans eating our fish, fish thefts, over-fishing at sea by foreign commercial fleets or the lack of research into fish diseases.

Pictures courtesy the Daily Mail and the U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service.

It’s your chance to do something about it, but it will not be like club working parties that require your time and effort. All you have to do is join - your membership is a weapon that can be used in the interests of angling, but do it now!

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Back in September I posted the result of my quest for a catfish and I spoke of a coach I had met called Nick Watkins who had helped make my dream come true. On one of our coaching days near Winchester he had mentioned that he had yet to catch a grayling and as he was camping near the river Itchen I gave him a few pointers and he caught his first one, although only a small fish. I had promised him a trip to the Lower Itchen Fishery but our various coaching commitments made this impossible until yesterday. Nick wanted to bring a friend of his, Rob from Brighton, who had never caught a Grayling and we arranged to meet at Winchester services on the M3.

I owed Nick a favour for his Catfish expertise which helped me achieve one of my goals and I was determined to help him catch a big Grayling. I awoke yesterday morning with flu-like symptoms and really didn’t want to venture out into what was a very cold and frosty morning, but the boys would already be on their way and it had been so difficult to organise a day that suited us all, that I made my way to the meeting place. At the service station I watched Nick eat a cooked breakfast without being able to face one myself (a measure of just how rough I was feeling) and we were on the fishery by 9 a.m.

The ground was frozen solid and the banks were white with frost but I was confident we would catch Grayling and we started to set up the tackle. Neither of my guests had done much river fishing, both being of “the carp persuasion” but Nick had a match rod he uses for coaching and had bought a cheap centrepin on my recommendation, he had even wound the line on backwards the way I suggest. It’s a wonderful thing to have disciples.

Rob had no such tackle and I lent him a centrepin and a fifteen foot match rod and once I had shown them how to set the float up I put them in a couple of likely swims and showed them the basics of trotting a float in very fast water.

Nick caught on first trot down as did his mate Rob.

Nick’s next grayling was a little bigger than his first.

Grayling are very strong fish and very difficult to hold and Nick soon had his first lesson in Freestyle Grayling Wrestling.

They also fight very hard on the hook and nearly always have to be nursed back to normal before release.

Towards the end of the afternoon I moved Nick up to the top of the fishery and managed to find him a shoal of bigger fish.

This fish weighed exactly two pounds and in terms of a percentage of the record is equivalent to a twenty five pound carp.

This is the fish I was looking for for Nick, it weighed two pounds five ounces and is a very large grayling indeed.

Both anglers enjoyed themselves and learned a lot despite me not being at my best due to the bug that was by this time ravaging my system. I did very little fishing myself but my day was made by the success of my two “carp fishermen”.

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In my previous post I showed a picture of two sets of floats I bought on eBay and mentioned that I was ordering some more - well they’ve arrived! They are all fluted avons and the picture below will show how the body of the float is shaped to ride the current.

I had ordered two sets, the ones on the right of the picture have a half inch balsa body on a crow quill stem and take from 9AAA down to 11BB and the others are three eighths of an inch balsa bodies on cane stems and range from 9BB down to 5BB. I have calibrated and marked them myself as they come unmarked. (Actually, Jan marked them for me as I can’t write that small and neat.)

I am really pleased with these floats (’cos I’m a tackle tart) and I thought I would pass on my recommendation to you. I enjoy using these hand made floats because they are a little different. Although I would not call myself a traditionalist, my rods are carbon and not wood, my centrepins all have bearings and I don’t understand why anyone would pay to have a rod rest made out of built cane. Apologies if that is your thing.

Yes, I will agree they are a little too buoyant and take too much weight for most rivers but the guy that makes them tells me he does a whole range of hand made floats. (Something else to spend my money on!)

I have spoken to Stan Payne and he has given me permission to post his phone number here - 0121 3545637 - so if you are pleased by using something a little different from everyone else, give him a ring. The most expensive float he makes is only £1.40.

Part of my coaching is teaching knots and as some of the modern lines require special new knots I also show them to the more experienced anglers I meet. I have found a great website that shows videos of most fishing knots. I hope you find it useful.

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As a well known tackle tart I was browsing through the fishing tackle section of eBay when I came across these two sets of hand made fishing floats.

When they arrived I was so impressed with the quality that, although I have yet to try them out in running water, I think I know enough about river floats to know that these will do the job perfectly, I contacted the seller with a view to buying some more. The green bodied set on the right of the picture are fluted avons and trot beautifully in fast water, I paid a fortune for the last set I bought, these are about a third of the price.

He was very obliging and gave me the name, address and phone number of the maker. I have since contacted the man and after an interesting chat I have ordered some more sets from him.

I don’t suppose they work any better than the shop bought ones but Weller of the Yard once made me a couple of similar floats and they just have a little more character than those produced by that nice Mr. Drennan.

If you are interested in doing the same leave me a comment with your email address and I will send you his details. I am reluctant to broadcast his details here to the whole web as I feel his privacy deserves some respect.

The largest of each set takes about 7AAA and will be ideal for the faster stretches of the river Kennet. I will let you know how I get on with them.

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During my nine year coaching career it had been brought to my notice by the questions of my students that there were two common British coarse fish that I had not caught, the Wels Catfish and the Zander. My excuse was that neither of these fish were indigenous to the UK and although they were now more widely spread, I rarely fished waters that contained them.

This season I promised myself that I would put that right and despite a busy summer I made a start in the early autumn. Now then readers, what do you do when you have an angling problem? You seek the advice of a coach! During the summer I met Nick Watkins, a fellow coach who helped me catch my first Catfish.

With that under my belt all that was left was a Zander and the best place for them, locally, was Bury Hill. I had fished there for Zander a couple of times in the last few years using modified pike tackle and all I had caught was pike (unmodified!). Then this week I received an email from Bury Hill in the form of a newsletter.

Bury Hill Fisheries - Latest Predator Catches

Zander doubles galore as mild wet weather conditions take hold!

With a return to mild wet conditions, the zander fishing has responded with a good number of doubles reported over the last week topped by a boat caught 12lb 5oz specimen. With most anglers catching multi bags, there has been plenty of fish in the 6lb to 8lb bracket caught with a number of anglers reporting bags of up to 10 fish a session. To read the latest news click on the link below:

http://www.buryhillfisheries.co.uk/fishery/details.phtml?ID=456

Martyn Cook’s 12lb 5oz boat caught zander.

Regards
David

This was just the motivation I needed. A boat was booked and my pair of Fox predator rods (two and a quarter pound test curve) were unpacked and set up. I already had plenty of frozen small roach collected for such an occasion waiting in my bait freezer.

So once again I needed advice so I sought the best. Steve Grey of All Things Piscatorial is a great all round predator angler and although he gave me a hiding on our last predator trip, it was his advice I sought.

He has caught more than his share of Zander from Bury Hill and his words of wisdom were as follows. Use half, well punctured dead baits on single hooks to fine supple wire traces and use a small waggler for bite indication with about a AAA shot on the bottom. He said that Zander were very touchy about resistance when they took a bait and would drop anything they thought suspicious.

The day came but the weather had been bad with cold rain (lots of it) the day before and high, gusty winds. Danny, my boat partner and I struggled to keep the boat moored in the wind, the weights provided were by far to light and this meant that the majority of the lake was unfishable. We went from one swim to another with only the crayfish taking any interest in my dead baits, Danny too had no success on his float fished maggots and worms until about mid afternoon when my float slid away. A crayfish with a mission?

I struck quickly in case it was a Zander and before it could drop the bait, I was rewarded with a short, dour fight and my first Zander rolled into the net. A small, very scruffy, moth-eaten Zander, but a member of the sought after species and the completion of my set.

The moral of this story is if you have a problem or want a new experience, ask a good coach!

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Today I took Tayler to the Predator Lake on the Wasing Estate the scene of many great days coaching but due to a very hard frost last night I was not expecting much sucess.

We set up dead baiting rods and Tayler went on a wander with a spinning rod. I caught the first pike about eight pounds after which nothing happened for four long hours. I changed one of the baits for a larger roach and popped it up a few inches in case it would be hidden in the weed.

In the late afternoon the sky darkened, the temperature plummeted and the sleet that the weatherman had threatened looked imminent. We started to pack up and I was regretting not letting Tayler take that first run. Suddenly, the rod with the popped up roach had the line pulled out of the drop back clip and the alarm sounded. I was dismantling one of the other rods so he picked up the rod, engaged the bale arm, tightened and struck. The rod arched over and the slipping clutch screamed, this was a big fish I thought and this was soon confirmed when the biggest pike I have seen from this lake took to the air and tail walked.

Tayler had a look of mixed terror and joy on his face but soon gained control of the fish. I must be a very good coach!

After a vigorous struggle the fish came to the net it was huge - it weighed twenty two pounds five ounces - his biggest fish ever.

The sky blackened, the rain and sleet started in earnest and a half an hour later we were on our way home with a car full of soaking tackle but a day we will both remember for a long time.

Update.
I have just found a picture of Tayler’s first pike that must date back to the year 2000. It was caught on my first pike handling course and looking at the two pictures together just makes me feel good.

We both got a mention when Tayler’s recent picture was shown on Keith Arthur’s programme on Sky Sports last night and modesty forbids me repeating the kind words Keith said about me.

Further update.

I have just heard from Tayler, he has received a “goodies pack” from Tight lines containing assorted pike floats, hooks and traces. Well done Skysports.

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This week I have have one of my students staying with me for half term, I have been coaching Tayler since he was seven and have become firm friends with his family. He has become an accomplished young angler and is good company. On Monday, his first day, I took him on my first visit to the Lower Itchen Fishery this season. He fishes with a centrepin and can trot a float as well as many much older anglers.

I have mentioned in a previous post how the river suffered a disastrous fish kill a couple of summers ago and this year I was hoping to see a great improvement. I was not disappointed!

We split up after I had watched him catch his first fish, which he did about his third trot down.

You can see in the picture above that he even winds the line onto his reel backwards the same as I do.

We caught about forty grayling each during the day and both had at least one two pounder.

The river has improved greatly and although it is still not as good as it was a few years ago, we had a wonderful day.

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One of the main disadvantages of coaching full time is that over the last nine years I have had less time to fish how and where I would prefer to fish and whilst I enjoyed the achievement of the lad in the picture below almost as much as he did, it was not caught on a venue I would have chosen myself, nor is it a species I would have spent what has become my valuable time, pursuing.

I love to fish rivers and I prefer to be active all the time, trotting a float satisfies that need. It also requires some skill and is totally absorbing, so much so that I often forget to eat my lunch until late afternoon (and that is most unlike me as anyone who has shared a meal table with me will testify).

Float fishing on a river requires that you learn the geography of your chosen swim and use your knowledge of your prey to locate feeding fish, you then try and use the skill that you have acquired after much practice, to present a bait to the fish in as natural manner as you can.

Yes of course I love to catch big fish but the size of the fish is often secondary to achieving a skilful presentation of the bait beneath a float in difficult conditions. Some years ago when I was in the Police at Heathrow Airport, two of my best friends were avid golfers but very much at the learning stage. They talked continually about the one stroke in a round of golf that just turned out right and they spoke of saying to themselves that Arnold Palmer could not have played one better. I resisted their entreaties to take up the game but I knew the feeling they were experiencing. Float fishing a river, like playing golf, is a constant struggle to achieve the perfect presentation but only the fish know when you have got it right. This must sound like a recipe for a spell in secure accommodation with sorbo rubber wallpaper learning to weave baskets but, in fact, it is very therapeutic and has helped me get through some very stressful times - you can’t fish and worry.

The river Kennet is my favourite river and has been since I first fished it in 1967. I was a boy soldier stationed near Reading and I must admit I poached a stretch called beat five (The Jam factory) using borrowed tackle. That day I caught some dace trotting a float with a centrepin and I was hooked. Since then I have returned again and again to various parts of the river after various species using different methods but it is the flowing water and the problems it presents that brings me back time and time again.

The most difficult and exacting method of float fishing a river is using a float called a stick float, this is a balanced float made of a very buoyant wood at the top and a heavier less buoyant wood or some other material at the bottom. It is very sensitive when used properly but only functions at its optimum performance in ideal conditions. It is preferable to fish this float with a gentle upstream wind blowing slightly from your bank and as most of the rivers in this area flow from west to east and the prevailing wind is south westerly I rarely have the opportunity to use this float in its most effective role. Also much of the river Kennet is too turbulent for this float but Martin James recently recommended a stretch of the river that is eminently suitable for this method and I have been fishing this recently.

This stretch is located at Woolhampton just below a restaurant called the Rowbarge. Here the river and the canal flow in the same bed and the result is much wider and deeper than the river stretches I usually fish and therefore less turbulent and slower. Yesterday I went back with the wind in the ideal quarter for the stick float, armed with six pints of maggots and some hemp. The river is also famous for its perch so I also brought some lobworms and it was with this bait that I started the day, fishing in the margins with a method called stret pegging, having introduced some chopped worms with a bait dropper.(Martin Bowler describes this method HERE)

I had set up two rods both with centrepins, one for the margins was a Harrison Interceptor stepped up float rod with four pound line and the other a Drennan super stick float rod with two pound main line. I spent the first hour exploring the margins with worm and apart from one perch about half a pound the only response was from the crayfish but I continually fed a little further out with maggot and hemp on the line I intended to fish with a stick float.

It was about 1pm before I started with the stick float and with dace and roach being my target species I chose to fish a single maggot on a size twenty Kamasan 510 tied to one and a half pound breaking strain line. It is necessary to fish this fine to get the presentation right in clear water. Over the next five hours it was a “bite a chuck” and I soon lost count of the fish I had caught. They were mostly dace, some in excess of half a pound maybe even ten ounces, some small perch, a few gudgeon and a few very small roach but the total count must have been about two hundred.

Just after 6pm I was getting quite tired when half way down the swim the float shot under the surface and my strike was met with a much more solid resistance, the tip of the stick float rod arched over and the fish slowly powered off down stream, the rim of the centrepin turning under my thumb. This was not the headlong, panicked flight of a fish in fear of its life but more the powerful exit of a fish, mildly irritated, who just decided he wanted to be somewhere else. The fish did not realise it had been hooked and if it did so whilst travelling downstream with the current, then my forty or so yards of line with which I always load my centrepins would soon be used up. Very gently I applied side strain and turned the fish towards the far bank and let it kite across the current for a while, then a little more side strain until the fish was headed upstream. He seemed to think this had been his own idea and carried on back towards me, so I lessened the pressure and let him cruise past me. Once he was five yards or so upstream of me I applied all the pressure I dared and made him fight both me and the current and hoped that he ran out of steam before I ran out of line.

It was close, the base of the spool was showing clearly and only a few turns of line remained before he slowed and turned toward the far bank, again. I applied side strain and turned him down stream back towards me but he had got it in his head that upstream was the direction he wanted to go and after I had gained ten yards of line he turned again and continued to fight me and the current. I have tried to describe the fight as it happened but I would not want you to think that this was in any way frantic, the fish was moving slowly and methodically but very, very powerfully - I was not, as you may think, dictating the direction of travel to this fish but rather making subtle and gentle suggestions to it.

The fight lasted about thirty minutes and all that time I was expecting the tiny hook to pull out or the fish to find some snag such as a sunken tree or weed bed. My right arm was aching and finally the fish surface and rolled. I knew then why I had been having so much trouble with this fish, I had suspected a barbel was my tormentor but not one this big.

It weighed ten pounds ten ounces in the net and as my net weighs a pound, it was nine pounds ten ounces, something I have only just realised, in all the excitement I forgot to deduct the weight of the net at the time.

I spent the next ten minutes nursing the fish back to full strength in the shallows, as such a long fight takes a lot out of a fish and a lot of acid is built up in the muscles. I would not advise anyone to fish this light for barbel and I shall be re assessing my tackle when fishing this stretch again.

The reason for the title of this post is that this venue is just twelve minutes drive from my front door!

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Well it’s been a whole year since we made the move to Paradise and that’s a lot of water that has flowed under a lot of bridges (did anyone else notice what a wet summer it was?). One of the advantages to living so central to so much good fishing is that we get a few guests to stay and one of those has been Martin James, an old friend of Gordon Scott, who I first met at a Barbel Society Conference about ten or more years ago, just before Gordon died.

Martin is an angling writer and broadcaster who travels all over the world. He is also a great angler but probably a greater raconteur and this last year I have been very lucky to have spent several evenings in his company, listening to his wonderful stories and experiences. He has met so many of the wonderful, old time, anglers who have had such an influence on my sport over the years and I never tire of his tales of such people as Richard Walker, Jack Hargreaves and Fred J Taylor.

Martin has been very supportive of the work I do with young people and was kind enough to interview me for his radio programme on BBC Radio Lancashire, you can listen to the interview until 7pm on Thursday 25th September after which I hope to have downloaded it to this post.

Go to the Radio Lancashire home page and click on the Listen Again button (top right) (this opens a popup window) then choose “At the Water’s Edge” from the “A-Z OF ALL SHOWS” listing. The interview starts at about 08:50.

When the programme has been replaced by next week’s, I’ll put the interview here for listening or downloading.

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We are approaching the end of the summer coaching season and during this time I have met many new people and hopefully been able to share my enthusiasm for our wonderful sport with them. I have also met some old friends and made some new ones too.

Aidan has fished with me before and this is not his biggest fish.

As you can see, this lad really enjoyed catching his first carp but was not quite ready to hold it.

The smile says everything about this photo.

At last, after such a busy summer I finally had some time for myself and I decided to try and achieve one of my goals. I have only two common British freshwater fish left to catch, one is a zander and the other is a wels catfish, neither of which is actually an indigenous fish but are widely enough distributed in the UK to be worthwhile targets.

During this summer’s work with the Environment Agency. I met another coach called Nick Watkins who is more of a big fish hunter than I am but an excellent coach for beginners nonetheless. He stayed at my place for a couple of days whilst we were coaching at Staunton Park in Havant to save him commuting between there and Canvey Island where he lives, in between the two day sessions. He used to be the head bailiff on a fishery called Beaver Farm and he was talking about the catfish for which it is famous and this resulted in a planned expedition for which I can’t even blame the drink!

We decided that it would require at least a “two-day session” to be in with a chance of connecting with one of these monsters so late in the year as it would be September before our coaching duties would let us fit it in. Two-day sessions are definitely beyond my usual fishing experience and so Nick arranged to borrow a bed chair and bivvy for me. Any of my readers who know me will be falling about laughing as I have always said that I did enough camping in the army to last me the rest of my life, but desperation requires desperate solutions.

We also discussed tackle and I was surprised to find that very little of the terminal tackle in my vast arsenal of tackle was suitable - the rods and reels I use for pike fishing would suffice but I had to think differently about hook length material and hooks. Catfish have huge mouths equipped with abrasive pads so large baits and abrasion resistant hook lengths would be the order of the day.

Have a look at the size and gauge of those hooks,(that’s a pound coin not a one pence piece) you could probably hang a side of beef on one but that was “not quite” one of the baits we considered.

Kevlar is one of those materials born of the space race of which the advertising men are so fond and is, in reality, used to make such diverse thing as racing car cockpits and bullet proof vests but seems to be one of those words which allows the manufacturer to double the price of any article (like “carp” and “specimen”) and so I was in no way surprised to find that catfish require kevlar hook length material.

I also provided myself with various outrageous baits including huge halibut pellets big enough to hide behind, a tub of Moggy Chunks which look like the droppings of a constipated, medium sized, fish eating elephant, along with tins of luncheon meat cut in half to make two baits from each tin, both glugged in salmon oil, halibut oil, or another foul, fishy smelling liquid I found in an unmarked bottle in the bait additive section of my tackle store (the label must have come off years ago and if it smells like this now, God knows what it smelled like when it was fresh?). Add to this copious amounts of various sizes pellets, some boilies and marine pellet groundbait and of course fifty of the largest lobworms I could find. All this was carried in buckets which the local wild life found fascinating.

This picture proves that not all ugly ducklings grow up to be swans, a fact that many of us have known for years.

The first Monday in September saw me arrive at Beaver Farm Fishery where I met Nick who told me we were to fish Snipe Lake where we would have the chance of some small cats should all else fail (doesn’t it always when someone says that?).

We walked the lake and I was introduced to some of Nick’s friends. I have always said that these session carp fishermen are a strange lot but some of the stories that were swapped would not bear printing here, or most other places, for fear of prosecution for indecency or libel. There was no sign of the bivvy or bed chair that we had been promised and as the skies darkened with rain clouds I looked forward to a grim first night but at the last moment the bailiff arrived with the required items and Nick soon had the bivvy erected, a task that may have taken me days on my own (how tent design has changed since my army days). Any comments about muzzle loading rifles and Zulus will be immediately deleted.

The first night I fished two rods, one near a patch of lillies on my left which had been heavily baited with a mixture of hemp, assorted pellets, dead maggots (that had been in my bait freezer since before some of this Summer’s students were born) and chopped luncheon meat bound together will a couple of kilos of marine pellet ground bait. This rod was baited with half a tin of luncheon meat and sat motionless all night except for a couple of line bites. The second rod was fished tight to the island, baited with six or seven huge popped up lobworms over a bed of two kilos of mixed pellets placed with the aid of Nick’s bait boat. Oh how I would love one of these bait boats but I really cannot justify the expense as I normally don’t do this kind of fishing very often and it would just be something else to carry (that’s never stopped you before I can hear you say!).

We just got set up when the skies opened up and the rain set in for the night and what a restless night it was, most of the time I was kept awake by the torrential rain drumming on the bivvy above my head or blowing in the open door. Oh yes, I forgot to mention how claustrophobic these bivvies are, I could not bear to have the door shut and I was worried about hearing the bite alarms if I had been able to shut it. This last worry was proved baseless with my first line bite and I found that I could and did hear every other bite alarm on the complex as well.

I crept out just after dawn (well, about 9.30 but it felt like first light) to find the rain had stopped but the ground was sodden and one of my bait buckets was half full of water where the lid had not been fitted properly. I reeled in both rods to find the baits untouched and I noticed that there was a lot of fish activity over the ground bait near the lilies on my left, there were bubbles everywhere, some in wide streams that Nick assured me were small cats. I had said all along that all I wanted was a catfish not necessarily a big one, so I decided that these indications would be my target for the day. I replenished the ground bait by the lilies and set up the second rod by the island for carp, without much hope I might add as the temperature had fallen during the previous night’s rain. I am not really comfortable with this long range, boltrig and boilie type of fishing because I have not done enough of it.

I decided to target the smaller cats by the lilies with a method I do know well, so I set up my flood water barbel rod, a twelve foot two pound test curve Harrison Torrix with a centrepin reel loaded with twenty pound braid to fish with a lift float. I have described this method before on this blog.

The main difference was the hook length of ten pound co polymer, the hook a forged size six and the bait, a single large lobworm was popped up by an injection of air into one end. After about an hour during which I sat with the butt of the rod on my lap (proper fishing!) the float lifted and laid flat, my strike was met with about a second of very solid resistance and then all hell broke loose. I had been warned that catfish fought hard but had not been prepared for the next few minutes of manic struggle. Given the swim I had chosen with the patches of lilies and bank side reeds it took all of my skill to keep this fish out of the snags, they really can swim backwards and I was relieved when Nick scooped it up with a landing net large enough to use as a butterfly net for a small airliner.

It only weighed eleven pounds thirteen ounces - thank God it wasn’t any bigger on the tackle I was using.

Guess who’s going back in May to catch a big one?

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Last week I took a father and his two sons to Frobury Farm for a basic lesson. Billy is already a great fan of country sports and is keen that his sons should share his enthusiasm but as his knowledge of coarse fishing is limited he contacted me to teach them. He has arranged for them to have shooting lessons as well.

Frobury is now very local to me infact it was during my search for Frobury Farm, a few years ago that I discovered the village that we are now so happy in.

The fishery once again came up with the goods and between them the lads had nearly a hundred fish. Carp, tench, rudd and perch and although Billy did not fish much(coarse fishing not really being his thing) he got fully involved with the lesson.

Dad acting as ghillie for his sons

I wonder if these lads realise what a great Dad they have?

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As I have mentioned before, I do quite a lot of work with schools in Slough and most of this is with total beginners, one such lad, Bilal, made the Anglers Mail with a perch he caught on his first lesson with me. He was fishing with a five metre whip without elastic, two and three quarter pound hook length and a size sixteen hook with two red maggots. The venue was one of my new favourites, Royal Berkshire Fisheries at Windsor that I have been visiting a lot over the last eighteen months. It has plenty of small fish and is very close to Slough.

It was the first time he had ever held a rod yet on his first cast he hooked this fish and bullied it to the surface and screamed for me as he dragged it across the top. I saw the size of it, grabbed the nearby landing net and scooped it up before it realised it was hooked. It weighed three pounds three ounces.

He looks justifiably pleased but I think it may be sometime before he realises just how lucky he was.

Keith Arthur was also kind enough to give this catch a mention on his Sky Sports programme Tight Lines.

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