The Fishing Coach

Tench have always been my favourite stillwater fish, I think I caught my first one in about 1962. In those days tench were for grown up, proper anglers and us kids were happy with little perch and roach. So when I caught my first tench on a legered lobworm, it really was a turning point in my angling life and a milestone had been passed but my real ambition was to catch one on a float. Later that season I achieved that ambition too and catching them with float tackle has remained my favourite method.

Most of my stillwater fishing has been done in gravel pits and I soon learned that the tench in those young and sometimes vast expanses of water behaved differently from the estate lake fish that I read about in my youth. They would feed all day if you were lucky, they tended to be very mobile and difficult to hold in the swim but they often fed in the margins and could easily be caught with float tackle.

Since then I have caught many tench that way (I won’t use the old cliché of an orange tipped quill sitting amongst a patch of bubbles next to a lilly pad, oops! I just did!) but it has become more difficult with the changes to our stillwaters due to the introduction of carp. Over the years more and more waters were stocked with them to the detriment of the tench fishing, tench can’t compete with the larger carp. Tench fishing went into a decline so that it has become more difficult to find a lake where it is possible to float fish for tench without being smashed by unwanted carp.

I was discussing this with a young coach I met recently and he told me about a local lake he had heard of that still held a good head of tench and offered to fish it with me on my first visit. Will Barnard is a very capable angler with a vast knowledge of local waters and his description of the lake proved right. We met at about eight in the morning and both fished with feeder tactics in adjacent swims.

We both had one tench each but Will’s was slightly larger than mine.

He caught his fish very close in whilst mine came from a deep trench about three rod lengths out, so the next time I visited the lake I fished the margins with a centrepin and float tackle. The swims we had been fishing were both those horrible platforms extending out into the lake from between dense bankside vegetation. Still I suppose the platforms are preferable to removing the vegetation to make the fishing easier. This meant there was a good depth of water, about six feet within a rod length of the bank and I was able to fish under the rod tip from the bankside end of the platform so as not to scare the fish.

I chose to fish balls of paste under a pole float on a five pound hook length over a bed of ground bait, pellet and hemp. The day produced three tench, the last one weighing seven pound and seven ounces, the best tench I have had for a couple of years.

Five pound twelve ounce tench

Four pound eight ounce male tench

Seven pound seven ounce tench

All these fish fought like tigers and I thoroughly enjoyed the day but late in the afternoon I tried a piece of prawn, having fed a few chopped free samples during the day, in the hope of hooking an even bigger tench. My bait was taken by something that stripped thirty yards of line from my centrepin before turning back and kiting into the roots ten yards to my right. Not a tench but a carp I suspect but I will never know because it transfered my hook into the roots and I straightened it trying to pull it out…

I have been looking for such a fishery since I moved here and it turns up fifteen minutes drive from my home, well done Will!

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At last a fishing programme by the same maker as A Passion For Angling has made it on to mainstream television. This morning at 7 am. Channel 4 broadcast Catching The Impossible.

This series of films is made by angler and wild life photographer Hugh Miles who fimed and directed A Passion For Angling, featuring Chris Yates and Bob James. It features well known actor and one time recording artist Bernard Cribbins, who did the narration for Passion For Angling and Martin Bowler, noted specimen angler. It took five years and nearly half a million pounds to produce and was turned down by the BBC because it showed “fish under stress” and therefore did not fit in with the Beatrix Potter image their management like to promote.

I have seen the entire series - I bought the boxed DVD set at the Carp Society Show at Sandown earlier this year and had a chance to have a short chat with Hugh who has long been one of my heros for his wild life documentary photography. He is also a fanatical angler with a great enthusiasm for roach fishing on rivers.

This series is even better than the classic Passion For Angling and will appeal to anglers and non anglers alike. It is a quality series not having been “dumbed down” for the mass audience like so many angling programmes and I will watch my copy again and again. I encourage you all to give up your Sunday morning lay in, go fishing a bit later or set your recorder to tape it. The series is being shown until the 1st August and if it gets enough viewers then perhaps it will encourage more stations to show it and more programmes to be made.

Let’s face it, there are one and a half million anglers in this country and most of them have a TV licence but the BBC turned it down and the best slot the other TV companies can manage is 7 am. on a Sunday morning when most anglers are out of the house…

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I have been promising Jordan some serious carp fishing since the start of the last ice age that masqueraded as our winter and today I took him to Royal Berkshire Fishery to try for carp using conventional carp tackle. I had set up two carp rods with baitrunner reels, one with a helicopter rig and the other with an ordinary lead clip, both had leadcore leaders and flourocarbon hook lengths. The hooks were attached with knotless knots (love the music). On one hair I fitted a 10mm pellet surrounded with paste and on the other I mounted a small tiger nut popped up with two pieces of bouyant plastic sweetcorn. Both rigs were sealed into PVA bags filled with pellets before being cast out to the margins of an island.

While we waited for our first bite I explained the differences of the two rigs and how they were constructed, then I showed him how to tie the knotless knot and let him practice tying one for himself. He found the most difficult part was tying a small enough loop to form the hair (as I do myself.) The carp gave us just enough time for me to complete my lesson and for Jordan to get sufficient knot tying practice before the first run occurred.

It was the rod with the popped up tiger nut and after a brief fight this fish came to the net.

A fine common carp.

Then it was the turn of the other rod.

A second common carp.

He caught five carp in all including this last fish, a personal best for him. All but one came on the small paste covered pellets.

This fish weighed 9lbs 15oz

His expression might suggest that he was disappointed that the fish was one ounce short of being a “double” but Jordan has been taught, as have all my students, that the value of a fish is not measured in numbers but by your enjoyment in catching it. He enjoyed catching all five.

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On Monday I took Josh to a fishery I had never fished before - Lizard Fishery at West Drayton is closer to Josh’s home than most of the venues I normally use. On our arrival we met the baillif and he briefed us on the myriad of rules and after catching a small carp on a waggler I opted for a method feeder with a small piece of luncheon meat on the hook, sweetcorn and boilies not being allowed.

Josh caught four decent carp in the next couple of hours and polished his fish playing skills.

Josh’s biggest ever carp.

Then the baillif returned and said he had forgotten to tell us that both method feeders and groundbait were also forbidden and that this was not mentioned on the exhaustive list of banned baits and methods on the sign post in the car park…

WHOOPS!

As the old News of the World reporters used to do, “we made our excuses and left”. Josh had a great day and finally caught the carp that I had been promising him since we started fishing together. Job done!

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At last we are beginning to catch some fish now that the water is warming up and I am starting to get some better results on my coaching courses. The small carp at Longmoor are feeding freely and while they may not be very big, there are plenty of them. A great place for beginners or those who want to get their “string pulled” again after a cold winter.

Last year I had the privilege of giving a father and son team their first lesson and after one cancelled lesson during the winter, we met again at Twynersh where I took them bream fishing on the match lake. Both had a quick refresher lesson on the waggler and I set up a method feeder for each of them as well.

Joe caught fifty or so roach, perch and rudd including this one on the waggler, all on his new rod but the method feeder produced the best fish especially this 1lb 4oz roach.

He also caught about a dozen bream, topped by this 6lb 4oz fish.

His dad Colin also caught small fish on the waggler and some bream on the “method” including this one at 5lb 7oz.

A long and very tiring day but very satisfying. I am so lucky to be able to do this for a living, at least now the warmer weather is here.

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Much has being written over the last few years about the decline of fish stocks, in both quality and quantity, caused by the influx of non indiginous species to the freshwater environment of the UK and also by some species that have been re introduced where they had died out.

Discussion became hysteria a few short years ago with the spread of cormorants to most of our British inland water ways. Contrary to common belief, it seems that these birds were not driven inland by hunger caused by over fishing of the seas around our coast but came from an inland colony of birds in Denmark, according to Dr. Stuart Piertney in his article Big greedy British cormorants : where do they come from?

They have devastated many fisheries and have changed the face of freshwater fishing forever. I do not believe there is any need to go into details here about how many fish a cormorant can eat or how large a specimen it can swallow but as long as they are a protected species there is little hope of reversing the damage.

Signal crayfish were the next problem to come to light. Introduced to the UK as a food species in the 1970’s, these crustaceans escaped from their landlocked ponds into Britain’s rivers and rapidly spread. They are carriers of “crayfish plague” which has attacked the UK’s native crayfish and depleted their numbers greatly. In addition, they threaten fish stocks through predating on their eggs, damage banks and make fishing a bait on the bottom almost impossible in some areas. There are so many in some of our waters that they are in danger of wiping out fish stocks by eating their eggs but trapping seems to have little effect.

Otters, although originally widely spread in this country, died out in many areas by the first part of the last century. Not, as some would have us believe, by hunting - otter hunting with dogs was mostly ineffective - but by pollution and water abstraction damaging the environment in which the fish they fed on lived. Not enough fish, no otters!

The disciples of Beatrix Potter (or the bunny huggers) then took a hand and decided it would be wonderful if we had some otters back in our rivers. A restocking program was born but no one thought to ask why the otters had died out in the first place or what these new otters would eat in their new homes. In many places much had changed in the passing of time - the freshwater eel, once a major part of the otter’s diet, was in terminal decline and the area had blossomed with the growth of still water commercial fisheries caused by the same decline in river quality that had seen off the otters.

These fisheries represented a major monetary investment in fish stock by the owners and were often situated in river valleys. Where do you think the otters reintroduced into those rivers went for lunch when they found the rivers still had no fish in them? As you know, these commercials as they are known, are heavily stocked with large, slow moving fish that had no experience of such predators. The result was very expensive carnage and a lot of very upset anglers.

The result is that the bird watchers are happy, lots more birds to watch or count or whatever they do. The bunny huggers are happy with more cute furry animals about but I can’t think of anyone who is happy about the signal crayfish except those whose supply the restaurant trade and probably imported them in the first place.

Anglers, of course, all have their feathers ruffled up in indignation and are complaining to anyone who will listen (mostly each other!) but before you shout too loudly from your righteous high horse, think about the damage that we as anglers have done to the environment in the name of our sport!

Now I’m going to get controversial because I don’t just mean litter on the banks. We have imbalanced the environment we are so keen to preach to others about by introducing species of fish that weren’t there to begin with. Barbel being probably the least of our offences as they were at least indigenous to some parts of the country since the last ice age but just before the turn of the last century (1896) barbel were stocked into the Dorset Stour and the Hampshire Avon for the first time and since then they have been introduced to many other rivers such as the Severn, the Warwickshire and Bristol Avons, the Wye and their tributaries. I love my barbel fishing as much as the next man but barbel have a dramatic effect on the stock of any river they colonise, they out-compete the smaller species and the bigger fish are quite predatory.

Zander and catfish are other non indigious species that have been introduced for the benefit of our sport and in many places these apex predators have had disasterous effects. Did we really need two more predatory species when water quality was already beginning to suffer?

Yes, you knew I was going to go after the “sacred cow” next. Carp have been here a long time but they are not an indigenous species. Some people say the Romans introduced them and others say they did not arrive until the Middle Ages but before 1900 there were so few of them about that one angling writer said it was not worth fishing for them because life was too short. They can now be found in almost every bit of fresh water, rivers, canals and lakes as well as, seemingly every puddle that doesn’t dry up over the summer and the number of fisheries that are poorer for their presence, such as good tench lakes, are beyond count. They are not even proper natural carp as were originally found around the Black Sea in Eastern Europe but cultivated, ornamental, table varieties, selectively bred to grow big and fast and prone to every disease that fish farms encourage. Their introduction, legal or otherwise, has changed coarse fishing beyond all recognition since my childhood - the sport has come to depend on these frail mutants and perhaps carp fishing has changed anglers too.

The trouble is that it is quite easy to introduce a species to an environment, their survival instincts do a lot of the hard work but it is very difficult to remove them again after you have realised your mistake.

Remember what we anglers have done when you complain about others messing with the environment.

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What an awful winter, it seemed to go on for ages and I don’t know if it’s my age but this one really seemed to get me down. The lakes I use for coaching were frozen for six weeks and all the rivers were full of snow melt. It was difficult to tempt the young ones away from their nice warm play stations and out into the fresh air and the few days I had to myself were disasters.

It at least gave me time to look back over the previous year, through all the politics that have bedevilled our sport and I will share some of my thoughts with you.
The highlight of my fishing year was not, in fact, the big Avon roach I caught in the January but this fish I caught at Sparsholt College during a coaches day out.

I have read about these beautiful fish for years and this was the first golden tench I had ever caught and you don’t get many “firsts” at my age. Death might be the next one!

The Angling Trust, which I anticipated would be the savior of our sport, has taken a long time to get going and I believe this was down to an appalling business plan at the start and some people in the beginning thinking they knew more than the very experienced people who were offering good advice on the setting up of such an important organisation. They thought they knew what anglers needed but didn’t bother to consult them. It almost failed in its first year and yet they still ignored the offers of help and advice given by those who rallied around to support it. It remains to be seen what happens at the AGM, when some people will have to answer for their decisions.

My contribution was to help run the AT stands at the Carp Society show at Sandown Park in November and at the “Big One” tackle sale at Farnborough in February, working alongside Keith Arthur and Ruth Lockwood. Between the two shows we gained over 100 new members for the AT. The big benefit came at the Carp Society show where I was able to meet fanatical roach fisherman and wildlife photographer Hugh Miles. He filmed the famous angling series Passion For Angling which many of you will have seen on the television and was publicising his new series Catching the Impossible. I have bought the full series on DVD, it is the best angling series I have ever seen and is responsible for me not troubling Ebay with all my fishing tackle this winter. Well worth £75, the kids will really enjoy it.

The Professional Anglers Association, whose course got me started in coaching all those years ago, finally imploded with its own internal political problems. These had been coming to a head for a couple of years and I resigned from the association last spring before it got messy. It would seem a minority of members had seized control of the association and were running it for their own dubious ends. The existing members now seem to have regained control of the direction of the association and hopefuly it will become the coaches support organisation it was originally intended to be.

I will continue to support the AT and hope soon to see the way clear to rejoin the PAA, both organisations require members to concentrate on their positive points and work on their negative ones. Why do so many organisations seem to work on the basis that they know what’s best for their members but never consult them?

As I said at the start, spring is finally here and I have already started courses that are producing results for the young people. They are catching from Royal Berkshire Fishery and Longmoor is producing Rudd, Tench and small Carp including these two.

A small common carp

A beautifully marked mirror carp.

Due to the demands on my time last autumn I have engaged the services of another coach, Alwyn Royans who I know from my days in the police is in possession of much more empathy than his CID background would suggest and I am sure he will be a great asset to myself and our students. I am looking forward to working with him.

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Image credit: Broken-Arts

Are you looking for the ideal Chistmas gift for a friend or relative who fishes? Tackle is a difficult choice as it can be very much a personal preference and buying an item of tackle that the angler already has can be embarassing (let’s be frank, I don’t even know what I’ve already got…).

So why not buy a year’s membership to the Angling Trust! This is the new, single organisation to represent all game, coarse and sea anglers in England. They will lobby government, campaign on environmental and angling issues and run national and international competitions. They will increase participation in angling by people of all ages and backgrounds. They will fight pollution, commercial over-fishing at sea, over-abstraction, poaching, unlawful navigation, local bans and a host of other threats to angling. You will not only show that you are thinking about them at the festive season but you will be helping them to make a real contribution to the sport that they love and helping the Angling trust at the same time. Any angler worth his salt should be a member.An excellent gift for the new angler as it will get them involved in their first angling community and give them a feeling of belonging.

Members get the following benefits all for just twenty pounds a year, the ideal present for any angler and if you pay by direct debit then the gift will be renewed each year. One less present to worry about each Christmas!

Menbership applications are here.

The trust says

The Angling Trust is here to represent you and to ensure the future of our sport. Help us to help you, stand up and be counted, join today. You can support the Angling Trust for less than 39p a week and get several great member benefits. Your subscription is important, it will make your voice heard. The more anglers who join, the louder our voice and the more we will achieve - for you the angler.

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At the end of August I wrote a post about how our chance to get all anglers speaking with one voice was likely to fail with disastrous effects to the future of our sport. It made depressing reading and I apologise for that, but the one glimmer of hope in the whole post was a letter from a group that has now become known as the Magnificent Seven and I make no apologies for republishing it here.

The following letter was recently sent to the Trust and gives us a glimmer of hope:

OPEN LETTER DATED AUGUST 10th 2009
ADDRESSED TO BOARD OF THE ANGLING TRUST

Dear Sirs

It is with deepest concern that we contact you regarding the development of the Angling Trust.

For far too long, anglers have needed a professionally run, representative body, and the launch of the Angling Trust in January 2009 was a major step forward towards greater unity in angling.

We believe the Angling Trust has provided an initial framework to the path of true representation and the merging board has created a valuable structure, but news of overspending combined with a failing business plan is extremely worrying although not that surprising.

Our concerns at this stage arise primarily from the continuing lack of engagement with AT members, and the angling community as a whole, particularly on sensitive issues. There is a wealth of first hand angling, industry and media experience that appears to have been largely ignored by the current board. Therefore, it is with this in mind, that we all offer our support services, without charge, to the Angling Trust as a “collective” advisory board. The absence of individuals that anglers recognise, trust and respect is clearly apparent at all levels of the Angling Trust.

In addition, there is obviously and immediate need to review the failing business plan currently in place. Once again, where applicable, we would like to offer our experience in business development, marketing and finance at no cost, to help secure the immediate continuation and sustainable development of the Angling Trust in the future.

We trust that the current AT board will be addressing these concerns and await your earliest response.

Signed by:

John Wilson, Keith Arthur, Danny Fairbrass, Martin Bowler, Ruth Lockwood, John Everard, Tim Norman

This group - who I will in future refer to as the M7 - are all very busy people and it was decided that an advisory panel of fifteen anglers from all disciplines, under the chairmanship of John Wilson, was needed to spread the workload. I needed to be on that panel so I started to make representations to everyone I could think of. I made a list of ideas collected from many sources and I understand this was referred to on the first meeting of the M7.
(more…)

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I am a great fan of the internet, it gives me instant access to a great deal of information and enables me to share my views on various matters with other people all over the world, it is probably the best thing that has happened to communication since the discovery of the electro magnetic wave.

But the great freedom of expression that enables me to publish this post is also available to fraudsters and extremists and allows the spreading of lies and propaganda without any accountability. You can read here about my catches but you have no way of authenticating what I write. I could be anyone in the world and although I do publish my telephone number, I could be practicing a great deception for my own purposes.

The dangers of this were brought home to me this week when I received a circular email from a friend for whom I have a great deal of respect.

Do you agree ?

Hit the nail on the head!

An incident occurred in a supermarket recently, when the following was witnessed:

A Muslim woman dressed in a Burkha (A black gown & face mask) was standing with her shopping in a queue at the checkout.

When it was her turn to be served, and as she reached the cashier, she made a loud remark about the English Flag lapel pin, which the female cashier was wearing on her blouse.

The cashier reached up and touched the pin and said, ‘Yes, I always wear it proudly. My son serves abroad with the forces and I wear it for him’.

The Muslim woman then asked the cashier when she was going to stop bombing and killing her countrymen, explaining that she was Iraqi.

At that point, a Gentleman standing in the queue stepped forward, and interrupted with a calm and gentle voice, and said to the Iraqi woman:

‘Excuse me, but hundreds of thousands of men and women, just like this ladies son have fought and sacrificed their lives so that people just like YOU can stand here, in England , which is MY country and allow you to blatantly accuse an innocent check-out cashier of bombing YOUR countrymen’.

‘It is my belief that if you were allowed to be as outspoken as that in Iraq , which you claim to be YOUR country, then we wouldn’t need to be fighting there today’.

‘However - now that you have learned how to speak out and criticise the English people who have afforded you the protection of MY country, I will gladly pay the cost of a ticket to help you pay your way back to Iraq ‘.

‘When you get there, and if you manage to survive for being as outspoken as what you are here in England , then you should be able to help straighten out the mess which YOUR Iraqi countrymen have got you into in the first place, which appears to be the reason that you have come to MY country to avoid.’

Apparently the queue cheered and applauded.

IF YOU AGREE… Pass this on to all of your proud English friends..
I just did……………!!!

Support Our Troops.

It took me a two or three days to take in all the inferences of this story and I read it a couple of times before I truly realised what a nasty piece of fiction it most definitely was. The cynical old copper in me recognised the elements of a made up story, it was too perfect and totally unattributable [1].

No mention was made of where or when it happened, no witnesses were named, it read like the old style “voluntary statements” attributed to suspects in the bad old days of the sixties by inexperienced young coppers. Weller of the yard will know what I mean!

I took a great deal of care in composing the following email in reply and I hope the people that read it will think more carefuly about the things they read, receive and forward on the web.

I have read this with some dismay, not expecting to receive such racist drivel from someone I respect as much as I do you.

The dialogue is too perfect to be true, no names or locations are mentioned and when, in this sort of discussion, was one speaker able to deliver such a precise monologue without interuption or abuse?

This has obviously been contrived, either wholly or in part just to encourage the racial distrust that is genetically programmed into each and every one of us but which, as civilised adults, we should strive to suppress. Even if it were true and the poor woman was misguided enough to believe her statement, what purpose is to be gained by broadcasting it on the internet, other than to foster racial hatred, thereby playing into the hands of the extremists on both sides?

This wonderful country of ours has always been a haven for migrants of one form or another, be they, as in our distant past, invaders or more recently as refugees. Over time they have been absorbed into this great nation of ours and have often been a great benefit, we have always been a nation of mongerels, absorbing the ideas and cultures of our guests and we have become stronger because of it.

Of course it is tragic that our forces are being killed in Afganistan and Iraq and as an ex regular soldier I feel the loss more than most but this is something to be taken up with the politicians and not held against those who have sought sanctuary in our country to escape from this violence.

I also served as a police officer in some of the most racially diverse areas of London, I am aware of the problems these people face and the vulnerability they suffer as strangers in a strange country having lost so much. This sort of story only fosters that feeling of isolation and may encourage beliefs such as those attributed to the Iraqi woman in this piece.

This sort of propaganda was one of the ways that hatred of the Jews was encouraged in pre war Germany and that resulted in the Holocaust.

I will always support our soldiers abroad but fostering racial distrust can only make their job more difficult and I will not be passing this on to anyone.

Martin

Someone once said that all that is needed for evil to prevail is for good men to do nothing.

Remember before you pass any of these stories on to your friends that credibility is like virginity - it can only be lost once.

[1] This story has been seen in various forms on the internet for many a year, try searching for any part of the text, excluding the home nation since it is “reported” variously as stemming from the wearing of English, Scottish and British, Australian and undoubtedly other country flags.

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We anglers are famous for our stories. Non anglers would call some of them lies, but this would be to ignore the mythical element of our sport and I will try to explain what I mean.

Fishing is about much more than just catching a few fish. The angler, whether he realises it or not, is going back to his deepest roots when he ventures on to the river bank, seashore or lake side, he is dabbling with a world that in his not too distant past was full of mysteries. Many civilisations even worshiped water spirits and made votive offerings to their Gods by throwing valuable items into water. Only recently has science been able to explain what goes on beneath the surface of the water that covers seven tenths of our planet.

We rely even in these modern times on the water that is our rivers, lakes and seas, even now it is still a mater of life and death but in times gone by, without our knowledge of science you can see how water and the aquatic environment gained its air of mystery - and let us not forget that our most remote ancestors came from that same water. Myths and legends have grown up around almost every expanse of water from springs, to small streams, rivers, lakes and of course the sea. As fishing evolved from a means of feeding your familly to a sport it has encompassed this atmosphere of mythology and myths have become part of angling .Think how stories have grown around many fisheries about the huge fish that are purported to live in them - in my youth it was always pike but now huge carp or catfish have replaced them and how they devoured small dogs, even children, smashed tackle after fights lasting many hours and they seemed to live for ever. These stories often featured grandfathers who had seen these monsters as young boys and yet they were still said to inhabit the same waters fifty or sixty years later. Angling has never let science get in the way of a good story and even those of us who publicly laugh at these legends are intrigued by them and part of us wish they could be true.

Don’t we all hope to catch a fish much bigger than anything else the venue has produced, even if it is a recently dug and stocked commercial fishery? And for me, rivers have even more mystery as none one can say for sure what fish may be in front of me.

Can you blame the angler, immersed in this mythical world, who exaggerates the size of the fish he lost or adds a few ounces to the weight of one that he caught?

Now before my regular readers begin to wonder if I have lost the plot or gone all mystical I will tell you why I have written the above. Something strange happened to me in the wilds of Essex a couple of weeks ago when I was doing some coaching for Nick Watkins on one of the taster days he organised, that may well have been considered a myth had there not been a couple of professional coaches and a number of members of the public as witnesses.

I was demonstating to a student how to hit bites on eight metres of pole and for once I was holding the pole. I was fishing with an eight millimetre soft pellet on a size fourteen hook when the float dipped and I struck into what I thought was one small fish.

As my quarry came to the surface I saw not one but two fish so I carefully netted them and called to Nick who was nearby.

You can see on this picture that the hook length goes through the lip of the small mirror carp and the hook is securely lodged in the lip of the bigger brown goldfish. Two fish on the same hook at the same time, first time in forty eight years of angling.

My explanation is as follows. The mirror carp took the pellet and while it was between in its lips the brown goldfish used its size to snatch the bait. The small fish must have been already hooked at this time, with the hook point outside its mouth and the larger fish pulled the hook through the lip of the smaller one only to have it lodged in his own lip.

Perhaps in twenty or thirty years time my grandson Oliver or his brother William will tell the story of how their grandad once caught two fish on the same hook at the same time. A myth… but we know better, don’t we?

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I am an old man, 60 seasons have come and gone since I was stocked into the fishery that is this world of ours and I like to think that I may have picked up a little wisdom during all that time. Very little of this was free, indeed I paid quite heavily for a lot of it but I will pass one particular gem on to you for nothing.

All you anglers (and many non anglers) are worriers and are always ready to complain about what ever it is that worries you. Get a couple of anglers together and the complaints will start - the immigrants/cormorants/crayfish are eating all our fish, there are too many/not enough silver fish or carp, or the carp in such and such place are dying from some disease or other. The list is endless.

I was once told by a man I respected greatly, in an organisation whose initials are AA and has nothing to do with motoring, that worries should be dealt with in the following way. He said,“There are two categories of things that people worry about: things that they can do nothing about, in which case, why worry about them and things they can do something about, in which case, stop worrying about them and do something to solve the problem.” I have tried to follow this axim over the last few years and whilst it has not stopped me worrying it has given me a measure of “peace of mind”.

It is a difficult way to live, it is so much easier to complain about the way things are and how someone should do something rather than get your bum off your seatbox and actually do something or empower someone who has the required skills to force some change or other.

I pointed out to my readers their chance to take such action in my post on the 18th January about the formation of the new Angling Trust and I said all anglers needed to join this organisation to give us a combined voice to protect the future of our sport.

Well, the majority of the apathetic anglers in this country didn’t bother to put their hands in their pockets and join because someone else would do it and everything would be alright! Now we are in danger of losing our last chance, we have burned our boats by combining all the failing angling groups into one and that is about to fail too. Not because of political pressure or the difficulty of the task but purely because Joe Angling Public could not be bothered and didn’t care enough about the future of his/her sport. Neither did the tackle trade or the clubs or the Angling Press, every one just thought they didn’t need to get involved someone else would do it for them.

Perhaps I am being unfair, maybe the launch of the Angling Trust and its purpose and value to the sport was not well publicised but in a number of my tirades in tackle shops and on the river bank (yes I am a bit of an Angling Trust evangelist) I have been told, after my argument in favour of joining proved too strong, “I’ll wait and see how it goes before I join”. The fact that I haven’t slapped anyone is only because of my advancing years and the fact that most of them are bigger than me!

As you may have seen in the angling press the Angling Trust is in trouble due to the shortage of members.

Angling Trust announces restructuring

The Angling Trust has announced a number of cuts to its central operations in Nottingham and Leominster. Despite widespread publicity and the distribution of half a million membership leaflets, the level of recruitment has to date, fallen below expectations. This shortfall, along with higher than expected costs, is threatening the viability of the Trust.

Membership shortfall
Of 4 million anglers less than 1% have joined the Trust – many more were expected to have signed up and, despite thousands of further members of former organisations due to renew in the remaining months of the year, the Board was not confident the organisation could continue to provide sufficient service to members without making savings.

This shortfall, added to difficulties created by the merger, presented a difficult situation which could only be rectified by reducing the overheads of the organisation. Consequently deep cuts have been made and a number of staff have been made redundant.

“Angling needs the Angling Trust” - Chairman

“These measures are necessary to balance the Angling Trust’s books. It is difficult to conceal the board’s disappointment in the response we have had from anglers. However, we expect to be able to continue at a satisfactory level of service.” said Dr Stephen Marsh-Smith, the Trust’s chairman.

“More than ever before, angling needs representation at national level to continue the fight against pollution, inadequate legislation, illegal canoeing, poaching, predation and all the other threats facing angling today.

Angling needs to have a strong body to promote our unique sport, increase participation and ensure that the whole business flourishes. For only £20 per angler, this can easily be done, but we need every individual angler to join as a member themselves, as well as their clubs and sponsorship from all those who benefit from the £3billion angling business.

Anyone can join the Trust today and ensure the sport is represented at a national and international level by completing an application form, visiting www.anglingtrust.net or calling 0844 7700616.” he continued.

Chief Executive Mark Lloyd stated:
“Anglers need to imagine what the future might look like without a national body to represent their needs, and join the Angling Trust now. We have worked very hard before and after the merger to develop the national body but it seems that too many anglers think that others will support the cause for them. Anglers have to realise that having a central body representing their interests, protecting their angling and campaigning to ensure we can all go fishing tomorrow does require a commitment from everyone today.”

Latest development

The following letter has just been sent to the Trust and gives us a glimmer of hope:

OPEN LETTER DATED AUGUST 10th 2009
ADDRESSED TO BOARD OF THE ANGLING TRUST

Dear Sirs

It is with deepest concern that we contact you regarding the development of the Angling Trust.
For far too long, anglers have needed a professionally run, representative body, and the launch of the Angling Trust in January 2009 was a major step forward towards greater unity in angling.

We believe the Angling Trust has provided an initial framework to the path of true representation and the merging board has created a valuable structure, but news of overspending combined with a failing business plan is extremely worrying although not that surprising.

Our concerns at this stage arise primarily from the continuing lack of engagement with AT members, and the angling community as a whole, particularly on sensitive issues. There is a wealth of first hand angling, industry and media experience that appears to have been largely ignored by the current board. Therefore, it is with this in mind, that we all offer our support services, without charge, to the Angling Trust as a “collective” advisory board. The absence of individuals that anglers recognise, trust and respect is clearly apparent at all levels of the Angling Trust.

In addition, there is obviously and immediate need to review the failing business plan currently in place. Once again, where applicable, we would like to offer our experience in business development, marketing and finance at no cost, to help secure the immediate continuation and sustainable development of the Angling Trust in the future.

We trust that the current AT board will be addressing these concerns and await your earliest response.

Signed by:
John Wilson, Keith Arthur, Danny Fairbrass, Martin Bowler, Ruth Lockwood, John Everard, Tim Norman

Well there you have it, a challenge. If you have bothered to read this far then you care about our sport and presumably already belong to the Trust but there is more you can do. Convince other anglers to join too, ask your local tackle shop, club and fishery if they are members and if not, ask them why, if they depend on the sport for their income, they have not joined.

The reason I have not posted here since the middle of July is that, along with a number of other Angling Trust registered coaches all over the country, I have been working hard to introduce more people to our sport on various functions. These efforts and those of years gone by, along with all the other hard work done by the Angling Trust board members and their predecessors, will all be wasted if our sport goes into decline, as it will, without our voices being heard in the corridors of power.

Anglers out there happily pay £10 for a day on their chosen commercial fishery, two days would buy them an Angling Trust membership and safeguard the future of their sport.

If our sport is to decline all anglers need to do is NOTHING!

Let’s show we care about our sport.

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I have just got back from a day’s coaching at Black Park in Slough. The day was funded and organised by the Environment Agency and was open to the public who were given half an hour of free coaching with one of the five coaches who attended.

The fishing was hard, with very few bites. My first student was an Asian lady who fished instead of her daughter who refused to have anything to do with the sport due to a fear of electric eels. Her mum had one bite which resulted in twenty feet of elastic being pulled out of my pole before the hook length parted.

The rest of the day continued in a downhill direction until my last student, a young lady named Lauren, who hooked and landed a fine 4lb male Tench, with a little help from me.

Lauren and her 4lb male Tench

My gratitude goes to fellow coach Kevin, who not only netted the fish for us but took this excellent photo as well.

Update:
I had a lovely email from Stewart, Lauren’s dad earlier today and he has kindly agreed to let me post it here, along with additional photos from Matt Hart at the Environment Agency:

Here are the pictures of you and Lauren at Black Park yesterday afternoon.

Lauren and her “fish of a lifetime”!

Thank you for your patience and expertise, she loved the experience as you can tell by the photos.

Please do feel free to use them as you wish, but do send me the link of your blog, so as we can show all of our friends!

Thank you again for making a little girl, very very happy.

Stewart also forwarded an email from Matt Hart, Technical Officer (Fisheries) from the Environment Agency who hosted the event (and took the two photos above). Here’s a snippet:

As I mentioned yesterday, Lauren’s tench really is a fish of a lifetime. I’ve never caught a tench that big and a number of my colleagues that are really keen coarse anglers are now planning trips to Black Park to catch some tench.

It’s when you get days like yesterday, meet people like Stewart and Lauren and receive such positive feedback that make the early mornings and long drives worth every minute.

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The Angling Trust are asking anglers to complete a survey to gather information about angling participation, I have filled it in and it only took me ten minutes.

There is also another survey this time for the Environment Agency but it is not very well publicised and is a little difficult to access as you have to register with the EA, which I am at the moment I am having trouble doing. They say

The law that governs fish removal, particularly of coarse fish, is unclear and limited. We want to hear your views on proposed new byelaws to regulate what fish can be removed under what circumstances.

This is a very important subject and well worth contributing to, so I will persevere.

Remember if you don’t say owt you can’t complain no one listens!

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I have never made a secret of the fact that I’m a tackle tart and although I have been lucky with some of my purchases on ebay, it is very satisfying to own something very special and personal.

I am always praising the quality of rods made on blanks from Harrison Advanced Rods of Liverpool and have been fortunate to find some real bargins second hand as I have mentioned on this blog. The thirteen foot spliced tip match rod I mentioned had a very scruffy cork handle and worn sliding reel fittings so I decided to have a screw on reel fitting fitted and the butt rebuilt when I had the time to organise it.

One of the other Harrison rods I found on eBay was the two pound test curve Torrix which I bought as a barbel flood rod but caught me my first catfish. I was so impressed with this rod that I decided to get a slightly lighter version for my normal barbel fishing.

To kill two birds with one stone I went to a rod builder I have used once before to re-ring another of my Harrison rods, Chris Ward. He is a craftsman of some distinction and I am more than pleased with the results.

This is my new toy, a 12 foot Harrison one and three quarter pound test curve Torrix, beautifully made and totally original.

Both rods were delivered just before the start of the river season and the busy coaching schedule that has enabled me to afford such luxuries has also denied me the chance to use either of them so far.

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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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