The Fishing Coach

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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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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