The Fishing Coach

After last week’s strenuous coaching I decided to combine some more pole practice with a day’s pike fishing. My choice of venue was lake three at Twynersh which I know has a good head of pike and silver fish. This lake is usually quiet this time of year and it turned out I was sharing it with one other angler.

Where I chose to fish had a depth of between twelve and fourteen feet and I chose to fish on the drop off about nine metres from the bank. My intention was to start with the pole and try and catch some small roach for livebait but all I could catch was perch, skimmer bream and hybrids the latter two being too large for bait.

After a while I set up the pike rod and used a small perch as bait. Let me at this point explain the pike rig I use when fishing the pike rod as a secondary rod. I use a float paternoster to stop the bait towing the float around the swim, this means a sliding float on the surface with a lead of at least an ounce and a half on the bottom of the lake. In between is what the carp boys would call a helicopter rig revolving around a forty pound nylon covered wire as a back trace, in case the bait gets tangled around the main line as it is taken by the pike causing the pike to bite through the line. The snap tackle is attached to this revolving swivel which allows the livebait to swim around the main line without causing tangles.

This is cast into the periphery of my vision whilst watching the pole float and is designed to stay there, this way even when concentrating on the pole float I will still notice any movement of the pike float. The last thing I want is a deep hooked pike and this system seems to work well and resulted in one pike about six pounds. Later that afternoon I suffered a couple of dropped runs and as I was catching a succession of perch on the pole I suspected that big perch may be the culprit. Unlike pike, big perch will not tolerate any resistance when taking livebait and so the float paternoster rig was causing them to drop the bait.

I changed the pike rod to a small float with a single treble hook to ten pound wire on a free roving rig and the result was a bristling two and a half pound perch which fought extremely well despite the heavy pike rod.

A satisfying day’s fishing which left me with a sore wrist from handling the pole, this really is an effective method for fishing very deep water.

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Last week was such a success Kim Nielsen asked if I could do two more days and as a result I was back at Frobury on the following thursday and friday. This time I had four young people and two case workers and this resulted in the best two days coaching I have ever had despite the weather on the second day. Both case workers fished as well and this combined with the high numbers of fish being caught meant I was very busy. Nearly two hundred fish were caught in the two days and despite every one getting soaked on the second day spirits were high and there was as much laughter as fishing.
This is what this sport is about, having fun!

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September 5th saw the children return to school and gave me a chance to refurbish my coaching tackle after the rigors of the summer holidays. Float rigs had to be retied, split shot resorted in to sizes and new hooks and floats purchased.
Less than a week later I was coaching again, this time with the older pupils from Reading E2E. Three days had been booked, 13th,14th and 15th at Frobury Fisheries at Kingsclere near Newbury. Only two lads turned up but they were both very keen and I was able to pay them more attention than normal.
I tried a slightly different approach than previously, feeding lots of hemp and assorted small trout pellets at the beginning then feeding heavilly with sweetcorn. I would normally advise against feeding lots of sweetcorn as it can quickly fill the fish up but this water is so heavilly stocked I really don’t believe this is likely.
This proved to be the case with one lad catching fifty small carp, six tench and three rudd in a little less than three hours.

During the three days both students progressed from whips to rods and reels and are keen to learn more about our sport.

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On Wednesday and Thursday this week I completed the summer holiday coaching package with PAYP Slough but before I could do that I had to take on a major servicing project with the fixed spool reels we have been using this summer. These four reels have had some rough handling from inexperienced fingers and the line which had already been renewed this summer was past its best.

I spent most of one evening this past weekend stripping, cleaning and lubricating the reels prior to replacing the line. In the past I have used a co-polymer type line from various manufacturers but have found that they all suffer from line twist due to the overzealous use of the slipping clutch by youngsters who cannot grasp the concept of not reeling in when the drag is paying out line.

As you can see from the above picture, I have decided to fall back on an old favourite -Maxima- in the hope that this robust line will deal with this problem better.

The two coaching sessions went quite well despite the one on Wednesday being blighted by very hot weather, the bright sunlight having an adverse effect on the fish. The Twynersh bream made a showing on both days to the delight of the youngsters.

I know these are not big fish as bream go, nor are bream hard fighters or even difficult to catch at this size but for a novice angler with little or no fish playing skills as yet they are the ideal quarry. Even a small bream looks like a big fish due to their body shape and they are unlikely to cause the novice angler any embarrassment by breaking the line or pulling out the hook with excessive struggles for freedom.

They do have one disadvantage as a target for the budding angler and that is their slimyness. I am sure that my name is mud in at least a couple of Slough households as after the triumphant photo session the pupil’s t-shirt is often coated in bream slime. In the warm weather we have been subjected to this would have stiffened nicely by the time the student got home and begun to smell. Sun baked bream slime has a piquancy all of its own.

Remind me to give parents’ day a miss!

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