The river season has ended and with it the longest seeming winter in my memory. This was probably an illusion caused by my lack of fishing opportunities due to my wrist injuries but other anglers of my aquaintance have said the same. There was nothing memorable about the winter other than the lack of rain and being a little colder than we have become used to but it just seemed to drag on and on.
I missed my days out to the Itchen, a river now a shadow of its former self and I wasn’t able to give the Kennet the attention I had intended. The only saving grace has been the Pike Handling courses, although they caused me a lot of physical problems.
We now find ourselves at a strange time of year for coarse angling. The rivers are closed and the still waters have yet to warm up enough to get the fish feeding. It is time to prepare your tackle for the spring and summer, to repair the wear and tear the winter has wrought and to replace damaged or missing items before you miss them on your first good day out. Let me explain what I will be doing over the next few weeks.
The most important consideration for me is line. Many of my reels had a lot of use in the late summer and autumn and although they were cleaned before being put away, the line on them has spent a lot of time exposed to sunlight. This is the worst enemy of most monofilament fishing lines as all types except flourocarbon deteriorate due to sunlight to a greater or lesser degree. This deterioration does not seem to be gradual but can often appear to occur overnight and your six pound breaking strain line suddenly parts under two pounds of pull.
The only solution is to replace it every so often and to store your reels in total darkness. I am even careful where I buy my new line as it is difficult to know how the line you are buying from your tackle dealer has been stored. I tend to buy an unopenned box of line in the breaking strains I most commonly use and store that which I don’t use straight away in a black box with a tight fitting lid in a dark corner of the garage. The same attention should be paid to any spools of line that you keep in your tackle bag for tying up hook lengths. Braid, fortunately, does not suffer in this way so is worth the extra it costs to buy.
While we are talking about reels (and here I mean fixed spool reels) - before you put them away after renewing the line, slacken off the slipping clutch or drag as some call it. This will prevent the spring from weakening and prolong the life of your reel.
Another cause of damage to line are cracks in the ceramic linings of rod rings or guides, these can be difficult to detect but if you gently run the cutting edge of a sharp pointed scalpel or craft knife around the inside of them you will feel any crack easily and will be able to take steps to have the offending ring or guide replaced.
I will also be checking all my hooks, weights and feeders to make sure that I am not short of any sizes or patterns and inspecting my floats for the same reasons and for damage. Floats are easily damaged but can be repaired with a little effort much more cheaply than they can be replaced. I would like to say that I also sort through my tackle bag and discard anything that I have carried for a couple of years and not used but I have tried to do this and don’t seem to have the self discipline. It all ends up back in the bag labelled “just in case”.
Expeience has also taught me to check my boots and waders, as being made of rubber they are liable to perish. What ended the autumn as a servicable pair of chest waders can be a bl**dy embarrassment on the first day of the river season.
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