The Fishing Coach

I have and have always had a healthy distrust of salesmen and my recent dealings with a double glazing company of some repute who shall remain nameless, has done nothing to change that.

Shortly after the move to paradise I traded in my diesel-guzzling Toyota Hi Lux 4x4 for a three year old Volvo CV70 diesel, four wheel drive estate car, which I purchased from Fawcetts of Newbury, a local Volvo dealership.

This seems to be the ideal fishing/coaching car as there is room for four passengers and all the tackle I always take (those who have fished with me are now imagining something the size of an articulated lorry). The great plus is that in three months motoring it is averaging about forty miles to the gallon.

However last week it started losing lots of brake fluid and wary of the warranty I took it back to the dealer for investigation, only to be told that the clutch slave cylinder was leaking and because it is situated inside the bell housing and therefore part of the gearbox it was not covered by the warranty. As the leaking fluid was likely to have damaged the clutch mechanism the bill could be as high as £2500, this caused me a great deal of concern .

The Service Manager said he would see what he could do and finally arranged for Volvo to pay 40% of the bill and the warranty company and Fawcetts themselves each to pay 20%. I got a new clutch, flywheel and slave cylinder fitted for a little over £500 and during the work they discovered that the four wheel drive system was not supplying power to the rear wheels. Happily this was covered by the warranty and was fixed at the same time. The lack of four wheel drive would explain my problem in the previous post.

I am therefore extremely pleased with the service I have had from Fawcetts of Newbury and pass on my recommendation to you.

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Sometimes I think that anglers should be born with webbed feet (apologies to any readers that were), it has been so wet this month that my beloved river Kennet has been in the fields and most of the Wasing Estate has been inaccessible due to flooded tracks.

My thanks go to John Butler, the head bailiff on the estate, who had to winch my car out of a very muddy track last week due to a failure of my four wheel drive (more about this in a later post

).

I have managed one day barbel fishing since Christmas but my choice of swims was limited by access problems. I ended up in the car park swim above Brimpton bridge with the intention of field testing one of my two new flood rods. I found a pair of two pound test curve Harrison Torrix rods on Ebay and couldn’t resist them, they were less than half the price of new rods and were in mint condition.

I fished one in conjunction with a Relum centrepin (very similar to the Arnold Kingpin and the old Swallow centrepin). I have had this reel for about ten years but have hardly used it because it has been loaded with eighteen pound mono for carp margin snag fishing and the gap between the drum and the back plate discourages the use of light line. With the Kennet in flood I knew I would need to cast a lot of weight so I went to my reel drawer only to find that the line on the Relum was well past it’s sell by date. I replaced the line with a bonded braid made by Spider wire called Ultracast in thirty pound breaking strain, I dislike using ordinary braid on a centrepin because the coarseness of the braid makes Wallace casting difficult and this braid has a smooth coating.

I fully expect some criticism over the use of such a heavy main line but in my mind it was justified due to the strength of the current and the debris that was being washed down, the hook link was a soft twelve pound braid. There is no credit in leaving fish tethered to a bunch of weed and other debris because your end tackle became so heavy during the fight that the main line couldn’t take the strain.

I fished a large open-ended swim feeder weighing six ounces loaded with fishmeal ground bait and mixed pellets with a fifteen millimetre crab flavoured pellet on the hook. These pellets are really strong smelling and just the job for really coloured water. I managed to get the rig to hold the bottom in a small slack on the far bank by holding the rod up high to keep as much line out of the water as possible.

Martin James was fishing up in the weir pool, he came down for a visit and by some amazing coincidence he too was using a Relum centrepin (the only other one I have ever seen), which he praised highly. He had caught one barbel just short of ten pounds from the weir pool and we had quite a long chat.

I tried several other sizes of flavoured marine pellets without success and eventually switched to a ten millimetre Dynamite Source boilie, hair rigged to a size ten hook. This produce a couple of tentative taps and finally in mid afternoon a barbel of just over five pounds (small baits in flood water, haven’t they read the books?). Dusk produced one more bite but the hook hold failed.

The rest of the month has been devoted to tackle repairs and replacements ready for the spring coaching sessions which are programmed to start half way through February. I did start a day’s chub fishing on the river Embourne (a tributary of the river Kennet) but it was spoilt by getting the car stuck and ended fishless.

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Earlier this month I ran my first Pike Handling course of 2008 with two very enthusiastic young lads. Elliott had been given a day out with me for Christmas by his father Clay and due to computer and other logistical problems I had to deliver the card (my partner Jan makes special handmade gift cards for such occasions) to their home address to ensure it was in time for the festive season.

This should have been a piece of cake given modern sat nav technology but unfortunately my TomTom seems to get confused when it hasn’t passed a street light for a couple of hundred yards and as my new student lived in the wilds of darkest Hertfordshire, a simple delivery turned into a major expedition second only to Stanley’s search for Dr. Livingstone. The point the TomTom took me to given the postcode was about three miles driving from the actual house and none of the locals I spoke to had ever heard of the house name.

At one stage (bearing in mind I was in very rural Hertfordshire) I was driving in desperation along a secluded country road when I spotted a woman walking towards me, I put on my best disarming smile so as not to frighten her and stopped to ask for directions. My smile was returned with some enthusiasm but my request for directions wiped it smartly from her face and replaced it with a look of confusion, she was from somewhere in Eastern Europe, at least that’s my guess, as she spoke nor understood a word of English.

I eventually got directions from Clay by phone and delivered the card safely.

As I left home on the day of the proposed course (not as early as I used to have to do when I lived in Shepperton) I was greeted by a howling East wind that took away the feeling in my ears before I got to the car. I met Clay and his son Elliot at Max’s Café at Padworth and was introduced to Elliott’s friend Jack who was to fish with him. Both lads were already keen anglers and asked lots of questions as I explained my plans for the day over a hearty breakfast.

We drove to the Predator lake on the Wasing Estate where Clay left the boys with me and we were faced with a landscape that the East wind had given the appearance of an arctic tundra, all the vegetation or what was left of it, was leaning sharply westwards in the fierce wind and the surface of the lake was being whipped almost to a foam. My heart sank for the lads’ sake as I realised it was going to be a difficult day and any shelter I tried to erect against that wind for warmth, would be blown away by it.

I set up four rods with the usual dead bait legering rigs, a snap tackle attached to an uptrace with a couple of swan shot pinched on to it and the boys remarked on the simplicity of it. I explained that this would do the job and there was no need to make it more complicated, they had been reading too many magazine articles designed to sell tackle rather than inform. The baits were to be frozen coarse fish as I have had hardly any runs on sea baits all season and a couple of years ago I was so confident using frozen sardines that I rarely brought anything else. I also set up one heavy and one light spinning rods and gave the lads a lesson on lure fishing as we waited for the deadbait rigs to catch the fish I desperately hoped would feed. I didn’t expect the lures to catch fish in these conditions and despite the lads’ best efforts I was proved right. I explained that most of the pike would be laid on the bottom and that any fish we did catch would be carrying leeches because of this.

When the two students had lost the feeling in their fingers due to their gloves being taken off to work the lure rods, we huddled together like penguins against the wind and talked some more about pike fishing and the associated tackle. About mid day one of the bite alarms sounded briefly but no run materialised, my hopes raised a little as I desperately did not want these lads to go home disappointed.

About twenty minutes later the same alarm sounded and a firm strike by Elliot resulted in him playing a small, rather dour pike which soon came to my eager landing net and sure enough had four or five leeches clinging to its body.

The fish weighed between four and five pounds but could not have been more welcome had it weighed twenty.

A little while later about mid afternoon the same alarm sounded again and this time Jack hooked and landed a slightly larger fish, again with it’s compliment of leeches.

I would have been more than happy with one pike between them given the conditions and would have cheerfully settled for just that at the beginning of the day,but both of them deserved their first pike and I’m only sorry they were not bigger.

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It’s been a long time since I posted anything here, for which I apologise, but the house move I mentioned at the end of my post in May proved much more fraught than either Jan or I could have imagined. Having sold our house in March we finally moved on the 18th September, only being 100% sure that the move was actually going to happen with less than 24 hours notice. We were very lucky to have a very flexible removal team who put up with two last minute cancellations* and still turned up at silly o’clock on the actual moving day with big smiles and a cheerful attitude. If you need a recommendation for a removal team in the south east of England, let me know.

* Apparently caused by (a) a land registry problem on my vendor’s property, a 300 year old cottage and (b) the fact that said vendors had chosen Northern Rock for their mortgage and our exchange date fell during that week. Quite. I’ll tell you more about this when my therapist says I’m strong enough…

As if that weren’t enough, despite careful planning on our part and repeated phone calls and promises, BT decided to end our broadband service and install it in the new house… weeks before the actual date. Have you ever spent hours on a mobile phone trying to get BT to reconnect a landline? I should have started a swear box that first morning, I’m sure we’d have had enough to buy a second house by the time I was done with them!

I was also spending a lot of time packing and getting rid of furniture, books and various items that I knew we wouldn’t have room for given that we were downsizing in our very own episode of Escape to the Country. Jan listed some furniture on the recycling site reuze.co.uk but I was kept busy delivering furniture and multitudes of boxes to the local charity shops. There were very pleased to receive the first batch. And the second. But by week four I swear they had a permanent lookout on the corner and as soon as my box laden 4x4 turned into Shepperton High Street all 4 charity shops boarded up their doors and windows and refused to take any more stock!

Add to this the fact that I was quite busy coaching both for Slough Council and the NFA/Environment Agency, I just have not had time nor the facility to write some posts.

Anyway, I’m hoping that once this catch-up post is out of the way I’ll be able to write much more regularly in 2008. I’ve set the bureau up in a little corner of the dining room where I can chew the end of a pencil slave over the laptop to produce more regular posts.

Enough of my excuses, let me tell you about the summer’s coaching. As ever, my coaching activities are divided into three areas - council work with disadvantaged young people, private courses for young people and for adults who wish to return to fishing, often after a long break. Each of these areas provides their own very different rewards but when you look at the next photos you will guess why I enjoy the former.

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