The Fishing Coach

One of the main disadvantages of coaching full time is that over the last nine years I have had less time to fish how and where I would prefer to fish and whilst I enjoyed the achievement of the lad in the picture below almost as much as he did, it was not caught on a venue I would have chosen myself, nor is it a species I would have spent what has become my valuable time, pursuing.

I love to fish rivers and I prefer to be active all the time, trotting a float satisfies that need. It also requires some skill and is totally absorbing, so much so that I often forget to eat my lunch until late afternoon (and that is most unlike me as anyone who has shared a meal table with me will testify).

Float fishing on a river requires that you learn the geography of your chosen swim and use your knowledge of your prey to locate feeding fish, you then try and use the skill that you have acquired after much practice, to present a bait to the fish in as natural manner as you can.

Yes of course I love to catch big fish but the size of the fish is often secondary to achieving a skilful presentation of the bait beneath a float in difficult conditions. Some years ago when I was in the Police at Heathrow Airport, two of my best friends were avid golfers but very much at the learning stage. They talked continually about the one stroke in a round of golf that just turned out right and they spoke of saying to themselves that Arnold Palmer could not have played one better. I resisted their entreaties to take up the game but I knew the feeling they were experiencing. Float fishing a river, like playing golf, is a constant struggle to achieve the perfect presentation but only the fish know when you have got it right. This must sound like a recipe for a spell in secure accommodation with sorbo rubber wallpaper learning to weave baskets but, in fact, it is very therapeutic and has helped me get through some very stressful times - you can’t fish and worry.

The river Kennet is my favourite river and has been since I first fished it in 1967. I was a boy soldier stationed near Reading and I must admit I poached a stretch called beat five (The Jam factory) using borrowed tackle. That day I caught some dace trotting a float with a centrepin and I was hooked. Since then I have returned again and again to various parts of the river after various species using different methods but it is the flowing water and the problems it presents that brings me back time and time again.

The most difficult and exacting method of float fishing a river is using a float called a stick float, this is a balanced float made of a very buoyant wood at the top and a heavier less buoyant wood or some other material at the bottom. It is very sensitive when used properly but only functions at its optimum performance in ideal conditions. It is preferable to fish this float with a gentle upstream wind blowing slightly from your bank and as most of the rivers in this area flow from west to east and the prevailing wind is south westerly I rarely have the opportunity to use this float in its most effective role. Also much of the river Kennet is too turbulent for this float but Martin James recently recommended a stretch of the river that is eminently suitable for this method and I have been fishing this recently.

This stretch is located at Woolhampton just below a restaurant called the Rowbarge. Here the river and the canal flow in the same bed and the result is much wider and deeper than the river stretches I usually fish and therefore less turbulent and slower. Yesterday I went back with the wind in the ideal quarter for the stick float, armed with six pints of maggots and some hemp. The river is also famous for its perch so I also brought some lobworms and it was with this bait that I started the day, fishing in the margins with a method called stret pegging, having introduced some chopped worms with a bait dropper.(Martin Bowler describes this method HERE)

I had set up two rods both with centrepins, one for the margins was a Harrison Interceptor stepped up float rod with four pound line and the other a Drennan super stick float rod with two pound main line. I spent the first hour exploring the margins with worm and apart from one perch about half a pound the only response was from the crayfish but I continually fed a little further out with maggot and hemp on the line I intended to fish with a stick float.

It was about 1pm before I started with the stick float and with dace and roach being my target species I chose to fish a single maggot on a size twenty Kamasan 510 tied to one and a half pound breaking strain line. It is necessary to fish this fine to get the presentation right in clear water. Over the next five hours it was a “bite a chuck” and I soon lost count of the fish I had caught. They were mostly dace, some in excess of half a pound maybe even ten ounces, some small perch, a few gudgeon and a few very small roach but the total count must have been about two hundred.

Just after 6pm I was getting quite tired when half way down the swim the float shot under the surface and my strike was met with a much more solid resistance, the tip of the stick float rod arched over and the fish slowly powered off down stream, the rim of the centrepin turning under my thumb. This was not the headlong, panicked flight of a fish in fear of its life but more the powerful exit of a fish, mildly irritated, who just decided he wanted to be somewhere else. The fish did not realise it had been hooked and if it did so whilst travelling downstream with the current, then my forty or so yards of line with which I always load my centrepins would soon be used up. Very gently I applied side strain and turned the fish towards the far bank and let it kite across the current for a while, then a little more side strain until the fish was headed upstream. He seemed to think this had been his own idea and carried on back towards me, so I lessened the pressure and let him cruise past me. Once he was five yards or so upstream of me I applied all the pressure I dared and made him fight both me and the current and hoped that he ran out of steam before I ran out of line.

It was close, the base of the spool was showing clearly and only a few turns of line remained before he slowed and turned toward the far bank, again. I applied side strain and turned him down stream back towards me but he had got it in his head that upstream was the direction he wanted to go and after I had gained ten yards of line he turned again and continued to fight me and the current. I have tried to describe the fight as it happened but I would not want you to think that this was in any way frantic, the fish was moving slowly and methodically but very, very powerfully - I was not, as you may think, dictating the direction of travel to this fish but rather making subtle and gentle suggestions to it.

The fight lasted about thirty minutes and all that time I was expecting the tiny hook to pull out or the fish to find some snag such as a sunken tree or weed bed. My right arm was aching and finally the fish surface and rolled. I knew then why I had been having so much trouble with this fish, I had suspected a barbel was my tormentor but not one this big.

It weighed ten pounds ten ounces in the net and as my net weighs a pound, it was nine pounds ten ounces, something I have only just realised, in all the excitement I forgot to deduct the weight of the net at the time.

I spent the next ten minutes nursing the fish back to full strength in the shallows, as such a long fight takes a lot out of a fish and a lot of acid is built up in the muscles. I would not advise anyone to fish this light for barbel and I shall be re assessing my tackle when fishing this stretch again.

The reason for the title of this post is that this venue is just twelve minutes drive from my front door!

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Well it’s been a whole year since we made the move to Paradise and that’s a lot of water that has flowed under a lot of bridges (did anyone else notice what a wet summer it was?). One of the advantages to living so central to so much good fishing is that we get a few guests to stay and one of those has been Martin James, an old friend of Gordon Scott, who I first met at a Barbel Society Conference about ten or more years ago, just before Gordon died.

Martin is an angling writer and broadcaster who travels all over the world. He is also a great angler but probably a greater raconteur and this last year I have been very lucky to have spent several evenings in his company, listening to his wonderful stories and experiences. He has met so many of the wonderful, old time, anglers who have had such an influence on my sport over the years and I never tire of his tales of such people as Richard Walker, Jack Hargreaves and Fred J Taylor.

Martin has been very supportive of the work I do with young people and was kind enough to interview me for his radio programme on BBC Radio Lancashire, you can listen to the interview until 7pm on Thursday 25th September after which I hope to have downloaded it to this post.

Go to the Radio Lancashire home page and click on the Listen Again button (top right) (this opens a popup window) then choose “At the Water’s Edge” from the “A-Z OF ALL SHOWS” listing. The interview starts at about 08:50.

When the programme has been replaced by next week’s, I’ll put the interview here for listening or downloading.

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We are approaching the end of the summer coaching season and during this time I have met many new people and hopefully been able to share my enthusiasm for our wonderful sport with them. I have also met some old friends and made some new ones too.

Aidan has fished with me before and this is not his biggest fish.

As you can see, this lad really enjoyed catching his first carp but was not quite ready to hold it.

The smile says everything about this photo.

At last, after such a busy summer I finally had some time for myself and I decided to try and achieve one of my goals. I have only two common British freshwater fish left to catch, one is a zander and the other is a wels catfish, neither of which is actually an indigenous fish but are widely enough distributed in the UK to be worthwhile targets.

During this summer’s work with the Environment Agency. I met another coach called Nick Watkins who is more of a big fish hunter than I am but an excellent coach for beginners nonetheless. He stayed at my place for a couple of days whilst we were coaching at Staunton Park in Havant to save him commuting between there and Canvey Island where he lives, in between the two day sessions. He used to be the head bailiff on a fishery called Beaver Farm and he was talking about the catfish for which it is famous and this resulted in a planned expedition for which I can’t even blame the drink!

We decided that it would require at least a “two-day session” to be in with a chance of connecting with one of these monsters so late in the year as it would be September before our coaching duties would let us fit it in. Two-day sessions are definitely beyond my usual fishing experience and so Nick arranged to borrow a bed chair and bivvy for me. Any of my readers who know me will be falling about laughing as I have always said that I did enough camping in the army to last me the rest of my life, but desperation requires desperate solutions.

We also discussed tackle and I was surprised to find that very little of the terminal tackle in my vast arsenal of tackle was suitable - the rods and reels I use for pike fishing would suffice but I had to think differently about hook length material and hooks. Catfish have huge mouths equipped with abrasive pads so large baits and abrasion resistant hook lengths would be the order of the day.

Have a look at the size and gauge of those hooks,(that’s a pound coin not a one pence piece) you could probably hang a side of beef on one but that was “not quite” one of the baits we considered.

Kevlar is one of those materials born of the space race of which the advertising men are so fond and is, in reality, used to make such diverse thing as racing car cockpits and bullet proof vests but seems to be one of those words which allows the manufacturer to double the price of any article (like “carp” and “specimen”) and so I was in no way surprised to find that catfish require kevlar hook length material.

I also provided myself with various outrageous baits including huge halibut pellets big enough to hide behind, a tub of Moggy Chunks which look like the droppings of a constipated, medium sized, fish eating elephant, along with tins of luncheon meat cut in half to make two baits from each tin, both glugged in salmon oil, halibut oil, or another foul, fishy smelling liquid I found in an unmarked bottle in the bait additive section of my tackle store (the label must have come off years ago and if it smells like this now, God knows what it smelled like when it was fresh?). Add to this copious amounts of various sizes pellets, some boilies and marine pellet groundbait and of course fifty of the largest lobworms I could find. All this was carried in buckets which the local wild life found fascinating.

This picture proves that not all ugly ducklings grow up to be swans, a fact that many of us have known for years.

The first Monday in September saw me arrive at Beaver Farm Fishery where I met Nick who told me we were to fish Snipe Lake where we would have the chance of some small cats should all else fail (doesn’t it always when someone says that?).

We walked the lake and I was introduced to some of Nick’s friends. I have always said that these session carp fishermen are a strange lot but some of the stories that were swapped would not bear printing here, or most other places, for fear of prosecution for indecency or libel. There was no sign of the bivvy or bed chair that we had been promised and as the skies darkened with rain clouds I looked forward to a grim first night but at the last moment the bailiff arrived with the required items and Nick soon had the bivvy erected, a task that may have taken me days on my own (how tent design has changed since my army days). Any comments about muzzle loading rifles and Zulus will be immediately deleted.

The first night I fished two rods, one near a patch of lillies on my left which had been heavily baited with a mixture of hemp, assorted pellets, dead maggots (that had been in my bait freezer since before some of this Summer’s students were born) and chopped luncheon meat bound together will a couple of kilos of marine pellet ground bait. This rod was baited with half a tin of luncheon meat and sat motionless all night except for a couple of line bites. The second rod was fished tight to the island, baited with six or seven huge popped up lobworms over a bed of two kilos of mixed pellets placed with the aid of Nick’s bait boat. Oh how I would love one of these bait boats but I really cannot justify the expense as I normally don’t do this kind of fishing very often and it would just be something else to carry (that’s never stopped you before I can hear you say!).

We just got set up when the skies opened up and the rain set in for the night and what a restless night it was, most of the time I was kept awake by the torrential rain drumming on the bivvy above my head or blowing in the open door. Oh yes, I forgot to mention how claustrophobic these bivvies are, I could not bear to have the door shut and I was worried about hearing the bite alarms if I had been able to shut it. This last worry was proved baseless with my first line bite and I found that I could and did hear every other bite alarm on the complex as well.

I crept out just after dawn (well, about 9.30 but it felt like first light) to find the rain had stopped but the ground was sodden and one of my bait buckets was half full of water where the lid had not been fitted properly. I reeled in both rods to find the baits untouched and I noticed that there was a lot of fish activity over the ground bait near the lilies on my left, there were bubbles everywhere, some in wide streams that Nick assured me were small cats. I had said all along that all I wanted was a catfish not necessarily a big one, so I decided that these indications would be my target for the day. I replenished the ground bait by the lilies and set up the second rod by the island for carp, without much hope I might add as the temperature had fallen during the previous night’s rain. I am not really comfortable with this long range, boltrig and boilie type of fishing because I have not done enough of it.

I decided to target the smaller cats by the lilies with a method I do know well, so I set up my flood water barbel rod, a twelve foot two pound test curve Harrison Torrix with a centrepin reel loaded with twenty pound braid to fish with a lift float. I have described this method before on this blog.

The main difference was the hook length of ten pound co polymer, the hook a forged size six and the bait, a single large lobworm was popped up by an injection of air into one end. After about an hour during which I sat with the butt of the rod on my lap (proper fishing!) the float lifted and laid flat, my strike was met with about a second of very solid resistance and then all hell broke loose. I had been warned that catfish fought hard but had not been prepared for the next few minutes of manic struggle. Given the swim I had chosen with the patches of lilies and bank side reeds it took all of my skill to keep this fish out of the snags, they really can swim backwards and I was relieved when Nick scooped it up with a landing net large enough to use as a butterfly net for a small airliner.

It only weighed eleven pounds thirteen ounces - thank God it wasn’t any bigger on the tackle I was using.

Guess who’s going back in May to catch a big one?

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