The Fishing Coach

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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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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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 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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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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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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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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This week I have have one of my students staying with me for half term, I have been coaching Tayler since he was seven and have become firm friends with his family. He has become an accomplished young angler and is good company. On Monday, his first day, I took him on my first visit to the Lower Itchen Fishery this season. He fishes with a centrepin and can trot a float as well as many much older anglers.

I have mentioned in a previous post how the river suffered a disastrous fish kill a couple of summers ago and this year I was hoping to see a great improvement. I was not disappointed!

We split up after I had watched him catch his first fish, which he did about his third trot down.

You can see in the picture above that he even winds the line onto his reel backwards the same as I do.

We caught about forty grayling each during the day and both had at least one two pounder.

The river has improved greatly and although it is still not as good as it was a few years ago, we had a wonderful day.

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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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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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Since moving to “paradise” I have been looking for a local venue that provides some good tench fishing and on advice I joined Newbury Angling Association and the 16th June found me fishing one of their waters, Knott’s lake, that had been closed for their voluntarily imposed closed season.

I am ashamed to say I blanked, as did most of the other anglers but I returned a couple of days later with a bit of local information and fished the opposite end of the lake in the deeper water. I found the tench but not in the margins where I had been told and they were not interested in the big baits I had been told to use.

I finally made contact with feeding fish, two rod lengths out in eleven feet of water and caught about eight or nine on float fished red maggots.

Not the prettiest fish, nor the biggest but great fun on a centrepin and a float rod.

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I have mentioned in the past a lake in Surrey that used to be managed by a very good mate of mine, Weller of the yard. Les moved to Northumberland just before my move and I was surprised to be invited to a netting of the lake earlier this year. The netting failed to show any of the tench that used to attract me to the lake and I went home very disappointed and sure I would never go back

In June this year Les again invited me to fish the lake as he was “down south” visiting and he said that the anglers who had been fishing it for carp had been catching tench. It was too good an opportunity to miss and a chance to see Les again.

The lake had changed a lot having been landscaped and tidied up after a great deal of work had been done on the estate, but the tench were still there!

It was good to fish with Les again and a chance for me to experiment with my new paste which I call “surf and turf” being a mixture of luncheon meat and trout pellet. This is a very soft paste and the tench loved it but it requires some stiffening to keep it on the hook before I try it on the river.

As you will see from the picture below they were not huge tench but caught on a float and with a centrepin, half a dozen of these make a good day’s fishing.

Small carp can also be fun on this tackle.

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On Sunday whilst on my way to a local game fair I received a telephone call from a very excited former student of mine who I haven’t seen for a couple of years. As I was driving at the time, although on “hands free”, I wasn’t able to give him the attention that he deserved but he phoned me again later that evening and told me the full story, his excitement unabated.

Russell on one of my courses in 2002

Russell was one of my first students, he did his basic course in July 2000 and was always ready for one of my days out but college and, I suspect girls, soon got in the way and he let his fishing take a back seat. He has recently returned to the sport and on Sunday morning caught a new personal best. He phoned to tell me as he claimed that “I’d taught him him all he knew”. Below is an excerpt of an email he sent me later, complete with a photo.

Hi Martin.

I was fishing the new Abbey Lake only 10 mins from my house. It was only the second time I’ve been there. I hadn’t been fishing and caught a fish since about 2006.

On the 1st trip I only got either a line bite or a nibble I couldn’t tell. After that trip I thought about how I could improve. So on the 2nd trip I took a rod with a marker float and I also used a feeder with carp pellet inside to lure the carp in.

I had 2 rods, 1 with a boilie and the other a lobworm and I got there at 7:00 a.m.. The bait was in the water by 7:30 and I sat patiently enjoying geting back to fishing. It was only 8:10 when when I was looking at my rods when I saw the rod start to bend and I was just thinking no way it is going to happen. After a second the indicator went up and it was taking line out and I was ready so I stuck and knew I’d hooked into something big.

It bent the rod right over 90 degrees, just like I got told, they fight like mad it took line and stopped and kept taking line then holding the tension for 3-4 mins. I didn’t dare reel in because it was still tugging like a rocket. As it eased up a bit I started to reel it in a little bit at a time and now had it half way in when it went all the way to the left of me for the trees. I used everything I learnt and just about kept it of the trees. I then had it rocketing back out again when it did a masive arc went all the way from the left now all the way to the right, under my other line round the tree to the edge of the swim and into reeds I was thinking no way am I going to lose it now. I just took the other rod off the stand and put it the other side while holding masive pressure on the fish as it was going deeper into reeds.

Now I had a new dilemma as I had a fish round the other side of a tree and into big reeds so I thought i don’t care I worked hard for this and went into the water only about a foot deep for the 1st 10 foot from the bank. I tugged and held pressure so tight for about 10 - 15 second thinking its going to snap then wow the fish comes out and finally its worn out a bit as I saw a big fish I knew it was a mirror now only making me more determind to get it. I reeled it right up 1 foot from my net then oh my god he went like mad when he saw the net and took more line out for 5 foot and that was its last fight and as I got it closer and netted it.

Weighed the mirror at 14lb 5oz - my biggest fish ever, also 1st fish I caught in 2 years only my 2nd mirror carp and 1st fish to break the 10lb mark.

I added the photo for you I hope you like it.

Russell

This type of feedback is just one of the rewards of my work with young people.

Well done Russell, I hope we can fish together again soon.

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My trip to Londonderry last month gave me a renewed enthusiasm for fly fishing but river fishing for trout in my area is ridiculously expensive and having paid a few visits to some still water fisheries in the area, I just couldn’t summon up the enthusiasm to fish one of them.

Rigorous enquiries, both in local tackle shops, amongst colleagues and on the net suggested there might be a short stretch of the river Itchen in Winchester that was free fishing and so I went on an exploration one afternoon and although I was unable to locate the stretch I had been looking for I found one length of river near the town centre where I saw another angler fly fishing. On speaking to him he told me that the river was indeed free fishing at this point and there were a couple of other stretches in the town that were free also, it turned out that he too was a qualified coach and he offered to show me where I could fish. His name was Keith Dipper and we met as arranged last Monday at his house. His front door opens onto the banks of the river and I spent a very pleasant day in his company with him acting as my gillie.

It was such a joy to be fly fishing a river again, I soon shook off the cobwebs from my casting techniques and was able to present a nymph in all but the most difficult swims. This is not an easy bit of river to fish, there is rarely room for a back cast and much of it is fast and turbulent. Add to this the fact that it is in an urban setting and I can see that it might not suit everyone. The wind was still coming from the East and was blowing predominately up stream, along with the cold spell the night before this made dry fly fishing unsuitable and any form of an insect hatch unlikely.

Keith assures me that under the right conditions it is possible to catch on the dry fly but we both chose to fish gold head nymphs. I chose a very soft actioned five weight Shakespeare fly rod that has become like an old friend over the years (nearly twenty!), it allows me to fish with a very fine point, three pounds breaking strain in this case and to use a small hook. The fly I chose was a size eighteen may fly nymph with a gold bead head fished on an nine foot tapered leader.

My guide caught the first two fish, small brown trout, before I hooked my first fish. Unfortunately it was a grayling that was out of season and the second and third fish were salmon parr and I don’t have a salmon licence. Not a good start, but my fourth fish was a small brown trout and I was as pleased as punch.

Keith showed me several stretches of the river on which there was no restriction to fishing some of which will be very suitable for winter fishing for roach and grayling, it seemed strange to be walking through shopping streets carrying a fly rod with a landing net hanging from my belt but the shoppers paid us no heed, too busy with their retail therapy.

After the tour we returned to the river near Keith’s house and I caught the best fish of the day, a brown trout of nearly two pounds that tested my light tackle to the limit aided by the very fast current. It seemed to spend as much time in the air as it did in the water and took me a few very enjoyable minutes to subdue.

A great day out - not the best day’s trout fishing but certainly the cheapest.

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For the last couple of months I have been working with a young lad called Aidan who is becoming a very keen angler. In order to broaden his experience I have been teaching him to trot a float on the tiny river Bourne at Twynersh. He has caught some small roach, perch and dace but whilst I was demonstrating the technique I hooked a small chub of about a pound which particularly interested him as it was the biggest fish we had caught from the river. When I explained that this was in fact quite a tiny chub he became even more intrigued and I decided it was time for a session on a bigger river in search of some more challenging chub fishing.

He is not quite ready for the problems involved in fishing small rivers like the Kennet where when even a medium chub is hooked the angler must be very quick and decisive in his response to prevent the fish reaching the snags it will be all too familiar with. This is the sort of intimate river fishing I have preferred for many years and so my repertoire of suitable venues to suit his requirements was some what limited. There was one place on the Thames I fished about fifteen years ago that gave me my first Chub over five pounds and I knew that the river had fined down from the recent floods and would be in perfect condition.

Last Tuesday I took Aidan, with some trepidation, to the river Thames just below Windsor to see if the chub were still there. The method I had chosen was ledgering with a maggot filled block end feeder, the method I had always used in the past but this time the main line on the reel was ten pound Fireline braid instead of ordinary monofilament that I would have used in the past. The reason for the braid was better bite indication due to the lack of stretch and less resistance to the current due to the fine diameter which would enable us to use less weight on the feeder to hold the bottom.

The feeder is mounted on the main line on a low resistance ring by means of a link clip so that it runs between two knots within a loop, the next two diagrams will, I hope, explain this. First thread the ring onto the main line and tie a loop with a double overhand knot so that the ring is inside the loop.

The next stage is to tie another double overhand knot to form a second loop, to attach the hook length, trapping the sliding ring between the two knots.

For the purposes of the diagram I have used sixty pound red monofilament as a main line - I would not fish this heavy for chub! The clip between the ring and the feeder would be covered with a piece of suitable diameter silicone tubing to prevent tangles.

The hook length is attached to the left hand loop by mean of a loop to loop connection. This is often fished very short perhaps only four inches. The way this rig works is the fish takes the bait and moves away with little or no resistance while the ring slides along the loop but when it hits the right hand knot the weight of the feeder hooks the fish.

The rod I chose to set up for Aidan was a twelve foot Shakespeare medium feeder rod well suited to the four pound hook lengths that were needed to get bites the last time I had fished the swim and sufficiently powerful for the fish around the four pound mark I expected. Two red maggots were put on the size fourteen hook on a three feet long hook length of four pound line and the two and a half ounce oval Drennen block end feeder was filled with red maggots also. (Never try and do this the other way round or your feeder will empty while you are putting your hook bait on!)

The swim requires a fifty yard cast (hence the ten pound main line) so I made several casts with no hook bait just a full swim feeder to prime the swim, there is quite a lot of accuracy needed so I did the casting for him all day.

The river was still flowing quite strongly and so I cast slightly upstream and as soon as the feeder hit the water I let out about thirty feet of line before closing the bail arm. This forms a large bow of line below the feeder and prevents it being dragged across the current by the pressure of the flow on the main line and if the feeder moves at all then it remains in a path parallel to the current and the maggots escaping from it continue along the same line. This is a very important thing when fishing any sort of feeder on a river, the idea is to create a trail of bait samples down the current along the same line and this will not happen if the feeder is dragged by the current or cast off line.

He sat behind the rod which was placed almost vertically to keep as much line out of the water as possible and waited for his first bite. The rod was fitted with a three ounce carbon quiver tip rather than a fibre glass one as with this method the bites show as a quick,short pull and then the tip straightens and this is shown better by a springy carbon tip than a softer glass one.

The tip twitched and then straightened showing the typical “drop back” bite and he lifted in to his first fish, much to my relief. I had told him not to strike as the fish would have already hooked itself against the weight of the feeder and he was playing his first big chub. He did well to keep the chub out of the far bank snags and bring it across the fast section in the middle of the river to the waiting net. The fish weighed four pounds six ounces, not bad for his first chub!

A couple of casts later he started getting false bites and I suspected the chub were picking up the feeder and shaking it to get the maggots out and ignoring the hook bait down stream, so I shortened the hook length to four inches and the next cast resulted in him hooking a very powerful fish which took him straight into the far bank tree roots despite his best efforts. I replaced the end tackle and stepped the hook length up to six pounds the heaviest I had with me, but I was now worrying about the rod not being designed for the hook and hold tactics we were being required to use.

Aidan also lost his next fish the same way due to his lack of experience, as much as the lack of power in the rod, so I made the next cast a little short to give him more time before the fish reached the snags. This resulted in fewer bites but he landed his next fish which weighed five pounds one ounce, a huge fish for one so young.

He then lost one more fish, much more powerful than the previous one, the hook pulling out but finally landed a real trophy of five and a half pounds.

A great day’s fishing for him and an eye opener for me.

I, of course, had to have some of this so I returned to Windsor on my own on Friday armed with a Shimano Technium Specialist rod with a one and a quarter pound test curve. My first fish made the journey worth while, it weighed five pounds eleven ounces and was easily beaten by the more powerful rod although I was using a lighter hook length, five and a half pounds but only four inches long. Alas no-one was handy to take the photograph.

The second fish was bigger but my digital scales had some sort of malfunction and told me it was seven pounds five ounces and I went into a state of total euphoria until common sense reasserted itself some time later. I weighed it again to be told it was in fact six pounds six, much more the size I would have thought. I have since tested the scales and they read accurately every time. This time the photo was taken by a chap out walking with his family, very kind of him considering I terrified him with my panting, wide eyed approach (I still thought it weighed 7lb 5ozs) which he mistook for some kind of psychopathic illness and almost fled (see eyes in photo).

I caught four more fish for a total of six and an overall weight of thirty three pounds.

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As a result of my first visit to the river Kennet this season I felt I had learned some lessons and could not wait to return to put them to the test. On my last visit few of the other anglers I spoke to had caught more than one fish and none as big as the two I caught.

I thought that the larger baits that they were using, such as large pellets and boilies and chunks of luncheon meat did not work as well as the smaller baits I had had such success with. Was the way I was presenting the bait the secret or was it the size of the bait?

I decided to return to the river on Thursday afternoon to try a more traditional method of Barbel fishing but with small baits. I fished one of my favourite swims on the Dalston beat of the Wasing Estate, just upstream of the Rowbarge public house near Midgham station, Woolhampton. Here the river was flowing fast with lots of overhanging trees on the far bank. Definitely not the swim for five and a half pound hook lengths, so I tackled up with my Hexagraph No. 2 with a Purist centrepin and twelve pound line. I chose this rod because it is powerful enough for the twelve pound line, despite it being listed as only one and a quarter pound test curve, and yet soft enough not to pull out the small hooks the bait size would dictate.

The method I chose consisted of a heavy open ended swimfeeder on a sliding paternoster link, a short ten pound flourocarbon hook length with a size twelve heavy forged hook tied with a knotless knot. On the hair I had mounted a small bait band to enable me to fish a banded pellet or a boilie. Perhaps I had better explain this a little further - if you thread your boilie onto a baiting needle (the type with the sharp point and the small barb) and then pull the bait band into the boilie the bait band will reduce in diameter as it stretches and expand again inside the boilie when released, the boilie will stay on the end of the hair. This enables you to fish most small pellets or any size of boilie.

I filled the feeder with small pellets and a few 10mm Dynamite Baits Source boilies with a plug of Halibut Pellet groundbait at each end. After seven or eight casts into a gap in the far bank trees with no bait on the hook I rested the swim for about an hour.

My first cast with an 8mm pellet resulted in a nice roach a few ounces short of a pound and when I rebaited, this time with a 10mm Source boilie, the rod tip started to bounce as the feeder was towed down stream. After a short but vigorous fight I netted this fine barbel of about four pounds.

I rested the swim for another half an hour after feeding a little more and then caught two more roach, followed by this barbel, a little bigger than the last.

The chap in the next swim who had remained fishless using larger pellets and who had acted as my photographer then went home and shortly before dark I caught this last fish about the same size as the first.

I decided to compose this picture in the John Wilson style but it was too dark to find any flowers.

It would seem that small baits will bear some experimentation. I will report back.

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Well the river season has finally started and as I promised in my previous post, my first outing was yesterday on my beloved river Kennet. The river was carrying a lot of extra water due to the recent rain and was nicely coloured, not the usual grey/brown (caused I believe by boats on the canal) but a more healthy, earthy brown due to soil being washed in by the rain.

My enthusiasm soared as I drove from stretch to stretch but all my favourite swims were taken. I have rarely seen the Wasing Estate so busy. I had anticipated this however and my Toyota 4x4 was fully loaded with enough tackle to cover most eventualities (some people will ask “What’s new, isn’t it always?”). I have long had the ambition to fish the Kennet with a pole and maybe catch a barbel on one and so the new pole gear I had bought from Les was also in the back of my “truck”.

It may have been fate but the swim I had always considered most suitable for fishing for barbel on the pole was vacant. This is the swim in the car park just above Brimpton bridge where there is a bit of slack water on the opposite bank on the inside of a bend, here the river narrows to about nine metres, a comfortable length to fish a pole. This part of the river is virtually snag free and provides plenty of room to play a fish. The decision, it seems, had been made for me.

I set up a Browning pole with a power top three fitted with what Les had informed me was a number fourteen elastic, the main line was 6.6lb (.18mm) and the hook lenth 5.5lb (.16mm) both Silstar Match Team. The hook was a size twelve Mustad with a small bait band on a hair tied with a knotless knot. The float was a new experience for me, it was a lollipop type, Desque made by Sensas and carrying 6gms.

I had experimented with this type of float when I used to fish the river Thames from a boat, it is designed to enable you to hold the float still in flowing water presenting the bait stationary and I learned that they have to be over shotted to prevent them riding up in the current, so much so that only the pressure of the current is holding the float on the surface. This is how I set up the float with a large olivette and a string of shot about a foot from the hook with the last six inches of line pinned to the bottom with two number six shot.

I was able to introduce hemp, maggots, casters and small mixed pellets with a bait dropper on this powerful pole set up and I did this regularly over the next hour. Meanwhile I set up another pole with 8-10 elastic and trotted an ordinary river pole float along the crease near the far bank, this provided a lot of fun with the small chub, dace, bleak and gudgeon which readily took my maggot and caster hook baits.

Martin James, who I know from years ago, turned up and checked my ticket and we had a little chat. He expressed the opinion that barbel should not be caught on the pole as landing them takes so long they are exhausted when returned. This caused me some concern as he is a very knowledgeable angler and I respect his opinion, so I resolved to be extra careful when returning any barbel I caught. I am no stranger to nursing barbel in the shallows for up to twenty minutes when caught on normal tackle, particularly in warm weather with low oxygen levels.

Shortly after Martin left I caught a couple of slightly larger chub, still under a pound and this is often the sign that the bigger fish are moving in. I put some more feed into the slack water on the far bank and put an 8mm halibut pellet into the bait band on the Browning pole. I shipped out the rig so that it settled just off the main current and put the pole in the rest.

I was just enjoying not having to hold a heavy pole while trotting and had just lit a cigarette (yes, I know it’s bad for you but you’ve got to die of something!) when the float tore away, the tip of the pole bent alarmingly and metres of elastic shot out. I found myself playing a very powerful fish. It felt much bigger than the three or four pound fish I had hoped for.

There are people who will tell you that playing fish on elastic is easy and that you are nothing more than a counter weight on the other end of the pole but I found that I needed all my skill to keep in touch with this fish and was soon grateful for my stillwater experience with big fish on the pole and for all the advice I have had from good pole anglers of my aquaintance (you know who you are).

I will admit that it seemed to take longer to get some sort of control over this fish than it would have done on my normal barbel float tackle but then the centrepins that I favour are very effective fish playing tools. When I saw the fish for the first time I was amazed at the size and then disaster struck.

Instead of my normal landing net with the heavy Conoflex duty telescopic pole I had a take-apart match landing net pole on which the last foot before the net can be removed after netting to facilitate unhooking the fish over the keepnet. When I put the net into the fast water at my feet in preparation for netting the fish the current removed this last foot, along with my net and swept it down stream. I was then grateful that the beat was so crowded and I was able to call to the chap upstream of me to lend me his net. Thanks Gordon!

The fish weighed 9lb 5ozs and was in beautiful condition if a little slim, certainly she will be double figures in the winter.

I rested her in the landing net in the current prior to weighing her and taking this photograph, mindful of what Martin had said and then quickly carried her in a weighing sling to a shallow stretch just up stream where I expected to have to nurse her back to strength in the current. I had no sooner removed her from the sling in the water and turned her upright and into the current when she tore herself free of my hands and powered upstream and away from me, not what I expected at all. I kept a close watch for a few minutes in case she reappeared, belly up, but saw no more sign of her.

Gordon kept an eye on my tackle while I drove to the nearest tackle shop and bought a new landing net, I had my usual pole in my rod bag. Before I went I put some more bait in with a bait dropper and did the same on my return.

After lunch I had a bit more fun with the other, lighter, pole rig and caught some more small fish and then went back to the slack on the bend with the heavy rig and another halibut pellet. I had fulfilled my ambition to catch a barbel on the pole and did not expect much more from what had already become a “red letter day”. Once again shortly after placing the rig, the elastic was steaming from the arched pole tip and I was into another big fish. This time I had the lessons learned from the last fish in my armoury and was able to make a better job of handling the tackle and the fish was in the net a little sooner. She weighed 9lb 3ozs but was cetainly a different fish as some marks around her anal fin (presumably caused by recent spawning) proved.

I fished on afterwards but pulled the hook out of a fish just before dark but was more than happy with my first day back on the river.

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Last week in between coaching sessions I decided that I needed some tench fishing away from my usual coaching haunts. I chose to visit Bury Hill Fisheries and fish the main lake as a result of an email from Bury Hill full of glowing reports of feeding tench. The first of May found me on the long bank of the old lake just after seven thirty armed with two light carp rods and a steeped up float rod, intending to fish any combination in pairs. The day ticket for two rods was £17, which I thought a little steep but the old lake is a very pleasant environment in which to fish and I have had some nice tench in the past.

One of the legering rods was set up with a semi fixed heavy open ended feeder with a short hook length, bolt rig style and the bait was a hair rigged 10mm. Source boilie from Dynamite Baits on a size 10 hook. The feeder was filled with the same small boilies and ground bait. The second leger rod had a much lighter open ended feeder on a paternoster link, with a three feet hook length and a size fourteen hook. This rig was fished in conjunction with maggots.

I fished the float rod with a waggler and a bunch of maggots on the bottom about two rod lengths out next to some lillies. I put a bed of groundbait next to the lillies first thing, intending to leave the float fishing for later and filled the feeder on the first rod with boilies and groundbait. I made eight or ten casts with this rod to the tip of a patch of lillies about twenty five yards away, filling the feeder each time, to put down a bed of bait.

The groundbait was a mix of two parts Expo to one part Marine Pellet Groundbait and two parts brown crumb. Hemp, pellets, sweetcorn and dead maggots were added to the mix.

I cast out the first rod with the semi fixed rig and as I was filling the lighter feeder on the other rod the bobbin shot to the first ring and I was playing a bream about two pounds with the boilie, still on its hair hanging from the side of it’s mouth. As bream were not my target I decided to rest this side of the swim and try the maggot feeded on the other side. No bites were forthcoming here, so I decided to float fish.

Bream nearly every cast both on the float and on the legered boiles, I must have had twenty five up to about four pounds but no tench. I was able to unhook most of them in the water from the edge of the fishing platform to cause them the least possible stress and avoid coating myself, my landing net and unhooking mat in bream slime. I have never been a fan of stillwater bream but I suppose it is better than blanking!

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As part of the preparations for selling my house my tackle store and workshop needed to be tidied out and I asked my longest serving student Tayler Clark to help me. He has done so before and is a pleasure to work with and he left with a lot of tackle, the sort of stuff you don’t want to throw out due to sentimental reasons but never use anymore. I also promised him a day’s carp fishing, so a few days later I took him to Royal Berkshire Fisheries and whilst I float fished for some more big roach, he ledgered pellets for the carp. His casting is now so accurate that he was able to fish right up against an island and was catching fish all day.

I have also had a couple of days at Marsh Farm. The first day produced a couple of crucian carp to about two and a half pounds and three tench, the biggest being over six pounds.

The second day was a disaster, one decent bite from a good crucian which shed the hook and a few small rudd. That’s why we call it “fishing” and not “catching”.

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We have certainly been blessed with a mild winter this time round and I wondered if the tench in a local shallow lake would be feeding early this year. All of nature seems to have been put out of phase by the unusual warm winter and it was with some hope that I arranged to visit the private tench lake in Surrey. As only one bank was fishable I opted for my favourite swim, even though it meant fishing into a cold strong wind.

I set up two Harrison stepped up float rods both with centrepins loaded with six pound line. Both rigs were set up to fish wagglers but one had a size fourteen hook for maggot and hooker pellets and the other had a size eight for a special bait. The latter hook was a new pattern I was trying, being lighter in the wire than most size eight hooks commonly sold for the carp hauling market, the Kamasan 983 is a very strong hook but made of finer wire to give lightness and a very sharp point. The barb is very small and easily crushed down.

The special bait was prawns which I knew had been sucessful there in the past but I chose a new twist - I fed chopped “Tesco frozen value prawns” but I was going to fish bits of king prawn on the hook. The size of the hook also gave me an option of fishing a sizeable lump of paste.

I was surprised to see that my favourite lilly patch had not totally died out during the winter and this saved me looking for the sunken remains with a plummet. I fed the chopped prawns with hemp to one side of it and maggots, hemp and small pellets to the other.

Most of the bites came to the pieces of king prawn and although I missed more than my share due to the problems caused by the strong wind, I ended the day with four tench and a bonus bream, the latter took a small hooker pellet. Not bad for the last week in February.

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Yesterday I went back to the swims that Chris Clark had shown me at Royal Berkshire Fisheries but this time I left my pole fishing kit at home. I wanted to catch some more big roach but this time on a rod and centrepin combination as the big roach seem to inhabit the margins on this fishery and this makes it suitable for the centrepin approach that I so love.

I set up the Harrison 15ft GTI match rod with a lightweight Youngs centrepin loaded with two and a half pound Maxima, the float was a Drennan stillwater blue carrying 3BB and a size twenty hook to a two pound hook length completed the set up. I intended to fish single maggot or caster so I began by feeding hemp, maggot and caster a little at a time as I set up and for a half an hour whilst I had a cup of tea and a smoke.

I was fishing about five feet deep two rod lengths out very close to an over hanging bush and I had set the float to fish with about six inches of line on the bottom. The casters had been frozen so very few were suitable for hook bait (the freezing seems to make most of them burst) but they were fine for loose feed and I was catching straight away with maggot or caster on the hook. The small fish showed first but clouds of mud in the shallow water warned me that the weather was mild enough for the carp to feed and sure enough I hooked something that took me straight into the roots, my tackle being too fine to stop it.

I set up my Harrison Interceptor stepped up float rod with a youngs purist centrepin loaded with six pound Maxima and started to feed a little sweetcorn with my loose feed. The result was this common carp which put up an excellent fight in such a confined swim. It took double sweetcorn on a lift rig, a method I use a lot for tench but it works on carp as well.

I switched back to the lighter rig with double bronze maggot and soon started to catch the better roach, the best of which weighed a pound and three quarters.

Just before dusk as I was thinking about packing up I caught a perch that weighed exactly two pounds, good fun on light tackle. I am beginning to like this fishery and hope to be able to include it in my coaching portfolio.

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Last Friday I took Les Weller (Weller of the Yard) down to Timsbury Manor to fish the river Test and its carrier streams. Les had asked me about this fishery as he had seen it mentioned on some angling forum but had never fished it and as most of our local rivers were about to burst their banks it seemed the ideal venue.

We arrived at about eight thirty in the morning and found the main river very swollen but the carriers were fishable. Unfortunately the banks were sodden and it was like crossing the battlefield of the Somme just to get to the water’s edge. Walking ankle deep in mud soon makes the legs ache despite travelling light which is the order of the day for this type of fishing. The bailiff was very helpful and advised us on the best places to fish but the whole place has a run down look to it and Les commented that it needed some real money spent on it to increase its appeal. He thinks the place could be a goldmine but he knows about these things as he manages the Surrey estate I have mentioned before.

While we were setting up at the car his rod fell down and his holdall fell on top of it breaking off the top ring and removing the liners to a couple of others, a disasterous thing to happen at the beginning of the day. Doubly so because for probably the first time for years I had not brought a spare float rod, as anyone who has ever fished with me will tell you, I normally bring two or three of everything I need and one or two things that might come in useful.

Les did not let this stop him for too long and we were soon trotting our floats on one of the carriers. We both caught some grayling and a few trout, the biggest of mine, a brown trout weighed nearly five pounds. I have been spoiled by the river Itchen when it was at its peak a couple of years ago and four or five two pound grayling were caught each trip but I was happy with this fish which might have been a pound.

I’ve cropped all but my hands and the fish from this picture because I’m wearing an expression of bewilderment and extreme concentration that would be understood by anyone who has tried to hold anything other than a very small grayling with cold hands, they are like a muscular bar of soap.

The weather was not particularly our friend on this outing as the down stream wind carried very cold rain and despite changing swims several times not much else was caught, although Les did manage a nice roach of about a pound from a very sheltered carrier.

I was using my fifteen foot Harrison GTI match rod and Les obviously took a shine to it as couple of days later he told me he had ordered a slightly more powerful Harrison rod from Mark Tunley, a rod builder he had found on the internet and this chap is repairing his old rod as well. Les wants me to write a review of his new toy when he gets it so watch this space, although I don’t promise to be totally unbiased as I love Harrison rods.

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Last week I received a wonderful email from James Halton, a student from one of my autumn pike handling courses. James has kindly agreed to let me share his email here.

Dear Martin

This weekend I finally had enough time to go for a proper pike fishing session. Rupert was away so a friend of mine, Matt asked if he could tag along. We went to a section of the Aylesbury Arm Canal, near a turning bay near Aston Clinton. On Friday night at the tackle shop I was told that numerous pike come regularly out of that stretch, and the reeds on the nearside bank are always a good bet. On arriving at the canal it was extremely cold and we struggled to catch many livebaits, but luckily there were just enough for the day. So I set up two livebait paternoster rigs just as you had shown me, one for Matt and one for myself. However I found the helicopter rigs a tad fiddly, so I settled for a John Roberts paternoster boom. And a “Pike System” egg bob float to finish the rig off. I used a rubber band which worked very well as a floatstop.

After about an hour and a half one of the skimmers became increasingly agitated, the float bobbed under and slid strongly to the right. Seeing this I picked up the rod and gave it a hefty whack (with my new Greys Prodigy Deadbait which I got for Christmas), I connected into a fine 5 or 6lb jack pike that fought well. Matt landed it and I removed the hooks like you showed me. It weighed in at 5lb 8oz. Matt had the next pike on a medium size roach, he played it well on his new “Monterra carp” rod. I netted it and took out the hooks, a fine fish at 3lb 6oz. I struck into the next pike, but as I soon found out it was much larger than expected. It jumped spectacularly and looked well over 12lb. However unfortunately the hooks flew out at the net and the elusive predator sulked back to the depths of the canal.

The next pike came on a large skimmer and resulted immediately after the cast. It fought hardly and weighed in at 5lb 2oz. Just as our day was going so well, a barge ploughed through the swim ruining it. We then decided to head for home.

Just before Christmas I also had the pleasure of catching a 12lb ghost carp, the biggest fish of my local venue. It took a cocktail of maggot and sweetcorn. But I did not intend to catch it, I was going for roach at the time. It was on my Abu enticer match rod and 2lb line, it looked as if it was going to snap in two! Anyhow some kids helped me net it and photograph it, but they failed to actually press down on the button!

He also sent some fine photographs.

Another young angler set on a path that will provide him with rewards for the rest of his life and he is already sharing his knowledge.

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Last week Chris Clark persuaded me to go after some big stillwater roach at Royal Berkshire Fishery where he did very well last season. The day was very mild with little or no wind and I decided to use my pole with a number four elastic and a two pound hook length. As the lake we were fishing is only about five feet deep I was able to use a very light pole float shotted down until the tip was only a dimple on the surface. The bait was a single red maggot on a size twenty hook. I presented the float under an overhanging bush at about eight metres and fed maggot and hemp.

Chris was into fish straight away and had several very good roach before I got my first bite, we caught fish all day long and between us caught over twenty roach over a pound. Both of us hooked carp, for which this fishery is famous but this was usually a fleeting experience on such light tackle, although Chris managed to land one of the smaller ones on slightly heavier tackle.

The best fish of the day was this fine specimen of exactly two pounds (not one pound fifteen ounces as they usually are). I wish I could catch roach like this on my beloved river Kennet.

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Over the past year or so I have been working with Steve Gray of All Things Piscatorial and we have fished together a number of times as we share a love of trotting rivers. Steve had mentioned that he had never caught a grayling so on the 13th December I took him to my favourite stretch of the river Itchen near Southampton. After a cooked breakfast in a café in Eastleigh we arrived at the river at 9 a.m. and were soon catching trout.

I tried my favourite swim fishing from a jetty on a sharp bend and managed the first graying of the day.The fish took double red maggot but fish can also be caught on sweetcorn.

Steve soon had his first grayling and was very pleased with his achievement but I wish he could have fished here a couple or years ago when the fish were much bigger and more plentiful.

I had given him some floating braid to trot with and I think I have another convert. We wandered up and down the river with only a few more fish to show for our efforts but both enjoyed the day just fishing the way we wanted without having to worry about anyone else.

Unusually I caught the biggest graying of the day, Steve generally gives me a good hiding when I take him to one of my venues, he is a very good angler.

This fish weighed about a pound and three quarters and two years ago would not have been mentioned. What are we doing to our rivers?

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A couple of years ago my friends and I spent a lot of time each winter fishing for grayling on the river Itchen but then low summer flows and an algal bloom caused a massive fish kill and most of the big grayling were lost. Last winter it was difficult to catch grayling at all.

Last week I was in the Davies Angling shop in Staines to buy some bait and got talking to Phil Leach the new owner. He mentioned that he had just had a great day’s grayling fishing on the river Itchen and explained that he had fished the Lower Itchen Fishery. I was delighted that the river had recovered so quickly and bought some extra red maggots for a trip down there the following day. As this is the first year in the last five years that I have not renewed my season ticket for the fishery, I telephoned the bailiff Jon Hall and the owner Lyndsey Farmiloe to book a day ticket and I was pleased that they remembered me.

Wednesday morning at 9 a.m. I was at the fishery as it opened and it was great to be back. I now own a Toyota 4x4 so the track along the riverside no longer holds any fears and I drove down to the top end of the coarse fishing stretch. Parking right by the riverside and fishing with my back against the front bumper of my car is a luxury I have missed and I was soon playing a spirited brown trout. About the third trot down I hooked my first grayling and was reminded of how well they fight. It was only about ten ounces, much smaller than they used to be, but I was very pleased to see it.

I am still using four pound Fireline braid for trotting and the lack of stretch in this line amplifies the fight, as well as making it easier to hook fish at long range. I am also experimenting with some new hooks that were given to me by Dave Higham on my last visit to his fishery at Oham Lakes. These are made by Kensaki and are quite fine in the wire but Dave promised me they were very strong.

I used them in size eighteen tied to a two and three quarters pound hook length and, as I had hoped, they dealt with trout up to nearly three pounds as well as grayling to a pound and three quarters very well. They are just the right size and shape for my favourite double red maggot hook bait.

Just after lunch I was trotting on a long straight stretch of river, down past the remains of a weed bed behind which I have found the grayling sheltering in the past. At the end of the trot I always hold the float back hard to make the bait rise up in the water, this often provokes a take that is often felt rather than seen on the float. On this occasion I felt a sharp tap and struck into what felt like a small fish, as I started to gain line the rod slammed over and the fish tore off down stream. It was a similar feeling to hooking a small roach or dace on the river Kennet and having it taken by a big pike and at first I thought that this was what had happened.

After twenty yards of line had been stipped from my reel at great speed I realised that this was not a pike and as I only load my centrepins with forty yards of line to prevent it bedding in, I decided it was time to get up off my ar*e and give chase. I eventually managed to get downstream of the fish and turn it into the current. I then realised that my landing net was thirty yards away and was too small anyway. The fish turned down stream again and I lost the twenty yards of line I had just won back in one very powerful run and again I had to run to get below it. In doing so I passed another very understanding angler who had a larger net and followed me. The fish eventually rolled into the net and I had caught my first salmon, a seven pound cock fish who was very coloured and had been in the river some time. Shame it was the wrong time of the year and I didn’t have a salmon license but it would have gone back anyway.

I had always hoped that my first salmon would be caught on a fly and not on double red maggot on a size eighteen match hook to a two and three quarters pound hook length. Still, beggars can’t be choosers and I wouldn’t have missed that fight for anything. I ended the day with several trout and a dozen grayling to a pound and three quarters, the sidestream was, alas, unfishable due to the floating leaves but it was wonderful to see that the river is recovering.

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On Wednesday I took Steve Gray from ATP (All Things Piscatorial) for a return trip to the river Kennet. I had booked him a guest ticket on the Warren Beat on the Wasing Estate and the plan was to trot the river for the roach and dace. I had not had a day fishing for myself for some time as I had been quite busy with my coaching activities and so this day, in good company, was to be something of a rest and recuperation session. I therefore chose to fish in my favourite manner, wading and trotting a float on light tackle.

Picture by Steve Gray

This is, for me, proper fishing - in tune with the tackle and the environment, totally absorbed in my chosen sport. I am not chasing a big fish that has been caught by many people and given a name, nor am I trying to fill a keep net fuller than the other anglers in a match. I am only in competition with the fish and the river and that is enough for me, no worries about targets or beating personal bests. Just enjoying practicing the skills I have aquired over the years in communion with nature.

Picture by Steve Gray

As you can see from the last picture, the swim I had chosen was shallow and quite pacy. Despite the plentiful cover provided by some tree foliage in the water at the bottom of the swim the fish were soon spooked by many of their numbers being caught and returned. It was time for a move. Steve wanted to go upstream to a peg we had fished last time where he had some trouble with pike, as he had brought some pike tackle to even the score.

We moved and whilst I tried to get the roach and dace feeding he killed his first roach and suspended it under a float on heavier tackle with a wire trace. The result was this magnificent perch that tipped the scales at exactly three pounds.

I think the Wasing Kennet Syndicate may have a new member next season.

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Last Saturday I travelled down to Whinwhistle Fishery near Romsey in Hampshire for the second All Things Piscatorial Roadshow. I had arranged to stay in a hotel overnight to attend the social evening and discussion the night before the match on the Sunday. Only Steve Gray and Ian Coates were there, along with their partners and as the journey took less than an hour I could have travelled down the following morning and saved myself £40. I spent a disturbed night in the hotel due to a long lasting wedding reception and arrived at the fishery in time for breakfast with the others. There were only seven coaches in attendance which was a disapointment as we were raising money for the The Teenage Cancer Trust. We had lots of raffle prizes, kindly donated by various people but no-one to sell the tickets to.

It was decided over breakfast not to count carp in the match, I am afraid I was responsible for this as I stated my reluctance to put carp into any kind of keep net and I hope this did not spoil the enjoyment for the others.

I am neither a match angler nor an expert with a pole but I enjoyed the element of competition and soon entered into the spirit of things.

I was pegged next to Steve Gray who proceeded to give me a right pasting, ending the match with nearly four times the weight I weighed in. He arranged for his wife Paula to distract me by constantly taking photographs of me, I hope she likes sweetcorn.

Steve has written a full report of the day, well worth a read. The day ended with Steve having his head shaved for the charity.

I understand that a lot of money was raised for the chosen charity but it was a shame that the event could not have been better supported by the other coaches. I do hope that there will be more support for the next one.

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