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.

The dog team.

I had volunteered to help my old friend, fellow PAA coach and more importantly, my accountant, Graham Walker to run a charity match in aid of the Alzheimer’s Society. Graham, his wife Anne and her sisters have already raised over £5000 for the charity and Anne is planning to do a sponsored walk on the Great Wall of China. See here for more details of Anne’s trek.

We arrived in Graham’s delightful village, Newton upon Derwent at midday and I was whisked off to see the fishery and visit a couple of tackle dealers. The shops were very generous with their donations, particularly Thompsons in Murton who told us to help ourselves to £100 worth of tackle from their shelves and then added two rods to our haul.

Here is a list from Graham of all who supported us:

Pool Bridge Farm let us use two lakes
Martech (UK) gave us the prize money
The Environment Agency provided a rod & reel for every novice
Cormoran provided a keep net for everyone plus a few good prizes and some Muckboots
Dynamite - loads of bait etc
Roy Marlow gave us a day for two at the Glebe
Thompsons in Murton let Martin Porter and me do a trolley dash for prizes and then gave us two rods
York tackle gave bait, a rod and other stuff
Joe Traves provided the meat for a barbecue for 80 people
Bruno, Derek North and Martin Porter came to support the event - I’d have struggled without them
The thirty five contestants, some of whom had to go to the pub every night to sign up new sponsors

and finally, when his mates had gone home, the winner of the £200 first prize in the “proper” match came around to donate his winnings - Chris Kendall, what a gent!

The matches, one for experienced anglers and one for beginners, were held at Pool Bridge Farm and my job was to help the beginners by providing coaching and tackle if needed. There were lots of prizes and a raffle so all the beginners went home with something.

The weather was very kind to us, if a little too hot and everyone caught fish.

This lad went on to win the beginners match

Not all the beginners were youngsters and Bernard caught this fine tench and the first still water barbel I have seen.

He certainly had a wonderful day, taking second prize and we all finished the day with a wonderful barbeque.

Graham and Anne are bird lovers and they have a barn owl that has been rescued but can never be returned to the wild since she would be very unlikely to survive. She lives in a special cage with room to fly and the privacy of an enclosed box in which to sleep. She’s very much still a wild animal and in no way tame. It was a great moment, sat in the darkness of Graham’s conservatory, to wait for the owl to make an appearance each evening at about 9 p.m.

You can see a larger version of the picture here.

We left late Sunday morning intending to return home in a leisurely fashion but made a diversion through Chesterfield to look at my old stamping ground. We had lunch just outside on the road to Matlock in a pub called The Three Horseshoes in Spitewinter - the food was better than we had dared hope considering that we stopped at the first place we liked the look of. It was probably the best Sunday lunch I have ever eaten and I would recommend it to anyone both for the quality of food and the excellent, friendly service.

A wonderful weekend with many thanks to Graham and Anne for their hospitality.

My reputation at stake, I considered for a while, thinking that the reel was similar to the Lewtham Engineering Leeds reel which can be picked up on Ebay for about £60 in mint condition. The reel was quite free running, certainly free enough to trot all but the slowest rivers, much better than the reels that Shakespeare used to produce, which I always thought to be too expensive.

The reel is called Shadowlanda and is a ball bearing type centrepin, six inches in diameter which makes it larger than most, and seems to be made of some kind of pressed alloy, making it very lightweight for its size and more suitable for trotting a float on rivers for medium sized fish than margin fishing for carp.

On the back are two knobs, the black one at the top switches the ratchet on and off but the silver lever type applies an anti-reverse mechanism similar to a fixed spool reel. The reel also has another innovation - the two handles seem quite small and while this is an advantage when “batting” the reel with the fingers on the rim to achieve a fast retrieve they might be difficult to grip with cold hands when playing a fish. However, on closer examination they are telescopic in construction and when pulled out they double in size. Now that is clever and something I have never seen before!

My estimate of the price proved to be way out… I bought the reel and got change from a ten pound note. Yes, a large diameter centrepin reel for the price of three pints of casters. It is not the same high quality engineering as the Youngs reels but it does the job.

I have since discovered that that a five inch version is also available. Thatcham Angling is now out of stock but the owner assures me he will be getting some more in.

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.

Coaching a young fly fisherman

Coaching waggler casting

Coaching feeder casting

Inside the tent tables had been arranged around the walls and pike, pole, carp and general coarse fishing as well as sea fishing and fly tying, demonstrations were given.

Teaching how to tie sea fishing rigs

Pole fishing instruction

Fly tying instruction

Flytying student

Carp rig clinic

Youngsters being shown insects and crustaceans

The Loughs Agency complex in Londonderry is very impressive and we were all very jealous of their facilities, especially the displays under a domed roof concerning the salmon, its life style and environment. We were made very welcome by everyone we met and apparently our contribution was well received by the public who seemed to flock to the site despite the showers. The Broomhill hotel we stayed in was very comfortable, the food excellent and the service superb. The picture below shows what they had to put up with but it gives no indication of the weird senses of humour that the hotel staff will probably tell their grandchildren about.

The team

The only letdown in the whole experience was the travelling. I left home at 3.15 a.m. on Friday morning and drove to Pershore near Worcester with Lee Blundell. Here we met Derek North who had organised the whole thing. With several other coaches we piled into a mini bus and a van and drove to near Preston where we picked up some more coaches. Then on to Scotland where near Lockerbie we picked up two more of the team and on to Stranraer for the ferry. A very fast crossing on the Seacat took us to Belfast with only the drive right across Ulster to Londonderry to complete.

We set up the stands for the next day at the Loughs Agency and finally reached the hotel at 9.30pm where they offered us a full dinner menu without batting an eye. After two days of coaching we were worried about the return journey, as the weather forecast was full of gale warnings and we were convinced that the ferry would be cancelled. The gales failed to materialise and the return journey went without a hitch… but still took nearly fourteen hours.

Great fun, a great welcome, wonderful people and good company! What more could you want?

I cast the feeder into the usual spot and we sat back and waited. Nothing happened for about an hour, despite about six recasts with the feeder refilled and I began to wonder if the fish had become wary of the short hook length. I then lengthened the hook length to four feet to place the baited hook well away from the feeder in what the fish may well consider to be a safer area, the next cast resulted in a sharp pull on the tip and the usual drop back bite.

Aidan lifted the rod and bullied the fish away from the far bank roots as I had shown him. The fish weighed four pounds ten ounces.

The next fish was a monster at six pounds five ounces and took all of Aidan’s newly learned skills to keep it out of the many snags on the far bank. This is a huge fish for a fifteen year old lad and only an ounce below my best chub.

The last fish of the day was five pound fourteen ounces, making his two day total of chub up to six, four of which were over five pounds.

I don’t think he yet realises how lucky he has been!

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.

The day started for me when I left home at 7.30 a.m. to drive to Slough to pick up one of my regular students, Aidan. The drive can be done in forty five minutes, traffic allowing. This morning it did no such thing, and it took me one hour and forty five minutes so I was knackered before I started. I picked up Aidan from his home on time, nevertheless, as I always leave plenty of time for such contingencies rather than let my students down and drove him to Royal Berkshire Fishery. There was a South West wind that was blowing onto the far bank of the main lake and we had no option but to fish into the face of it in order to be sure of catching fish but even this wind had a cold edge to it and the days fishing was far from comfortable.

Whist Aidan set up a twelve foot match rod with a waggler I chopped some worms and casters and added a little hemp and some very small pellets, I introduced this to our chosen swim with a small cup fitted to the end of an old six metre telescopic pole that I adapted for this purpose and then added half a cup of red maggots our chosen hook bait. I baited two areas of the swim, one straight in front of us, where I expected to catch lots of roach and one to our left very close in to the bank, which I intended to leave until the last hour or so.

I set up the waggler to fish just on the bottom with just two number eights below the float, a size sixteen hook with two red maggots completed the rig and Aidan’s first cast was rewarded with an instant bite which he unfortunately missed. The second cast had the same result but this time the fish was hooked and landed, a small roach which would prove to be the first of many. Encouraged by this I stepped up the feed and he got a bite every cast.

The shoal soon responded to the angling pressure and the bites slowed down but by the end of the session he had caught about twenty to just under a pound. Through out the day I continued to feed the margin swim with chopped worm and red maggot and finally in the last hour I set up a slightly more powerful rod with a four pound hook length and a size twelve hook. This rig consisted of a small waggler fished well over depth with an AAA shot fished on the bottom four inches from the hook which was baited with a small lob worm.

During the last hour we had several tentative tugs but no bites developed until I was putting the other rod away prior to packing up altogether, the float shot away and the strike was met with no resistance but he worm was still intact. I instructed Aidan to cast back to the same place and the float almost immediately slid away, he was rewarded with a spirited fight of a fine perch which weighed two pounds fourteen ounces.

A very fine fish and a personal best for Aidan, a very fitting end to a good day.

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

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

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

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

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

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

).

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

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

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

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

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

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

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