Eee Lad, These Young 'uns

I told my 15 year old grandson Calum about the great day I had on Border Fisheries, fishing the margin pole with Eric, Ed and Jon. Course, he couldn't wait to go and as it happened he had a day off on Monday from his work experience from school.

It gave a false impression though, for they proved much more difficult to tempt with hookbait than they had last Friday. The several degrees overnight drop in temperature didn't help, nor the incessant rain that at times pounded on the surface like a million fingers beating a drum - which is just what I imagine it would sound like to a fish. No wonder it puts them off their snapping!

So although it did nothing but persist it down from the minute we got up to the minute we got home we did have a very enjoyable, if wet, day.

Image by Graham Marsden via Flickr

There was no one else on the lake (probably nobody else daft enough to venture out) so I put Calum in one of the swims where we'd had that good day on Friday, and helped him set up. I didn't have to do much as he's got the hang of this pole fishing now. I showed him just how close to the edge we were fishing, throwing in a handful of micro-pellets just six inches from the boards, and blow me if two or three carp weren't swirling and scoffing the pellets within two minutes!


No matter, we caught a dozen or so carp each (and I had my first tench from the water) including a couple of low doubles and one or two F1s, plus a few nice rudd on Sonu Baits new Fibre Paste which I'm very impressed with. But more about that later when I've given it a more thorough trial.

I told Calum not to strike at all, even if the float was sailing away, for most of the time they're line bites when you're fishing the margins in extremely shallow water and you end up hooking nothing or foul-hooking a fish, and almost certainly scaring the fish out of the swim for a short spell or more.

Course, these young 'uns don't always listen and he spent the first 15 minutes or so hooking nowt.

"I've told you," I said, "when it's a proper bite from a carp the elastic will be flying out before you can react. Just leave it, no matter how good the bite looks, and the carp will hook itself."

So he resisted striking, carried on trickling the micro pellets in, and and within a few minutes was playing his first fish of the day, a decent carp of about 8 - 9lb.

So that was another good day, with my only real problem getting him to pack up and go home.

 

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Fun Day on the Pole

There was me, Eric, Ed and Jon, down at Border Fisheries for a spot of explosive fishing via the margin pole. Along with, of course, a good English breakfast, some cruel banter, and plenty of laughs; all adding up to a great day out.

With the lack of rain the water was still low, probably a foot down on normal level, which meant that margin fishing right in the margins, no more than a foot out, was in water no more than a foot deep. In fact, Jon and Eric were fishing about 9 inches deep. Sounds ridiculous I know, considering the carp we were fishing for average 7 - 10lb. The water barely covers their backs when they patrol round the margin and then start digging into the feed we've introduced.

We caught the odd fish nice and steadily for the first couple of hours or so and then the carp really got their bibs on as they found the food traps we'd put down for them. I spent some time taking photographs and helping Eric (who has yet to master the margin pole) but that's part of my enjoyment. Jon in particular was doing really well on his Shimano Beastmaster Extreme margin pole and Ed landed a barbel that he first thought was a bigger than average carp. How do these stillwater barbel manage to look so fit and fight so well considering they're essentially river fish and have no right to live in stillwater? Well, not according to some.

Jon managed to break the top section of his pole through leaning on it with his elbow and had to change to a waggler rod, both me and Ed managed to get broke off on a big fish and had the indignity of seeing the elastic twang back into the pole with a loud thwack! (No, we don't make a habit of getting broken, but it does happen very occasionally). And Eric had a carp so heavy it made him break wind as he lifted it from the water, causing a pair of pigeons to fly off from a nearby tree with a rapid flutter of wings. And I don't blame them, he frightens us at times.

We had a great day and Ed and Jon were still catching as me and Eric left a little earlier.

It's not rocket science

Now this margin pole fishing on prolific fisheries like those down at Border Fisheries isn't rocket science. You don't need to be a master angler to work out how to catch them. But we weren't there to study for any degrees in angling and we vary our approach through a wide range of legering and float fishing methods just so we're not doing the same thing week in and week out. You know, like many specialist carp anglers who fish with two rods, bolt rigs, bite alarms and boilies, in the same swim on the same water week after week after week.
 
What's the essential difference? The specialist spends a lot more time at the waterside, catches fewer but bigger fish, and waits a lot longer between bites.
 
Is that a knock at specialist carp anglers? Not on your life, for I'm one myself from time to time, but too many specialist anglers spend far too much time knocking commercial fishery anglers, or pleasure anglers who catch lots of smaller fish, from that aloof and lofty perch they've built that suggests, to them at least, that what they do is soooooooo superior to what anyone else does.

Get a life I say, and just enjoy how you fish, however it is, and leave the other guy to enjoy how he fishes. You're not doing each other any harm are you? In fact, if we all wanted to fish the same waters in the same way, there wouldn't be room for all of us. So draw your horns in and get on with enjoying how you like to fish, and accept the fact that one man's fish is another man's poisson chat.

The next time you get the urge to knock commercials or a club water with platforms and easy access, take a look at the picture of Eric to the left. He's aged 71 and has Parkinson's disease, and if it wasn't for commercial fisheries and waters like Border Fisheries, he would no longer be able to enjoy his life-long love of angling. And that applies to thousands of elderly or disabled anglers who are unable to fish anywhere that doesn't have easy access, easy fishing and comfortable swims.

Would you deny them that?

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Floater Fishing For Surface Feeders

Surface fishing  for carp, rudd and trout appeals to me for two reasons: first and foremost it is an exciting and interesting fishing method, and the other thing is that it is riddled with problems which, when solved - if only briefly - offer a tremendous amount of satisfaction.

Fishing floating baits on the surface teaches you a lot about fish, for you can actually watch how they approach a bait. Although the conditions are quite different between the bottom and the surface, much of the fish's behaviour when confronted with a 'suspicious' bait on the top or on the bottom (the refusal, the aborted take, the snatch, and the confident suck) must be almost the same. Which all goes a long way towards teaching you what is going on at times when your bait lies out of sight on the bottom and your indicator tells you that something down there is showing an interest.





My first taste of surface fishing (other than dry-fly for trout, which has always been my favourite form of trout fishing) was with rudd on a small farm pond. I was only a boy at the time, but I distinctly remember, following a spell of float fishing for roach and rudd with my favourite home-made peacock quill floats, throwing in my bread leftovers for the moorhens to devour when I'd left, and seeing half a dozen or so hungry mouths attack the bread as though they were determined to beat the moorhens to it. That probably was part of the reason for the frenzied attack on the bread, for the rudd most likely knew that they had to get in first to stand a chance. What they wouldn't realise was that the moor hens would not make an appearance until I had moved out of earshot.

The other thing about that day that stands out in my mind is that although I had seen the rudd taking bread from the surface on many other occasions, it was only then that the thought entered my head that presenting a surface bait to them could be a good way of catching them! Fishing a slow-sinking bait was the nearest I had come to it before. I determined I would try it on my next visit, which was the next day as it happened. And the simple approach I adopted was to fish exactly as I had before, but with no shot on the line at all between hook and float. From that day I got better and better at catching those rudd off the top; finding the right length of bottom to use; the best hook size; timing of the strike; and how best to loose feed to keep them interested.

It was many years later, sometime in my salad years as a 'specimen hunter', when I went through my next spell of serious rudd hunting, this time on a Cheshire mere that was renowned for good tench and even better rudd. A good tench at the time was 4lb plus, of which the mere had a nice head of them up to 5lb or so, and the rudd went well over 2lb.

The big problem on this fishery was that there was only one short stretch of bank from which to fish, the remainder being a bird sanctuary and out of bounds to anglers. Not surprisingly, it was the far bank where most of the marginal vegetation grew and therefore where the biggest rudd spent most of their time. But when the wind was right they followed it towards the fishable bank; you could see them priming and swirling at the surface as they sucked in spent insects.

To catch the biggest fish still meant a cast of more than 30yds, which ruled out float fishing of any efficiency, and also meant that loose feeding with crusts by catapult was out of the question (Chum Mixer-type biscuits were still being fed to dogs and cats only; fish were yet to have the pleasure).

So the hookbait had to go out via Arlesey Bomb on some kind of leger set-up. And I had to find a way of introducing loose feed.

The rig I decided to use was pretty simple, no more, really, than a modified fixed paternoster. I knew the depth so it was easy to get the rig set up correctly without a great deal of trial and error. To this day I have yet to find a better method of surface fishing at long range, providing the water is no deeper than about 6ft. Any deeper and sliding/running rigs have to be employed, which are fine if there are no algae particles floating around, which can foul up swivel eyes and make hard work of everything.

The beauty of the rig is that it is so easy to fish the bait at any exact depth you choose simply by allowing the bait to lie on the surface, and then hauling it down by pulling on the line at the butt ring and attaching a heavy bobbin at the bottom of the loop as soon as the depth you wish to fish at is reached. The bobbin has to be just heavy enough to stop the crust from rising again - what carp anglers call critically balanced. That way the rudd have only to sniff at the bait and the bobbin will begin to rise. I think this is a very significant factor towards the success of this method, for if a rudd shows an interest in the bait, if only swirling close to it, the crust begins to rise towards the surface; in effect behaving very naturally indeed, and simply asking to be grabbed before a competitor snatches the morsel from under its nose. The bigger the bait you use (within reason) the more easily it is controlled and therefore the more efficient the technique becomes.

Image by Graham Marsden via Flickr

The method is equally successful with carp, although you need at least two Chum Mixer and some rig foam to make it work. Crust too, if you can find a water where the carp will still take it!


I solved the problem of feeding crusts at long range by mixing dry crusts in with a few balls of groundbait. The groundbait was mixed so that it dissolved quite rapidly on the bottom and released the crusts to rise to the surface. I packed as many crusts into the groundbait balls as I could get away with.

The bottom line was that it worked like a dream; both the method and the feeding technique, and I caught plenty of rudd to almost 3lbs over a period of several weeks.

My first efforts at surface fishing for carp also led me to a method I still use to this day, only slightly modified from the original rig.

As usual, I began by catching a fair number of carp on a freelined crust, and then, when the carp had travelled the learning curve, found I was watching them take all the free offerings and perhaps just one of the hooked ones before they spooked. Close observation revealed though, that they were being crafty and knocking the hooked crust about enough to cause crumbs to fall off it and sink towards the bottom, which they grabbed on the way down.

So I tied up a two-hook rig which had a big hook on the surface carrying a big crust, and a smaller hook 4ins below it carrying a piece of pinched flake simulating a piece that was sinking from the crust. They fell for it hook, line, and particularly the sinker!

I was concerned for some time that the rig could lead to some damage to a hooked fish; the loose hook fouling a snag and tethering the fish to it. But I was using it in a snag-free water and never did have any trouble. I would be wary of this, however, and think carefully before you use the rig. Also, be wary of the fish thrashing in the landing net, causing the loose hook to snag the mesh. What I do is immediately cut off the loose hook before I place the landing net down on the unhooking mat. Tying on a new hook-length is a small price to pay for being able to use an effective method without risk of damaging the fish.

The floater-fishing method I use most of the time today is the straightforward controller approach, although I accept that controllers often spook the carp as much as anything. No controller and watching the bait through binoculars is no doubt the best method of bite detection, and can't be faulted when you know carp are showing in your baited area, but there is no way I want a pair of binoculars stuck to my eyes for hours on end waiting for that bite 'out of the blue'.

Like so many other types of fishing though, the way you loose feed can make the difference between success and failure. My way is to choose a position where I have my back to the wind and loose feed with trout pellet and hookbait samples (usually Chum Mixer) in the same way I would loose feed with maggot or caster when fishing stick float on the river. Little and often is the answer, or quite a lot and often if you are fishing a prolific carp water, for they can mop up a hell of a lot of feed if they're well onto it. Whichever - little and often, or a lot and often - the aim is to keep a constant stream of bait bobbing along the surface, to such an extent the carp grow over-confident and therefore careless. Feeding for twenty minutes or so before you actually wet a hookbait is the best way, which allows the carp to grow confident before any of them are hauled off to a landing net, and therefore remain confident for longer.

If you get the feeding technique right, on the right day, you can hook the carp on almost any floater method, within reason of course. They become so preoccupied with feeding, and competing with each other if you get enough carp in the area, their sense of self-preservation goes out of the window to a great extent. Ask any match angler, he'll tell you that correct feeding technique is more than half the battle.

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From the Archives - Fishing is Fishing

Maybe six or seven years ago, for that one year, most of my attention had been aimed at carp and pike, temporarily relieving several waters of over 50 reasonably big carp to almost 30lb, and roughly the same number of double figure pike, including several over 20lb.

Compare the fight of even the most sluggish of those fish, to the feeble flapping of a 6oz dace (which is not a bad sized dace) and you have a better parable than David and Goliath. So how is it I can still enjoy fishing for dace and other small species like roach as much, sometimes more, than those huge - in comparison - carp and pike?

The simple truth is that I do, and just as I have great difficulty sleeping the night before a fishing session for carp and pike, my insomnia is no less the night before a visit to the Dane or Dove for a few hours after the dace. To me, fishing is fishing, and I'm as addicted to watching a stick float steal through a smooth glide on a little river, as I am to watching a pike float bob across the heaving waves of a big lake.

Image by Graham Marsden via Flickr

Of course, there is a different kind of thrill to seeing the menacing jaws of a big pike slide over the edge of your landing net, to the thrill of slipping the net under the glistening body of a dainty dace. Where pike and carp provide a raw, macho kind of excitement, more related to the 'Ramboesque' angler, dace, and their ilk, provide the gentle, 'Morse' kind of thrill. The amount of enjoyment derived from each, however, can very well be equal.

All of which probably sounds like a load of rubbish to those carp and pike anglers who have never fished for anything else, or rate their success in no other terms but that of hard fights and heavy weights of individual fish.

One can make a fair comparison only if you indulge in all aspects of the sport, from slinging out a boilie on a hefty bolt rig, to side-casting a single caster on a 4 No. 4 stick, otherwise it is extremely difficult to understand what the 'other half' sees in their particular poison. Fortunately, I do enjoy all aspects of coarse and fly fishing.

I'm lucky, really, in that I can indulge in, and enjoy, the kind of fishing that suits my mood at the time. If I'm feeling lazy, and don't fancy any great activity, even to the point of not wanting to mix any groundbait, or prepare bait of any description, I can elect to grab a bag of shelf-life boilies and fish for carp. I need do no more than take a pair of made-up rods (which can include boilies already hung on the hair rigs) set up a rod-pod with bite alarms, hang on a couple of stringers of boilies, and I'm fishing. With no more to do than lie back on my bedchair and relax. Take off the boilies and substitute the end rigs for snap tackles baited with deadbaits straight from the freezer, and I'm piking in the same lazy way.

Two very handy methods of fishing for those who don't want anything very demanding, or who want to catch up on some reading. Pick a very difficult water where you are not likely to get many bites to disturb either your sleep or your reading and you can have a really idle time. And, of course, always with a chance of picking up that huge fish from such a difficult water, which you can enter in all the competitions, possibly showering you with cash and tackle, and headlines that describe you as a brilliant angler. You can chuckle all the way to the bank and tackle shed.

Image by Graham Marsden via Flickr

While I've got my cynic's hat on: Generally speaking, the less I do, and the more time I have to spend at the waterside doing nothing but casting occasionally, and lazing around a hell of a lot, the more chance I have of catching a fish that would attract the attention I've just described. It's a sad fact that the angler who fishes a river with float and light tackle, and makes a good catch as a result of a hell of a lot of skill and hard work, may never receive any recognition all his life. Right, off with the cynic's hat.

So, in a lazy mood I can spend time at the waterside doing little more than occasionally baiting and casting, possibly catching a few fish, getting a nice tan in the right weather, doing a little reading, and probably a lot of resting. I enjoy that as much as anything when I'm in that frame of mind. And I'm quite prepared to put up with the long periods of inactivity when I'm fishing a water that demands that kind of approach and holds fish that make the wait worthwhile. My problem, if that is the right way of describing it, is that I can take only so much of the type of fishing that involves a lot of doing nothing. Perhaps it's a fault of mine.

So when I've had enough of the sitting and waiting I may decide to go for a spell of feeder fishing for barbel, which, if you do it properly, involves a lot of casting to keep bait going through the swim, and keeping your hand on, or at least near to, the rod, ready to react to that sudden lunge of the rod tip when a barbel takes off with the bait.

An even more active kind of fishing is one I've already mentioned; float fishing on a river, for this involves constantly feeding, casting and retrieving. And even the bit between casting and retrieving demands constant control of the float through mending the line, holding back when necessary, and all the while being ready to react to the smallest bite.

Many times I will choose to fish in a way that is somewhere between the two extremes I've described, which depends of course on the water rather than the species. For instance, I may elect to fish for tench or bream, not on a fishery as difficult as, say, Queenford Lagoon appears to be, but where the fish are reasonably big, though not in the potential record-breaking class, and where bites can be logged by the session rather than by the season.

These sessions could involve bite alarms and bedchairs, but demand more activity as far as feeding the swim is concerned, which may be on the little and often principle (relatively speaking) and frequent casting, particularly if swimfeeders are being used.

Another variation is float fishing from a boat for quality fish. Constant feeding, and casting (when the fish are taking on-the-drop) makes this type of fishing very active at times, and a great change from land-based fishing. Although it can be pain when you fancy a brief walk to stretch your legs and your name isn't Jesus Christ. And relieving yourself can be a work of art.

Image by Graham Marsden via Flickr

So, you can enjoy yourself catching lots of small fish, just as you can catching the odd big fish. The answer lies in how much you put into it. If you approach float fishing for roach and dace, say, with the attitude that you shouldn't be there, but should be on the banks of a big gravel pit waiting for the alarm to go off, signalling a run from a big carp or pike, then of course you won't enjoy it. But if you realise - or, rather, accept - that catching a net of roach or dace demands a lot of skill, and needs to be worked at, and put everything you've got into catching them, then you will come away from that session with a tremendous feeling of satisfaction if you're successful. Or a determination to succeed next time if you're not successful.

Equally, if you normally only fish for nets of smaller fish, you should try to catch big fish with the attitude that it need not be all about sitting and waiting an age for a bite, but can reflect how much effort you put into swim choice (location) prebaiting (possibly) water craft in general, and good bait presentation.

Don't take the stance, as so many do, that your type of fishing is the only type of fishing worth doing. At least not until you've tried it. With the right attitude of course.

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