Slippery Customers

Tue, 8 May 2012 08:30:01 +0100

Two more wet nights on the bream lake was not the start to the week that I was hoping for, but at least the tench were a little more active than on previous visits and the odd fish was getting caught from the top end of the lake. Perhaps I am clutching at straws, but any activity is a good sign in my book, and with only a few weeks now to catch before the lake shuts for its close-season it is just a question of grinding on and hopefully getting a result.

Close friends are starting to question my sanity for fishing this place, but even though each session is almost inevitably a failure, the challenge is still exciting and I can’t wait to get back each week for another go! Still, at least there is an end in sight and with the thoughts of mobile fishing for massive tench just around the corner, I am going to stick out the bream fishing right up to the bitter end!

Fortunately, the rest of the week went a little better!

The latter half of the week saw me off on a two-day sojourn up to the North West to shoot a couple of magazine features for the coming months with Jimmy Coffey and Bernard Anderson of the Nash Peg One team. The plan was for Jimmy to fish the first day on a very prolific commercial fishery, before I would join Bernard for the night and following morning on Warrington AA’s Grey Mist Mere.

The first part of the trip went pretty much to plan, with Jimmy putting together a good bag of fish on the method feeder. Fishing a deep peg, it was the ideal venue to look at how to use different types of pellets on the feeder to fish different depths of water and to get different break down rates.

It was actually a fantastic day, with the sun shining almost from dawn until dusk, and was strong enough to give my balding head a mild case of sunburn after I left my cap in the car. Some people never learn! After so much rain it was lovely to have a decent bit of light for the pictures and as the evening approached we called time and I headed over to Bernard’s tackle shop for a coffee and stage 2 of the plan.

Grey Mist is perhaps best known for its stocks of carp. In fact I can remember reading about it way back through the writing’s of Paul Selman, but alongside these the lake also holds a great stock of specimen tench, and also some massive eels. Bernard knows the lake really well, living within casting distance of its banks, so I knew I was in good hands and we would have a good night.

The plan was pretty simple. We would fish the night for the eels and then swap over to the tench in the morning. Because the eels on this lake seem to be of the narrow headed variety (which mainly eat invertebrates rather than fish) we would actually be using quite similar maggot feeder tactics for both species. This suited me down to the ground as I wanted to try out some new eel rig theories, mainly revolving around using semi-fixed bolt-rigs and short hook links to try and reduce the number of deep hooked fish.

As darkness approached the indicators started to twitch and between darkness and 1.00AM when I wound in for a few hours sleep the indicators kept on moving. In fact, it was the indicator on the free-running ‘control’ rod that kept going, whilst the bolt-rig was a lot more quiet, except for the occasional screamer as an eel hooked itself and steamed off, doing a good impression of a carp! Unfortunately, none of the lakes bigger eels put in an appearance, but we had plenty of action and it was more useful rig testing.

As dawn broke I stuck my head out from under the titan, decided to switch over to the tench rigs and then I must admit got my head down for a couple more hours. The combination of the previous day in the sun and the late night had left me knackered. After breakfast though I was up and at it and after a quick pack-up Bernard and I moved further up the lake where the tench had been showing well.

I am not sure about flavouring maggots for eels, but for tench a good dose of Scopex No.1 and Intense Sweetner normally does the trick and so I cleaned off the bait and flavoured it up. Tackle was simply two inline bolt rigged feeders with 5-inch fluorocarbon hook lengths and four maggots on a size 14 hook. I know a lot of anglers use braided hook lengths for tench, but these are too prone to tangling for my liking.

The morning past quickly, and with the rods out I spent some time photographing a Great Crested Grebe that was nesting next to our swim. She was obviously sitting on eggs and every now and again the male would return with food or building materials for the nest.

As mid-morning arrived so did the tench and a quick flurry of activity resulted in three fish, the best a cracker of 7lb 4oz. Great sport, and I am sure we would of caught more if I could of stayed all day, but with a lunchtime pack-up necessary to get back down the M6 before the Friday night rush, I had to call time. A great trip though, and hopefully I will get another chance to fish this lovely mere again in the future.

Many thanks to Warrington Anglers Association for allowing me to fish Grey Mist Mere. Please check out there website here: http://www.warrington-anglers.org.uk/

It Never Rains, But Pours

Thu, 3 May 2012 07:16:55 +0100

Never has there been such an apt saying for the recent conditions. Considering much of the country is still in drought, the recent weather has been incredible. Of course, it really doesn’t matter how much rain that we have over the coming weeks in terms of re-filling the aquifers from which the water that comes out of most of our taps is drawn. The aquifers take months or even years to re-fill, and as long as we continue to abstract more water from them than they can sustain long-term then the crisis conditions will continue. At least those reservoirs that obtain their water from local rivers and streams are filling up nicely, which should stave off some fish-kills over the coming months.

For the angler though the conditions have been pretty grim, and it seems that even those anglers that are braving the conditions are struggling. Bream and carp fishing should be at its best at the moment, but it seems to be almost universally tough out there, with just the odd good catch reported. Some venues seem to still be producing the odd good catch as the fish go on a very short feeding spree, whereas others seem to have switched off completely.

The past week has been a bit of a mixed bag for me really, with a couple of lucky breaks that have kept me on track! The week started with a days tench fishing down in deepest Berkshire. I had been asked by the guys from Sky TV’s Tight Lines show to demonstrate how I go about catching tench on gravel pits. Having agreed to the date and venue some weeks ago (expecting it to be a bit warmer by now), I kicked off with a fair degree of trepidation. I can’t go into too much detail about how the session went, but it did all come good and you should be able to see the results on Tight Lines this coming Friday evening.

I find filming really stressful to be honest. Whilst actually catching something isn’t the be-all and end-all of the day, it is a bit embarrassing when you blank, and so the pressure is always on until that first fish is in the net. For the Tuesday night and Wednesday I was quite happy then to move on to the bream syndicate lake and take it easy. Fishing a new swim I found a lovely drop-off running out into the lake and fished a couple of rods along this at different depths where a friend had spotted some fish rolling a couple of days previously.

Somehow I managed to get the filming done and to get set up on the syndicate lake before the rain arrived, but when it started that was it for the next 48-hours, and I remained almost bivvy bound for the whole session. The tench were quite active over the bait, but my one bite resulted in a jack pike of about 8oz fairly hooked in the mouth on a bunch of maggots. This place really can be tough and a two-day blank is pretty much par for the course, but the rewards are out there for the lucky few and I will be giving it my all over the next few weeks.

After packing up in the rain it was back up the M40 and a quick stop-off en-route to meet up with Lewis Baldwin who was carp fishing on a very neglected fishery that most of us have on our doorstep - canals. With the rain actually keeping away for a couple of hours we managed to get the photos done (and Lewis caught a cracking fish) and you can see the results in the July issue of Total Coarse Fishing magazine.

With the gear drying out in the garage it was almost a relief to be back inside once again as the rain continued to fall. Saturday saw several of the guys from the Nash carp team and myself up at Fosters of Birmingham for a really successful open-day. Considering the weather there were certainly plenty of people still getting out there, and we were kept busy doing demo’s and answering questions all day long. A great day all-round and a fitting end to the week!

Early Tincas

Sun, 22 Apr 2012 19:10:20 +0100

The best of the tench fishing is still several weeks off, but already the fish are starting to move around a lot more and catches are on the increase. This week I have put away the full-on specimen gear and enjoyed a couple of sessions fishing for bream and tench on some of my favourite gravel pits.

The start of the week saw me at the famous St Ives complex in Cambridgeshire (www.stiveslakes.com). Despite being best known for their huge carp (there are actually four lakes on the complex at the moment that contain forty pounders!) there are also a huge range of other fish to be caught, whatever you prefer to do. The bream and tench fishing can be very good indeed, with double figure specimens of both species relatively common. On this trip though I had decided to fish one of the smaller lakes called Ivo, a mature four-acre gravel pit with a fantastic stock of bream and tench.

A few days pre-baiting had the fish queuing up to be caught, and after baiting up the water would soon cloud up as the fish turned up to feed. The session went really well with a stack of bream and a few nice tench putting in an appearance, all caught on either Scopex Squid 10mm boilies or Squidgee pellets in the same flavour. I guess I ended up with well over 100lb of fish, and could of caught more, had I not packed up in the early afternoon.

Still, the reason for the early bath was well worth forfeiting a few hours fishing as Gordon Howes the Fishery Manager was expecting a delivery of 73 new residents for the adjacent St Ives Lagoon; a magnificent 30-acre pit that was until last year home to one of the largest carp in the country, the Fat Lady. Unfortunately, as with all things, this old lady finally went off to join the great carp pond in the sky and this has left a tremendous hole in the lakes stocking, even though there are still fish to 40lb plus present.

Whilst Gordon had been introducing some absolutely cracking fish to some of the other lakes on the complex, the risk of stocking the Lagoon whilst the big girl was still around were too much, and so the lakes stock had gradually dwindled away to perhaps no more than twenty original residents. Now though it was time for the lake to have an injection of new blood, and along with another stocking of slightly larger fish the Lagoon is now home to more than 100 carp; perhaps for the first time in its history.

Already the fruits of Gordon’s labours are being seen on other lakes on the complex, with fish like the awesome Colin approaching the fifty pound mark in one of the other lakes. Even fish stocked at 5-10lb just a few years ago are now averaging over twenty pounds in the huge Meadow lake. In just a few years time these young blood hand-picked fish are already making a huge impact on the fishing available, and the future is certainly looking very bright.

Having fished the complex for almost twenty years on and off it really is remarkable how it has changed. I will be back in earnest in June when the specimen tench fishing should be approaching its best, with plans to bag a monster tinca or two.

Later in the week it was time to turn South and head down to another fabulous fishery, the Wasing Estate in Berkshire. Here is another fishery that is perhaps dominated by the fantastic carp fishing that it has to offer (again with fish to over 50lb being present!), but for me it is the other species that are of more interest. I had arranged to make a short film with Sky Sports next week for Keith Arthur’s Tight Lines show, and thought it prudent to go and have a days practice before we have to do it for real next week!

Despite the weather being grim (I really am grateful of my Titan shelter this year!), the fishing was OK. A couple of early bites got the confidence growing and then at dawn the lake was alive for about forty minute as carp and tench showed all over the place. This says to me that the tench are not really on the feed yet, as I would expect the activity to be more concentrated if they were really going for it, but there was definitely a preponderance of activity at one end of the lake. Between rain showers there was just time to have a quick plumb around and get to know a couple more swims before it was time to pack up before the Friday night traffic got too bad.

An interesting week, and for once most of my plans had come together well, and you can’t say fairer than that!

I still have one remaining tench fishing guiding day available for the last two weeks of May, and several excellent venues dotted around the country available. There are also one or two days available in early June for either tench fishing, or a feeder fishing session for tench and bream at St Ives.

If you would like more information please contact me at paulgarner@me.com, or via the guiding page of the website.

Quick plug time!

This coming Saturday (April 28th) I will be at the fantastic Foster’s of Birmingham for a Nash and Peg One Open Day. Several of the Consultants will be on hand to answer your questions and to demonstrate all the new products that we have lined up for 2012, including the Zig Bugs, Sticky Pellets, Transformer Carp Rods and Siren Alarms. It should be a great day, if you are in the area try and stop by. For more details of all the upcoming Nash shows and events go to www.nashtackle.co.uk.

One of a number of nice early tench from the Wasing Estate waters caught this week.

Here and There

Wed, 11 Apr 2012 08:27:59 +0100

Lengthening days, warming temperatures, Spring is a time that we all look forward to, but very often the results don’t necessarily match up to the expectation. Just as gardeners all over the South East were putting away their hose pipes for the now annual ban, the heavens opened, and the temperatures plummeted sending fishing into a spin. One week the carp were feeding on the surface and the tench were feeding well, and the next, well nothing seemed to be feeding at all ....

It has certainly been a busy week though, beginning with a Monday morning talking with a school class about fishery management. That was in Essex, and with a shop open day pencilled in at Shelton’s of Peterborough for the Friday I had decided to spend the whole week over in the East of England.

Monday night I pitched up at Gary Bayes’ Bayeswater Fishery near Chelmesford, a cracking ‘runs’ water that is normally good for a few carp. Unfortunately, the lake had been fishing poorly for a few days and I was expecting to have to try and scratch out a result. Fishing with three rods I decided to use zig rigs on two (as they are not used that often on this lake) and a solid PVA bag filled with crushed Amber Strawberry boilies cast regularly out into open water to try and buy a bite.

At just after 1.00am the bag rod was away and a plodding fight ensued. As the fish entered the shallow margins and started plodding up and down I got a good look at it, and put it at the right side of twenty pounds, just before the hook fell out! For some reason all the way through the fight I had a feeling that I wasn’t going to land it, but there you go, close but no cigar.

The following morning Nick Watkins joined me for the day as we wanted to get some material for the Peg One website, and maybe a magazine feature if we caught. As the day past by we certainly got plenty of photography done as the fish failed to interrupt us. My phone was surprisingly quiet all day, suggesting that there wasn’t much being caught anywhere, as normally the grapevine is pretty efficient if people are catching.

After stopping off for the night with a good friend, it was off the next morning to the St Ives complex in Cambridgeshire. With two nights at my disposal I was keen to try and catch some of the big bream that inhabit St Ives Lagoon. The lake has always been kind to me, and the bream are normally pretty reliable. The weather was less so, and it pee’d down from the moment I got the Titan up to late in the day.

It was a pretty relaxed day, I knew the swim pretty well from previous years, so got the rods rigged up and spent the day plumbing between rain showers. Alarmingly, the weed was much worse this year than I had ever seen it before, and proper clear spots were impossible to locate. Eventually I found three spots that were reasonably clear and put the rods out for the night along with a couple of kilos of 3mm and 6mm Fish Frenzy halibut pellets and some 10mm Scopex Squid boilies.

Line bites came right through the night. A couple of them taking the bobbin right up to the rod and holding it there, but no ‘proper’ bites were forthcoming. At least the rain had now stopped and I could sit out at dawn and watch the water. I wasn’t really happy that the rigs were fishing correctly amongst the weed (most of which was the horribly clingy filamentous algae that masks rigs very effectively). A big bream rolled about three hundred yards further down the bank, then a carp popped its head out in the same area. I could feel a move coming on!

Most of the day was taken up with moving swims and watching the electrofishing survey being carried out on a neighboring lake. The eels in there in particular were interesting, not too many of them and one or two real whoppers. Another target maybe for later in the year.

The second night was spent fishing the side of a point that extends quite a distance out into the lake. With the marker rods I could easily find a big clear spot at a comfortable distance from the bank surrounded by more weed. It seemed to be in about the right direction as where I had seen the fish rolling the previous morning, a good sign!

Although it is more gear to lug around, I now always carry two marker rods when fishing on the big weedy pits. One rod is cast around until I find a spot I like, and is then left in place. The second rod is then cast around this, to find the edges of the clear patch and any variations in depth. Having a reference float out in the lake to mark the spot makes a huge difference to feature finding and I wouldn’t want to be without the second rod now.

As it happened, the clear spot was about the size of a tennis court, so I decided to put all my eggs in one basket and bait the area quite heavily and fish all three rods over the top of it. Getting the rods out went according to plan and with the rigs coming back clean I was more than happy with the presentation I was getting. As the light began to fade I was reasonably confident, but the clearing sky hinted that it was going to be a cold night, and when the alarm went off at 5.00am everything was covered in a thick white frost and the lake surface had that steely ‘dead’ look to it.

Packing up in the half light with a frozen bivvy all the gear from a week away from home was carefully packed back in the car and by 7.00am I was ready to hit the road, only the car wouldn’t start, the battery had died! Fortunately, one of the other members had just arrived to fish one of the other lakes and minutes later I was on my way to Peterborough and a very pleasant day working at Shelton’s, a fantastic shop that I have been visiting right back from the days when I used to live in the Fens.

Eventually, late on the Friday evening, I pulled the car into the drive and was home again. It has been a long week. A week that despite a lot of effort had brought only one bite, and that had fallen off! Still, such is the nature of fishing, and I will be back out doing it all over again next week.

From the Top

Thu, 29 Mar 2012 17:54:20 +0100

This weeks blog is going to relatively short, simply because almost the whole of my week has been spent relaxing next to the hotel pool in the Canary Islands!

Now, in previous years, this would have meant taking the carp gear along and having a day or two fishing the lovely Embalse de Chira reservoir high up in the mountains. Even the depths of ‘winter‘ the fantastically scaled carp and rugged landscape (not to mention the brilliant weather) have been the perfect setting for some great floater and stalking sessions.

This year though the closest I got to fishing the whole time was finally getting around to reading Mick Brown’s excellent new book ‘Professional Pike Angler’, and feeding the mullet in the local harbour with any stale scraps of bread that I could scrounge. Sitting in the bar next to the harbour it was amazing how many people (blokes) would come down and rather furtively feed the fish, no wonder some of them were well into double figures!

I was expecting a bit of a temperature shock when we stepped off the plane back at East Midlands Airport, but the weather was only slightly chillier than it had been a couple of thousand miles further towards the equator! With a carp fishing feature to shoot with Lewis Baldwin (for the June edition of Total Coarse Fishing magazine), this was excellent news, and by lunch time Lewis had caught more than enough fish and we had got all of the photography wrapped up for the day.

With a few hours to kill, and a few carp sunbathing on the surface, it was time to break out the floater fishing kit for the first time this year (and who would of expected to be fishing on the top in March!).

The water was obviously still quite chilly, as the carp didn’t really want to know. I pulled out of a smallish fish soon after starting, but however hard I tried the fish wouldn’t really get feeding properly, and just took the occasional bait here and there. This wasn’t helped by the local bird life who made introducing any floating pellets an absolute nightmare.

Eventually though the odd better fish turned up and started to feed with a bit more confidence. One greedy common took three baits on the bounce before making the mistake of taking my whittled down pop-up and after a spirited scrap found himself in the back of the net. A lovely mid-double, was soon ushered back, but not before a quick picture to capture the moment.

Lewis managed a fish off the top shortly afterwards before we were both frustrated by the birds once again, annoyingly coming close to a few fish that would of probably been the right side of twenty pounds. Still, some you win, and with exposed skin already starting to feel a little burnt, it was time to take the hint and head for home.

With this warm weather set to last a few more days I am sure there will be some great opportunities to catch more carp off the top this week, so I am going to try another venue tomorrow for a couple of hours, where there is an outside chance of a really good fish. Withe the clocks having gone forward as well, there is now plenty of time to get out for an hour or two in the evening, when the fishing is often at its best. Short surface fishing sessions, does it get any better than that?