Lure and Dropshot fishing in Somerset

The back end of the season can be tricky round these parts. By the time the waters of the Somerset Levels are in any state to fish, winter is almost over and time is slipping away. I had hoped to find a dropping River Tone, but instead went for early start on the Taunton to Bridgwater Canal with Russ Hilton.

It's not the easiest venue to find the perch. There are at least 11 miles of it, and it can be hard fishing with a lot of walking required. I'm not even about to start telling you specific locations on this blog (sorry), but suffice to say you need to use your feet and find your own fish. But I'm really enjoying catching on the ultralight gear at the moment. You can fit a whole whack of lures into a box no bigger than a backy tin. You can also change setups quickly, and these days I'm doing a lot of drop shotting with the flies too.

There are plenty of features on these canals, but it's funny how often you'll catch a good perch from a fairly innocuous looking spot. If you can find the wider parts and straights where the smaller bleak and roach are massed, you'll see the tiddlers being chased on cool mornings. As often as not, it's a jack pike. But just sometimes you'll find a perch, or even a gang of them.

I like a tiny, minnow-like lure for these weedy canals. I fished a small 2g head and a little Japanese, split-tail lure to start. Sometimes you can even spot the fish- and when it's like this the fly can be even better. But on this occasion, visibility wasn't perfect and the fish seemed to be lurking in the deeper central track and were hard to pick out. I had just the one good knock in the first half hour, and was connected to a fish that felt weighty but only stayed on for perhaps six seconds. Bugger.



Then Russ showed up and we hit another spot, covering a fair bit of ground to get well away from the access point. The obvious, snaggy features didn't produce- and instead it was a featureless straight, a little more coloured water, with the takes coming in the middle.

With experience, you often know it's a good perch quite early in the fight. They don't fly off like the small pike. They plod and turn, but it's still quite tense. Even more so when you missed that first chance. You may not get another.



In late winter, these canal perch are really at their best and fattest. The even more curious thing about lure and fly caught fish is that they tend to push their fins up. It's as if they're still bristling with bad intent, even once you've landed them. This one went 2lbs 10oz and was pictured quickly, before going straight back.

And that was pretty much it for the cut. Next stop, I tried a short session drop shotting on the river. I've been thoroughly enjoying this technique with my own designs for dropshot flies. With a fine rod, you can search all the little slacks and areas close to the bank really accurately.

I rig my flies exactly as you would a standard drop shot soft lure, with a Palomar knot. On this occasion, I quickly stepped up from an 8g to a 12g dropshot weight, just to give a little more control.

Some parts of the river are really mucky and it took some exploration to find the fish. I fooled a couple simply by flicking the fly on the edge of a shopping trolley. Pretty much all the early takers were perch:


That all changed though, with the rig flicked out in a reedy slack. I'd just bumped a perch, when something a lot more solid pulled back. A light lure outfit is less than ideal for an angry pike, but these days you can get a lot of poke even with "toy" kit. A slightly stepped up fluorocarbon leader also helps when there are odd small pike thrown in the mix:


So, the short sessions have been fun and useful, and in fact the only full day out I had was a pretty gruelling session fly fishing on Blagdon Lake. It was meant to be a mild day with Gary Pearson, but he was ill, so instead it was John Garnett I subjected to a breezy day after the trout.



To cut a long story short, bites were hard to come by. We found one point swim where bites occurred, and just after I lost a fish, the old man netted a rainbow on a scruffy but effective home-tied Blob.


We might have caught a few more, had the wind been less brutal. But after a second fish, we just had to find some sanctuary.


We caught up with the others in a more sheltered spot, where the locals were hitting odd fish but the the fishin continued to be tough. Simon from Turrall probably deserves most credit for managing a fish on the buzzer, but there wasn't a great deal else to shout about!

Next stop for me is the West of England Game Fair, where I'll be signing books, tying flies and by midday probably hoping that the bar opens early. Wish me luck and hope to see you on the bank soon.

Postcard from a wandering drunk

One of the equally wonderful and irritating things about fishing is that, rather like football, everyone is allowed their own "expert" say in the matter. Certainly the case on urban bits of canal, where I met Seb Nowosiad for some fly fishing. If the above picture is a bit wobbly, it's probably because the bloke who took it was already on his third tin of super strength lager for the day. We humoured the chap anyway, before Seb left him a roll up cigarette and we went in the total opposite direction to where he was pointing and giving his expert fishing analysis. Nice.

The canal itself was about as clear as an alcoholic's brain too. Not as clear as we'd hoped, which suggested it could be a challenge to catch on the fly. The numbers of rudd and roach at the surface were a pleasant surprise though and given a good walk I was confident we might find some good ones. It might sound blinking obvious, but given murky water and flies it's sensible to use slightly bigger or more visible patterns than usual. A little beaded Tan Shrimp was commandeered by Seb and took several roach plus a skimmer, while I dug out a size 12 Black and Peacock spider, intrigued by local rumours of monster fish.
That's the trouble with rumours though; you almost willingly daydream and ignore the fact that
a) The general public often don't have a clue what they're looking at with fish.
b) Anglers, and especially the casual ones, will spectacularly overestimate what they've witnessed (notice how tactful I was there. I could have simply said "lie" or "deal in more fiction than Penguin Classics").
Anyhow, perhaps one or two rumours had a grain of truth, because you always have a chance of nice rudd on the Taunton to Bridgwater. If you can get to the buggers. It was especially educational for Seb, who is a relative fly novice. For a lure angler, it is all too tempting to retrieve the flies all the time- when for many coarse fish you want to just let them be to settle naturally, with virtually no interference. Too much drag or a clumsy cast and you can blow it. I still make a mess of it sometimes myself, but as well as the odd bush I had several decent fish from the pokiest swims imaginable, including this fish of 1lb 9oz:

After sweating it for months on the new "Canal Fishing" book, you might have thought I'd have had enough of them, but I've been doing more on the local cuts than the rivers so far. With it being light well into the evening I also had a blast on the Grand Western, where a whole troop of schoolboys were roaming. High on enthusiasm but low on knowhow, I felt duty bound to help one or two. After all, you don't catch many roach on 15lb line and three very dead maggots on a size 4 hook. They also kept wanting to borrow my polarising glasses to look at passing tench like this beauty:

A little later I then caught up with Russ Hilton for a spot of tench fishing, which proved ultimately frustrating. Well, for me at least. Russ did ok, while I managed to miss them, including one where my worm had skilfully obscured the hook point to render my strike totally duff. In typical style though, Hilton came good with a couple of nice fish. It's a good job I never make bets with him:

Other than that, I'm just getting over the inevitable demise of England at the world cup. At least as a half Swiss, I can follow a team that are the opposite to In-ger-land: underrated, under hyped and organised with that special efficiency that comes with having a German manager. In truth, I've still enjoyed the footy and even managed to combine it with some fishing, most notably at Stafford Moor, where Chris Lambert and me tried frantically via phone and radio to keep up with England's score. We may as well have stuck to the fishing in hindsight.

We had a plan to tempt a catfish on offal, to give you the backstory, but to no avail. Several carp fancied a chunk of liver, but perhaps a much larger or more disgusting morsel is required for catfish? Back to the drawing board I think. For the record, both Beatties and Joseph's Lake are both outstanding "runs" waters should you fancy a crack at summer carp in Devon- and there's no better or friendlier fishery boss than Andy Seery for putting you onto a big catch.