Digging for Victory

The beauty of being an angler of varied tastes is that there is always something to go for. I must be honest- my first choice on a spring day might have been very different to legering for carp. But take a really grotty day and persistent rain, and you have a much better recipe for action on a carp lake than on a trout stream, for example, that has been transformed from pure gold to pure filth.

Creedy Lakes are a place I hop across to once or twice every season. I also like to experiment with baits, largely because the place sees so many boilies I always suspect the carp are sick of getting caught on them. Bread and maggots both feature high on my list, but I really fancied giving worms a try and spent the best part of an hour gathering several hundred from the compost heap. Hard on the back, but completely free bait. They can be a pain to feed at distance, so I went for a spomb to put plenty of chopped feed at around thirty yards out.

As for presentation, I went with one running rig, and one semi fixed. With plenty of clay-like, sticky mud with the bait I even tried a rather gruesome method set up. No additives or gimmicks whatsoever here- just plenty of natural bait and very dirty hands. But was it to work?

It didn't take too long before the running rig was getting twitchy, and then a full blooded run and a fish of ten to twelve pounds. I then added a smaller one and an eel into the bargain, before things went quiet and I added more feed. And the day tended to follow a similar pattern- the fish would come on, then only return after re-feeding with quite generous amounts of worm. The next one fought really hard on my standard Creedy tackle (1.5 TC rod, 10lb line) and was absolutely solid around the middle at 16.08lbs:


Two tench added further variety, before I eventually got fed up with the rain and went back for a hot bath. Mission accomplished I guess, and a decent return for a really crappy day of weather. It literally didn't stop raining for a second until about four in the afternoon and perhaps not surprisingly Creedy was less busy than usual. Not that I was grumbling- and I enjoyed the company of this little chap for most of the day, and he even got a few free worms into the deal:

Last Orders and New Beginnings

To some extent fishing has become like so much of modern life, tailored to human convenience. Call me old fashioned, but I sometimes think this is a shame. There is a time for everything each year, and both anglers and fish need seasonal changes. They give us welcome variety, while our quarry gets a rest.
Perch fishing, to take just one example, is generally something I do in the winter and then cease as spring proper kicks in. I've really not tried hard enough for perch this winter past, so it was a case of one last crack to try and get one or two more good ones before they think about spawning and I think about something else.
Shillingford used to be a cracking perch venue, but I've found the big ones get rather trickier the last two seasons. No surprise, because angling pressure can have this effect- and it's also true that predators are shorter lived than other fish, hence the fishing can be cyclical and you can find a dip as well as a rise in form each year. I persevered with prawns on a day ticket session, but struggled initially on the middle lake which I once found so easy. Well, I say struggled, but the carp were there in spades. They are a nuisance on perch tackle- one took me the best part of ten minutes to get in.
A switch to a neighbouring pond was just the job though. All the ingredients looked wrong: bright sun, middle of the day, not many bites. Suddenly though, after returning a half pounder, I hooked a much better one on the very next cast. A really plump fish this, and a nice finish at a little over the two pound mark:

I then also spent a casual hour or so casting flies at the carp. In several places there were fish basking under trees, so I tried a black hopper gently landed in their sight. On four separate occasions I watched a fish mouth the fly, before it was either blown out or I struck too early! I left mildly cursing my lack of composure- but there'll be plenty of chances ahead this summer, and it does go to show that carp will inspect natural flies as well as the usual bait imitations.


My next short trip was also with a fly rod, but this time in search of trout on a mild spring day. I'd been itching to have a go with a selection of flies I'd been tying over the winter. With rain fed, slightly murkier than expected water however, it looked like slightly larger and brighter flies would be the best solution.
I'm certainly a fan of semi-urban locations (and for anyone keen to sample free fly fishing I'd highly recommend Theo Pike's book "Trout in Dirty Places"). It was great fun to try a little suburban stream with Scott Cooper on this occasion- a keen all round angler I'd met before at Anglers Paradise. We fished some open parkland, but also some real poacher's spots, complete with brambles and less than simple access. Great fun nonetheless:


In the end it was the nymphs that won out- fairly large, bright coloured flies in particular. Some of the deeper pools looked delicious, but I got the feeling there was just too much colour in the water. Whenever I fish on rivers that are a little murky with the fly, I always believe your best chance is to find shallower runs, where the trout can at least see your offering. And so it proved. I took three lovely wild browns on a size 14 gold bead caddis nymph, and even added a fourth on dry fly- my first off the surface this season! Great sport considering the conditions. They went well too, these fish, no doubt eager to feed after a grim, flooded winter.

Sleepless in Paradise

It's June the 16th. Which must be why it's raining relentlessly. And I didn't even go to the river. Instead I've been back to Anglers Paradise for a long overdue return. Two nights of fishing in the excellent company of Chris Lambert have yielded everything summer fishing should be about: screaming runs, some genuine surprises and lily infested swims discussed over glass or two of cider. I just love the main lake here. The next bite could be anything- like this terrific 4.12lb golden tench I took on maggots yesterday.


My approach to fishing these lakes is simple at the moment. I tackle up one rod with a large bait for big fish, while the other line is aimed solely at earning bites. I have a lot of faith in feeder tactics and dead maggots at present. For the price of four pints, you get one heck of a lot of bait. Preparation is easy- I riddle the maggots and replace the dust with a potent ground bait. Any strong smelling stuff is ideal, and I'm currently getting excellent results with the Bait Factory mixes I'm testing.

I feed my swim much like a match angler, continually adding small amounts and regularly recasting a small method feeder crammed with sticky, matching ground bait. The beauty of a decent bunch of maggots is that you'll catch fish of all sizes- and with persistent feeding, the bigger fish tend to show later as you build the swim. On my previous night session, maggots accounted for this fine 19lb linear mirror:


I must admit, I never sleep brilliantly when night fishing. You get into a kind of "half-sleep" mode of relaxed readiness, and I usually spend the following afternoon knackered. Especially when big fish make raids in the wee silly hours as they have been lately. Chris had a sensationally long cat fish last time out (do check out his "Fish Tales" blog for a fun read and ramblings on Everton FC). Last night was my turn to hook one- and spend the twenty minutes heaving, holding on and cursing. Strangely, it hadn't gone for a meaty bait this time but picked up a Fennel and Hemp boilie (vegetarian catfish?!!). The reel sounded like it was in pain in the pitch black. Bats were circling the rod as drag strained. Even with a pretty robust carp set up, these fish try and almost succeed in pulling your arms out of their sockets. It was pretty intense, but Chris was cool as you like in scooping her out. Wow!


While I wouldn't describe cats as beautiful, they're certainly beautifully designed for their job as nocturnal killing and scavenging machines. After the most dirtiest, most gut wrenching battle this cat of 32.12 was surprisingly well behaved on the mat. Slimy, but very docile. Nor was the cat our last surprise as Chris landed a grass carp at dawn.

There really is a terrific variety of sport at the complex, whether it's pleasure or specimen fishing. The trout lake is also very interesting and I'm hoping to provide future visitors with tuition on the fly.
In other news, I'm also raring to go for the BFFI (British Fly Fair International) next weekend. I hope to catch one or two of you there for the event, which I always find fantastic for finding new materials, ideas and like minded nutters. Plenty of homework before then however, tying up flies. For any of you keen to get your hands on coarse fish patterns, do remember I can offer a bespoke service. Here's a box of traditional spiders tied specially for a customer in the USA:

Spring blues, bronzes and greens

The best place to wax lyrical about the "glorious unpredictability" of fishing is the pub, I'm starting to believe, as opposed to a chilly waterside where you sit there perplexed as to why sport is slow. Lately I seem to be putting in about double the effort to make any passable catches. And although taking a bit of a piscatorial kicking can be educational, I'm still longing for that day of effortless enjoyment to mark a new summer. Still, the tench have been conspicuously bubbling and rolling- as the dawn picture above shows.

The anglers have been somewhat better company than the fish and I particularly enjoyed sitting alongside Dave Sellick (above) to see how he gets to grips with tench on the Exeter Canal. One factor is his skill as a pole fisherman. Another is his adaptability- with the water level well down on our trip, he knew instantly that the fish would be further out in the safety of deeper water. His other secret weapon is his bicycle and trailer to reach remote spots. He took a cracking net of tench and bream, while stopping quickly to become "Bicycle Repair Man" (anyone remember the Monty Python sketch?) and sort a puncture:


I managed two decent bream in the end, but only by fishing at maximum reach with my 13m pole. I also took a tip off Dave to try his favourite hook bait. All the old angling books tell you dead maggots are only useful for eels, but they are a great bait for tench and bream too. The beauty of dead grubs is that they stay put. They're easy for any self respecting bream or tench to suck in and won't wriggle into weed or silt. "Three dead red" is Dave's mantra. It's probably the only hook bait you need for these bonus fish.

A long way further down the road, I also had the pleasure of an escape to Norfolk to meet with Bob James. The mere we fished was absolutely to die for in terms of setting, but also proved a real challenge.

With northerly winds and distinctly chilly evenings, my night fishing for carp drew a big fat blank. A shame, because the odd fish we spotted looked solid and beautiful things. Night fishing for me is one of the great undescribed areas of angling. It can be a murky, dense and thrilling experience; or something more akin to psychological warfare over cold biteless nights. Why is it that most angling writers say so little about it? Perhaps they lack the bravery to describe the despondency of insomnia and inevitable blanks, while the successes are reduced to statements like "I was over the moon" "it was scale perfect" etc, etc. It's a bit like when you see the winning goal scorer interviewed on cup final day who says "I've hit it first time and luckily it's gone in the back of the net." Why do they never say: "I absolutely lashed it into the goal. It nearly ripped the bloody net out. I thought my heart would explode!" Answers on a bream.
No sudden explosion of joy for me on this trip where the carp were concerned. Thank goodness for other species in fact, because otherwise it would have been a very long trip for not a great deal. The mere I fished with Bob was delightfully peaceful, with kingfishers, owls and a staggering amount of insect life. I also caught this slow worm relaxing by the path:

Bob's little terrier Cassie also noticed the rustling in the grass, and is popular with the land owner for her skill at removing moles. A safer quarry than the badgers she also likes to pester in any case:
The tench were especially receptive in the morning. Bob uses little else for them than 10mm boilies and pellets these days, with liberal helpings of groundbait to prime an area. In fact, it wasn't exactly Mr Crabtree tenching. He favours fairly deep areas rather than directly in those tempting looking margins, as the tench can then be persuaded to extend their feeding well into the late morning.
We also had a try for bream and I put my "Bait Factory" testers hat on once again to lay down a good bed of feed. You might have had to force me at gunpoint to use a spomb and introduce lashings of particles not so long ago, but I'm beginning to see the value of accurate, fairly heavy baiting these days.

I don't know what it is about bream, but as with pike they just seem to agree with me. And unless it happens to be three in the morning I'm always happy to catch them. I even like the rather sleepy, ponderous way they fight on light tackle.

Spring Detours

Crikey... it's bloody mid April and I'm only just updating this blog. I have to confess, my ramblings here are not always strictly chronological. At best I can offer snapshots from my fishing, written in haste. It's a quandry for a writer. I have to sketch here, rather than steal the thunder of things coming up in the printed press. But at the same time, blogging is great to explore in all the interesting/weird/unscripted parts that escape the confines of your typical magazine article. One of my strangest recent exploits has been to discover the thrill of fishing in Norway. Ice fishing is absolutely nuts. So vastly different to anything I usually do. Think garden gnome rods, snowmobiles, 1000ft mountain lakes, sod-off big drills and you're only part way there. When you come across a huge sheet of snow, you think someone's bullshitting you when they say "this is it- we're standing in the middle of a lake." And if the setting is unreal, the fish themselves are little short of a miracle. Arctic char are probably the most incredibly marked fish I've ever seen. Like trout dreamed up by an artist on drugs. Sparkling green and burning orange. Unfeasible somehow. But no more so than drilling through a metre of ice or snacking on a reindeer's heart. The full story gets the Angling Times treatment soon- and I also hope to feature more of my Norwegian host Geir Sivertzen (aka "Dr Hook"), a globe trotting angler and Mustad designer regarded as the world's foremost expert on fishing hooks. For more on Northern Norway and the amazing arctic destination of Skaidi, you could also try www.skaidihotel.no, who run guided trips here year round. Ice fishing runs well into May, but the lure and fly fishing on mountain lakes can also be spectacular in summer.. In a funny way, I almost think the fish under ice were hungrier than the ones back home. Things are just warming up, but lately I've been catching on little more than a hook bait. I'm not exactly a weekly visitor in search of carp on commercials- but that said, find one with nicely conditioned fish and using classic tackle is great fun. In fact, I just don't get why these places tend to be stacked with rod pods and shelters these days. Playing "fun sized" carp is great sport on light tackle, but on a 2.5 test curve rod? It's a bit like hunting rabbits with a rocket launcher; pretty messy on the whole, and over very quickly. I've also been enjoying testing gear for The Bait Factory. Other than being a "Beer and Ale Consultant", which will never happen, I can't think of many more entertaining field testing areas to be involved with. Various pastes have been especially good- and perhaps the biggest surprise is how well a decent lump of super-potent stuff can work, with no loose feed whatsoever. I looked like a chain smoker at the end of a trip to South View Farm, but the stuff was dynamite literally dropped within inches of the bank (thanks to photographer Andrew Pym for current carpy pictures).

From Country Estates to Council Estates

I am an angler of itchy feet. I like fishing a real range of waters. That might seem like stating the bleeding obvious, but it does affect the way you fish. Hopping waters is exciting, but if you make lots of different detours you really have to think on your feet. Sometimes just getting the day ticket is a mission. Like at Shobrooke Lake, Devon- where you hand over your cash at surely one of the most unlikely combined businesses in the land (Ladd's Computers and Guns) for the not incredibly cheap rate of £12.50. "Yeah, I want a day ticket please. Oh, and while I'm here I'll take a Dell lap top and that great big shotgun. Yeah, that one. I'm thinking of an internet fuelled killing spree. Maybe I can chuck the bodies in the lake while I have a crack at some roach on the waggler." And if that seemed a bit unlikely, you'd might also wonder what I was doing lobbing out a spomb packed with hempseed and 10mm boilies. No, I haven't sold my soul to Satan or (xxxx insert Godless tackle company as applicable), I'm just finding these little devices really bloody useful and, dare I say it, good fun to use. You don't need some ridiculous spod rod and the result is a lovely, accurate pocket of bait that doesn't sound like an air strike on Kabul. I intended to fish the long pole with casters for the silver fish, but also put out a bonus rod for bigger roach or carp. Joining me was Russ Hilton, who I'd been trying for a while to drag away from the cricket pitch and back to fishing. A good move, because the lake was beautiful and although all the hardcore carpers had bagged the near bank swims, we found some space at the quieter end with a nice, mild breeze pushing towards us. We both enjoyed plenty of bites, with the odd better roach or hybrid thrown in, the odd one over the pound mark: The really exciting part was when the bonus rod surged into life. Lobbing the pole behind me, I savoured a good scrap from a carp. It happened later on too, with regular little top ups of bait grabbing the interest of a better one. The two carp couldn't have been more different. The first was a bit of a mutant: bug eyed and no pelvic fins of any description. The next was absolutely gorgeous though, beautifully dark gold and well proportioned. It took careful playing on relatively light gear: After such an enjoyable day I felt a real appetite for another trip on a decent sized and leafy lake. Trenchford Reservoir seemed a fair bet for a long walk with some lures. Having no pubs next to it, the place also seemed a good place to take Norbert Darby without fear of distractions such as barmaids and cider. The part I'd forgotten is that the place is harder than the Klitschko brothers. We didn't have so much as a whiff of a pike and even with waders, you just couldn't get to around three quarters of the lake. And the bits you could get to were as dead and depressing as Jimmy Saville. Time for a move then- and the predictable irony was that the most concrete part of the urban Exe showed far more signs of life. The walk was just as long, and just as biteless to begin with, although the graffiti art on show was right up our street. Some great B-Movie monsters and quirky humour, and Norbert took a shine to a big lady: The sun was up, we were laughing and pike were there after all, just not quite where I'd expected them. All we needed was a pint of cider, some jokes in such poor taste I can't repeat them, and a bit of a tactical reshuffle. Best of all, we silenced the town's own "I know everything better than you" character in a moment of pure, poetic justice. He'd been busy telling us that he was the mutt's nuts and declared that all the fish were in deep water; I couldn't help but smile sweetly as he caught a tree the same minute Norbert latched into a nice pike in a painfully shallow swim. It's times like this I wonder if perhaps there is such a thing as divine intervention. Karma is a bitch, ain't it?

Free-lining for Carp

Do you ever get the feeling your fishing is getting to techy for its own good? Sometimes, with carp especially, you try so hard to trick them you end up outsmarting yourself in the process. Daft rig bits, changing baits, hair brained plans. Sometimes it's best to take it right back to basics- which is why I love free-lining. At least 50 years ago, that king of carp fishers Richard Walker wrote that "sometimes the best rig is no rig at all" - a philosophy that still rings true today. I love overgrown, wilder ponds especially for my summer carping. Places that crawl with weed and the carp can be observed in intimate detail. Today I watched carp tearing through the weed for food; carp shadowing one another through shady channels or just basking in the sun. Creedy Lakes' top pond is just such a spot- absolutely beautiful yet usually deserted because of the wilder banks and lack of specimen carp on tap. I couldn't care less. The carp here are dark gold creatures- wily and powerful. By adding small quantities of bait, mainly mashed bread and pieces of crust, into pockets in the weed I spent much of the day walking around quietly and just watching for activity. The real thorny issue was getting takes in such clear water- you will get more bites on fine 8lb line, but fearing a wrestling match with dense vegetation thrown into the bargain, I didn't dare go below 10lb straight through. Some carp were prepared to stoop down and pick off the bottom; others started sipping off the top. Slowly but surely the takes arrived. The best of two was this 12lb common carp- as lean and powerful as I've hooked in a while. The raw power of the first run was hair-raising stuff. Another reason to go really simple, with no floats or weights to get stuck in the weed. Leathery gold, ridiculously strong, what's not to love about a wiry common carp from a summer pond?