Silver Bream - Pond life - My Menagerial Hell

I'm being stalked by domesticated albinos and now, stock on the hoof...!

Last night I went fishing at the Pit Pool just to see if I could catch a bigger silver bream than my biggest example from the pond — a whopper of seven ounces or more — and had a terrible time of it. Things were progressing just fine with the swim building nicely and a healthy procession of small silvers, skimmers and roach coming to net, when I became aware of a living presence to my unprotected rear.

Silver Bream - This Season, I'll be Mostly Wearing...

It's been a harsh winter and with a couple of months of ice and snow from November onwards it has seemed like a very long and protracted one but now that spring is upon and the clocks have gone forward lending us late evenings in which to play, I've a sorted out a new summer fishing wardrobe out of last season's knackered old rags in fetching light greys, buffs, faded greens and the like - just the palette for stalking about in the reeds.

Big Perch Quest - Occupational Hazardry

Like most anglers I'm a weather freak, constantly scanning the Met Office website for news of upcoming weather events that might hamper or indeed, improve fishing prospects. The short range forecast for the coming week looked very bad for my prospects with a rash of unseasonably warm days coming along coupled with bright clear skies that would bring on the carp and tench who do like an upturn in temperatures

Big Perch Quest - This Fishing's on Fire!

After publishing a piece concerning perch and my ongoing and frustrating problem with passing a certain weight of them you'd be forgiven for thinking that I'd just made up what follows for dramatic effect, for the sake of a good story... believe me, I often think my entire life pans out along a rolling story-line that I have no part in the authorship of and this continuing sub-plot of perch fishing incompetence is just sodding typical of what I, as an actor, have to put up with on a day-to-day basis.

Big Perch Quest - More than Nothing, Less than Something

In my mind, perch have been growing in significance recently. This is due to many things coming together in my head at once not least of which is the closing of the rivers and the lack of anything else in ponds and lakes feeding in earnest right now, the females being as heavy as they will be all year long with their spawning coming up in April, having also a couple of waters at the extreme outside edge of my walking range that contain very big fish indeed, but mostly, it has to be said, because of the fact that I have been suffering from, and trying hard to ignore for years, a bad case of perch constipation, a blockage that seems quite impossible to clear.

Out of their Sight, Out of their Minds - Coventry Canal Electrofished

I regret to have to inform you that the Coventry Canal between the M6 bridge, Exhall and bridge 13 in Bedworth has been electro fished by 'two men in a boat' who worked the section 'all day long' and took away 'two truck loads of fish' and drove them to 'a still-water up north,' according to my sources.

Silver Bream - Pond Life - On Coming Down to Earth

It was Keith who predicted what would happen next... after enjoying a purple patch of just one week's duration in which I would break two personal bests by large margins, I would then end up looking at my reality from a false and dangerous perspective - omnipotence - and I would henceforth step into any fishery and believe that I had a God given right to its largest fish and that it would no longer be required that I work to earn them.