Canal Roach - Julian Hiatus

Summertime, and the fishing is easy...

Too easy for me it would appear as I always seem to lose interest this time of the year. Bass fishing, my fishing of choice when the sun is warming the mudflats and luring the silver bars within inches of the shingle in inches of water in search of easy pickings, is at its best right now but alas the sea is not only distant, but an increasingly distant memory. It's the downside of living within spitting distance of Meridan, the center of England. Bass are a very long way away indeed.

Summer Carp - Monk's Pool Revisited

We were after grass carp and a pleasant day spent fishing floaters for them but an hour spent on the chosen water observing fish rise to a stream of wind blown chum mixers revealed that the carp were a fraction of the size we'd been led to believe and that grass carp were not amongst them. So much for fishery puff. So, it was decided that a swift move was in order before we got caught for a day ticket, the destination, a venue where grass carp were not but floater fun was pretty much guaranteed and with the half chance of a half decent carp.

River Zander - Severn Quest - Big Fish Eat Little Fish

Fishing in places where monsters lurk has been an abiding theme of my year's angling so far. Two trips to Marsh Farm after outsize crucians provided me with an inevitable personal best for the species for in such a place as that fish over two pounds are the stamp so I would have been a very bad angler indeed to have failed to improve upon my previous best of one pound six. As it happened I beat it three times over in three hours and still failed to get past two pounds, five ounces. If they had fed all day long I might well have beat it ten times over in consecutive fish and ended up at four pounds something...

Then there was the hunt for a gargantuan record shaker/maker of a perch on Hanningfield Ressy, a trip where we failed miserably to even locate perch of any size let alone one to wake the record committee up for. That was fun though - messing about in boats always is - and them trout wuz ard bastads...!

When Steve suggested an overnighter after really quite large zander, I of course said yes, even though zander, a fish that I've found bites hardest through a crack in the canal ice, are not exactly a fish I'd naturally associate with high summer. Who cares when no less than four over mid-double figures have come from the river stretch responsible in the fortnight since the season began in mid June

Canal Roach - My Quest for the Magic Two - It Never Rains

Roach are the most infuriating of fish. Go to a commercial fishery and chuck in a handful of maggots and they'll be a net full of sub pounders by tea time but go to a river and do the same and it won't work most of the the time, unless it's a day when it does work of course, just to make matters worse.