A Quest for Canal Carp — Sex & the Silvers

I thought I'd do the night. Get out after dark and fish through till dawn just to see what would happen, because I never have fished the canal alone those hours before, because you wouldn't, would you? All those nefarious characters roaming around slashing throats for a quid in the dark. Who'd chance it?

A Quest for Canal Carp — A Truer Sense of Things

Judy once uttered something concerning fishing that I've never forgotten. I was struggling to find words to describe the predicament that faces every angler every day of their fishing lives, and the one that faced me at that time, the one of not being able to fish for the fish of your dreams because of the wrong weather conditions prevailing, or being able to but knowing it will be a waste of time to even try 'in this wind,' but going anyhow, or making an arrangement that cannot be broken by anything less than a hurricane. 

She said ~ 'Jeff...'

You can't choose your weather, but you can choose your fish

Let the Train Take the Strain

I've been scratching my noggin recently. Not having use of a car, because I only have a motorcycle license, which made all the sense in the world living in London, but makes no sense whatsoever living and wanting to go fishing in the Midlands, got me thinking about how I could break out of Coventry and go fishing much further afield. After a lot of dead ends and wooly thinking involving this and that and whatever in the way of silly solutions, like actually taking a string of expensive driving lessons and getting a full car license and then us two paying double insurance and sharing our one car, or even buying a cheap moped (though I'd still like one for local fishing) I finally came up with a ball-pein rather than a sledge hammer, with which to crack this tough nut.

A Quest for Canal Carp — Signs

I've been waiting for the right weather conditions for some time, the kinds of weather conditions that carp like, and I like to catch carp under. Still, warm, and with a nice clear evening sky is what I associate good carp fishing with, I always have, and always will. I like that calm mirror smooth water surface you get around evening time because it tells you things about carp that wind and ripple obscure; if they are there or not, and if they are, whether they are cruising about or rooting around, making bubbles or bashing about in the reeds. Carp don't seem to be able to hide away when the weather is right, and advertise their presence with every flick of their tails.

Elvis Magnets, Cock Feathers, Specks, Inadvertent Unpaid Advertising & Sartorial Misjudgments. The Destructive Effects of the Cosmic Joker and his Pranks upon Fishy Pics - A Dissertation

Fishing pictures rarely come out well do they? Especially self-takes of important fish, you know, the ones you tried for over a period of years and finally got to meet in the flesh, but only after struggling through a million lesser specimens to get to them. It's almost a truism that when you do bank that leviathan, something will go wrong with the camera one way or the other. It will probably overexpose and burn out all the detail in the fish's flank, leaving a blank white space that nothing can be rescued from because whatever detail there might have been just ain't there anymore, rather than underexpose, when almost anything can be retrieved from the murk with a bit of applied skill in Photoshop.

Crucian Carp - The Case for the Defense

Lee Fletcher sent a bundle of pictures over yesterday. They're of a crucian that he once caught on a water well known to local specimen anglers for its tench and bream. The water in question does not contain any carp except for a single 12lb fish that somehow got in there and gets caught once in a blue moon. Lee's crucian is just as rare. It is the only one ever known to be caught from the water, and the water has seen enough maggot feeders and corn rigs flying about to be sure of that fact.

Crucian Carp - Published! A 'Crucian Website' Article

I was asked a while ago to write an article about taking photos of crucians for identification purposes for Peter Rolfe's excellent web resource, The Crucian Website. I wrote it up, bundled a load of illustrative pictures together, and sent it off to Colin Falconer, the webmaster, and it was duly published after a round of judicious editing of my script by Colin, which has made the article shine.

Writing articles is not quite like writing a blog! Here I say whatever I like, don't really correct very much, don't redraft anything once written, nor do I take much time over them, they just arise to the surface like so many emerging nymphs escaping the stygian mud of my overactive imagination.

Writing an article, and it was my first ever for publication anywhere else but here on IQ, was somewhat different, I found. I'd actually to consider what I'd written about, redraft, weed out inconsistencies,  rearrange things into logical order and (God Forbid!) resist, against every literary sinew, the temptation go off on a magical mystery tour into some fabulous digression, and finally, let it go. Even then it needed editing by fresh eyes, but I am pleased with it, now it's done.

It might be of use to you. The site itself certainly will be, and I can't recommend it highly enough as the the font of all knowledge on crucians, because you won't find a better source of information about these lovely, wily fish, anywhere.

You can read the article by clicking here ~ The Crucian Website

My thanks to Peter and Colin for allowing me to contribute a little something to their sterling work.

Long live The Crucian Website!

Now, shall I start a similar resource for that equally rare and lovely fish, the silver bream?

One day...

Crucian Carp - Cash Cows

A few recent trips after crucians and earlier season trips after Perch have taught me one thing -- there's an awful lot of carp out there in commercial land. There's lots of local places where both the first mentioned worthy targets are available, but the problem is that they are available amongst a ton of carp flesh, who like every bait that both like as much, if not more than they do. Prawns are an excellent bait for margin fishing because perch and crucians love them, unfortunately carp home in on prawns like a randy dog sniffing upwind to a bitch on heat. You don't even need ground-bait to attract them, they will find even a single one, and fast.

Float Making - What Floats My Boat

In the old days, anglers spent the best part of the close season repairing tackle and making floats for the next season to come. Every float for every fishing purpose was no doubt invented in the close season by anglers playing about with materials and paint. Now we buy everything off the peg and put up with it. The old days eh?

Roach and Crucian Carp - Big Fish, Little Fish, Cardboard Box

On a recent trip to the canal after silver bream, I saw a carp the like of which I'd never have guessed would be swimming around in it. I'd seen a twenty-pound plus koi moving swiftly up and down the far bank the previous day, but she was not interested at all in the bed of bread ground-bait I'd set up, passing across it time and again without stopping off for a bite to eat. I'd guess she was looking for hot sex under the weather conditions prevailing at that time, not a cold snack.