River Roach & Silver Bream - God's Own Billiard Table

An exploratory mission this. To Oxford, and Old Father Thames. Judy went shopping, but I of course forwent the attractions of Bicester Shopping Village, and with a heavy heart denied the spurious pleasures of burning cash at the Altar of Mammon, went off light-stepping to a spot of fishing with half a loaf of Warburtons Blue instead.

River Roach & Silver Bream - A Full House of Pain

Some time last week, perhaps Tuesday evening down the cut fishing with Norman, I became aware of a twinge in my leg. A kind of sharp ache in the joint between femur and pelvis. When I sat on my seat and then stood up, it would hurt a little, so I spent most of that canal session sitting on the grass. At home that night, it got a little worse and caused a restless night. By morning, My leg had seized tight and had to be manipulated out of bed, but I thought little of it. I'd overdone the exertions of trotting in a standing position off a rickety, half-submerged pallet on Sunday, and was paying now with a little muscle pain.

Tickets, Timetables & Tight Lines - Epilogue

The train ride home from Southampton and the Itchen was uneventful. I had to sit on my ever useful rucksack/stool in the vestibule between carriages after stowing the rod bag in the overhead rack, not because I didn't have a seat, but because there was a clean human being in the next one to my reservation, all other seats were occupied, and I was contaminated by the river. After Reading, it emptied, and I very nearly drifted into sleep in a window seat when the light failed and the landscape gradually vanished behind the bright reflections of the interior lights.

Tickets, Timetables & Tight Lines - Itchen Roach (Pt3)

Three roach anglers in a car on the way to a roach fishery. The one in the back leans over the seat, and says to the other passenger, "if you won a million quid on the lottery, what would you buy?"

Tickets, Timetables & Tight Lines - Itchen Roach (Pt2)

A short walk upstream along the riverside track and I'd be fishing in ten minutes. Other anglers already pitched and fishing over the crash barrier were a cause for concern. I was bound further upstream but once there, would I get a good peg? Never having fished the stretch before, I didn't even know what a good peg looked like, with only very limited experience of fast chalk stream fishing and the bare bones of the watercraft necessary to understanding them, at my disposal.

Tickets, Timetables & Tight Lines - Itchen Roach (pt1)

Ominous. That's how it looked, stumbling out of bed and throwing open windows on the day ahead. An unbroken sheet of the 'rain maker,' nimbostratus, stretched from northern to western, and to southern and eastern horizons. There wasn't a hole, not a tear, nor a rip in its leaden cloak. The air smelled of damp soil, and though the concrete yard was dry, there was a hint of a certain aroma that has no name... but tells you that the concrete won't be dry for much longer, for it's the unmistakable sharp spice of approaching rain.

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

Canal Roach - The Sun's Burning Your Eyes Out!

Over the last four years I've got so used to fishing the local canals in the late afternoon, through evening time, and often an hour or so into darkness, that I'd all but forgotten that they are actually open to custom, the full 24 hours of the day. It's easy to forget such things. It's easy to dismiss such things. But nice to be reminded of such things by someone who fishes the early hours as a matter of course.

Stillwater Roach - Bait Your Hook with Love

I don't quite know where I came across that expression, and have always wondered what the hell it could mean. I'm sure it's quoted somewhere in a fishing book of mine, but I don't remember where. Perhaps it means that you must bait your hook with bait lovingly applied ? But that makes no sense to me. What is there to love about baiting a hook? And what fish could tell the difference, if you did?

Stillwater Roach & Perch - Master Caster

Off to gloucestershire for the day. Last trip to this fishery saw a couple of good roach come to net and perch of an encouraging size. My plan was to go for both at once, so, two matched rods fishing the same float rig, one fished in the margins for the perch, the other a couple of rod lengths out for the roach, prawn on the hook for the first, maggot or caster for the second.

River Roach - The Stratford Blues

I've been so busy writing this book of mine that the blogger in me has taken the passenger seat and has been idly watching the landscape fly by as this upstart book writer hangs on to the wheel with his foot to the floor but luckily, even speeding upstarts need a stop off at the service station every now and then so the blogger has been able to stretch his legs once in a while. The word count is now scraping 50,000 and will pass that mark today with the beginnings of the another chapter and as they are pouring out so easily I can't see the first draft taking more than another couple of weeks to complete and now I'm beginning to work on the illustrations as a way of slowing things up a little and getting the mind to come around to the idea of editing - the slow and methodical but enjoyable process of sifting flour and cutting fat from the beef for the succulent meaty pie I'm baking.

River Roach - Scratching the Itch - Down Beat & Up Beat (pt2)

Both the news and the tea were very, very good when I got to the fishing hut  - Danny had broken the British gudgeon record but slipped it back unwitnessed, nonplussed by its size, unsure that it could ever have been what it actually was and even confusing it with a baby barbel! Luckily (for us) he had the proof in pictures which are often better evidence than the fish in the hand and had weighed it at six or seven ounces on a dial balance never designed to be accurate so low down on the scale but there's no doubt about it - it was a gudgeon alright and seven inches long too

River Roach - Scratching the Itch - Putting the Roach Hatt On (pt1)

It's a funny old game. I fished one of the most exciting stretches of water imaginable just yesterday but decided, as this was my third trip to this gem of a water, that I'd now forgo all the pleasures of swimming the stream with a stick float and centrepin for most of the day catching one grayling after the other, a spectacular leaping trout every now and then, or hooking and losing salmon once in a while and when finally exhausted by it all traipsing down to the 'coarse' beats a little too late in the afternoon to really try properly for a big roach and instead of all that just go for broke

A Seeswood Seizure, Rare Flying Anglers & The John Wilson Self-take Trophy Shot Experience

Steve Philips invited me over to Seeswood Pool the other evening. It was right at the end of the fabulous October heat-wave which has to have been the best spell of summer weather in autumn I can remember. It was warm and then the clouds of doom came over and the end of the balmy degrees we had enjoyed so briefly was nigh.

River Roach - Ol' Rubberneck goes Redfinning...

Like all good stories this one begins and ends with a curry...

Before setting off for a day out at Stratford with me getting in some serious roach fishing in the Lucy's Mill weirpools and Judy and Molly setting off for a six mile walk downstream through the Seven Meadows and beyond, Judy had prepared a highly aromatic chicken jalfrezi and put it on the side to improve for later. As you would...

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.

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.

Canal Roach - Gone Goozling, Again...

Keith has made me aware of what I am, or rather what I have become. A gongoozler, or someone who watches the activities of the canal network. Not a trainspotter in any sense but an idler in essence - one who watches things happen at lock and basin but at a remove, a distance, observes, is not involved in any direct way, is a spectator, an onlooker.

I am involved though. I fish it and I'm known to the local live-in boaters as an angler. They talk to me, tip me the wink, offer advice and the occasional can of cheap and nasty lager. I give them almost nothing in return as my sandwich of cheery greeting and a chirpy farewell has very little in the way of substantive filling apart from what little tittle-tattle I have picked along the towpath from other boaters and about other boaters and boaty things, which is all the filling they are really interested in.

On The Turn

I've been trying to replicate an accidental success with turning casters that I had a couple of months ago. I left some out in the yard by accident, forgot about them and then it rained heavily, filling the bait tin with water. When I found them, all the maggots had turned into perfect sinking casters that stayed sinkers as they turned dark. Quite what happened I don't rightly know as my latest attempt ended with half floaters, half sinkers.

Nothing Doing Down the Cut

After experiencing an infuriating but endlessly informative series of miniscule indications, slow pulls and twangs, knocks, tremors, husked maggots and the eventual hooking and landing one of the suspected culprits on Wednesday evening, I decided that not only would I get back to the same spot on the morrow, but would, because I could, get back not only on the morrow after that too, but on all the morrows following