Confounded Fish! - Roach, Rudd, and their Mules

This is the time of year when I begin to catch fish that slip between the meshes. I don't know why Spring should throw up so many oddities but it does seem to bring them out of the weeds. Hybrids, fish of two species parentage, seem to go on a feeding rampage right about now and over  the past four spring seasons I've been collecting pictures of these fish and trying to sort out, by visual clues alone, because portable DNA testing probes are not yet available in Maplins (but they will be one day!) the reliable visual clues that distinguish them from their parents.

My Way with Bread

I've done a great deal of bread fishing over the last few years and through hundreds of hours of various failures and successes have learned a great deal about this apparently simple bait, so I thought I might fess up about my hard-earned fluffy stuff methodology.

As you might have gathered reading this blog I am a roach nut. It's not that I don't love to catch chub, bream and dace, the other three worthwhile river species with a proper love for bread, but I find that fishing and searching for roach with bread invariably finds me those fish if they are present but without negating a chance of roach if they are present too. It's the only bait that I know that will select roach consistently, maggots and worms having their day but finding too many small fish in the first case and the second being rather inconsistent on rivers where roach are concerned.

On Roach - Warwickshire Avon Über Roach

One day it had to happen, and that day has finally come around. Forget the Bristol and the Hampshire, the Avon of the moment is the Warwickshire one. 80 miles of wandering, willful water has finally matured into a bona fide big roach fishery with the stunning captures of two two-pound fish in as many weeks.

On Roach: Canal Roach and Ruminations on Shoal Behavior

I have never fished for any other fish so capricious, so fickle and contrary than large roach and no other fish that requires more artfulness on the part of the angler if he is to be successful in the catching of them.

On Roach - The Purist Fish

Roach fishing is one of the only disciplines in coarse angling where 'how' a fish is caught is far more important than 'if' a fish is caught at all, in fact roach fishing has a hierarchy of preferable methods ranked according to the skill required to effectively fish them