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.




Once was vicious but he's armless now...

Roach though, are just around the corner and the one excursion I have mounted in the last weeks has been after them. Bread punch has been my experiment this summer and it certainly gets the bites but they are the most infuriating bites possible. I don't know. Perhaps a pole should be purchased as the waggler approach isn't really working very well. Dip, dip, lift, dip, lift, dip, dip is how it goes. On and on and on...

After a while you get annoyed with it because you cant hit the bites with an angle between you and the culprits, and just move along.

Then I decided to fish for a tench along the lilies of the far bank down past the motorway. Here the bites were more positive and a string of skimmer bream was my result but no tench showed this time out. One of the bream was an extraordinary individual with a huge chunk out of its back. A genetic disfigurement, I think ~



At last, just as the light faded I got a roach. It fell to a piece of flake fished without ground bait - I'd found that breadflake fished in amongst the lilies, which are themselves a new thing round here as they only started to appear two years ago, didn't require it. The fish are starting to get use to using them as cover, as you would expect. At exactly a pound it was an average roach but as perfect a roach as you'd ever hope for. The only thing that would make a canal roach more perfect would be serious weight, but I haven't had one of those for a time now...



The silver bream though, they were nowhere to be seen and the swims were the very ones where every spring they are found in numbers. Have they gone away or off the feed? Who knows? Mysterious fish that they are...

This weekend coming is the first annual Wark's and District Blogger Fish-In at Harvington. I expect a  lot of barbelling and even some zandering but I think I am going to try for a roach as last year I found some serious individuals at a certain place - the water is as low now as then and unlikely to change much before the weekend. I might even get in the water and trot flake down to them which would be pleasant fishing especially if one of them fell to it.

Then again I do fancy one of the carp I saw in the canal arm. Big buggers there you know. Eighty four pounders apparently...