Summer Chubbing — Twice Bitten, Once Shy

Somewhere over the far bank there's a party going on. Bright and breezy music drifting across the reed choked river. In my swim there's a party going on too with every chub in the neighbourhood jumping on my bait like it's the only food they've seen since Christmas.

I'm doing what I always do when confronted with a new stretch and that's flicking bread about here and there to ascertain potential. There's no bait quite as good for this, though few bother. If its full of roach you'll get tippity taps, crammed with dace then 4 inch bangs, chub alley then huge bouncing twangs and the lot mixed with added gudgeon then a bewildering array of all and every kind of bitey thang.

Of course I really want roach. There's none here, So I move one swim down and flick into the middle of what has to be a proper roach swim — boring looking. Which is just what they like in my experience. A smooth sheet of water with even flow bank to bank and of middling depth. Roach are so suburban in their housing choices, aren't they?

Once I've taken all the chub out of it I finally catch a number of lovely redfins but they're hard won with very few bites between fish. Not big, not small, but proof I've found another glide with potential come wintertime. That established I decide to fish all out for chub. and in chubby looking places where roach won't be.

Mid evening the music carried on the soft summer breeze changes. No longer the chipper anthems of the hopeful optimist but the doleful dirges of the defeated pessimist. I guess Costa Rica has just wiped its arse flushing both an Italian turd and England's bog paper thin World Cup presence down the toilet pan...

The party over there is over, but not over here where the chub are having a ball! I just can't fail catching them.  One after the other they fall. Martin fishing for barbel experiences similar. Chub, chub and yet more chub. In near pitch black we pack down but the party would have carried on and on all night long if only we'd stayed on.

Next session you'd have thought things might be the same, wouldn't you? Well, midday torrential rain here and there in the river catchment had put half a foot on it and added a nice tinge of colour so it looked better than before. It looked so bloody perfect in fact you'd have sworn it would also fish better than before, but that wasn't to be the case...

I find bites plentiful from the outset but just can't hook them and when I hit what I think is a dace bite but find myself attached to a big chub instead, it throws the hook. It's impossible fishing. Hundreds of twitches and twangs struck at — four good chub hooked — but every single one lost to slight hook holds.

Unlike Mr Suaraz, in today's game they just aren't chomping down hard enough to fall foul.

And it carries on that way till the big black cloud arrives ditching a million tons of cold water onto slate and tarmac turning the water from healthy green to deathly grey within the hour when bites peter out for good. Fish do know what's coming well in advance, I'm sure...

The gathering storm...

The lightning is great fun though. The deepest bass note of one clap of thunder actually moves the water, I swear! There's even a baby tornado.

Narrowly avoided a drenching (neither of us has brought a brolly us being optimists!) thankfully the storm skims past just a half mile distant. You'd have sworn it would hit our swims head on the way the cloud behaved but with such storms that produce tornadoes, as an insignificant speck on the ground looking heavenward, you see the rotation of the system not the general drift of the whole massive thing.

The storm passed by

The fishing never recovers (it never was very well) but around dusk with thick mist rising all around, bored with the lack of action and wandering about dejectedly, we discover something brand new and rather exciting that we hadn't bargained for.

But that's another story, for another time...

Canvas Design — My Kind of Trophy Shot

Do you remember this picture and my promise to explain what the hell we were up to in it?

They are of course canvas prints. Mine's hung over my desk for a month now. The fresh-off-the-printer inks have toned down just so and are now exactly as they should be and very, very close to those of the original picture. The stretcher hasn't warped or skewed so much as a millimetre. No tears or holes have appeared. I have to say that I like it very much!

Considering that the file sent for my print was a very small low resolution copy of an large original picture lost in a disastrous computer crash some time ago, it has come out rather well. Jaggy straight edges and a distinct lack of sharpness are bound to be very visible in a jpeg file that's blown up from very small to quite large — in this case nine times larger than the original — but the canvas weave does a good job of compensating for that. Actually, the combination of weave and compression artefacts is quite nice, lending a painterly softness that suits the subject matter. Smooth paper would not have been so forgiving.

Approximately actual size on my screen and the fish the size of a small chublet — surprised it came out so well blown up large enough to make the fish almost full size in the 24x20 inch print.  

Martin's hangs on his wall too, but downstairs in the dining room. His better half really likes it, probably because his smile is priceless. The file was full resolution so no problems there then. It's just as sharp as you'd expect it to be.

I chose mine out of thousands of alternative pictures because I like the unintentional visual pun of a chub who's apparently eaten my rod or been impaled upon it. I also like the background and the colour values which are just exactly those of a bright day by the River Itchen where it was caught. It was a no brainer really.

I chose Martin's from my own stock of images of him, without his knowledge, then presented it as a gift the day we went to the lake where the picture was taken. He was pleasantly surprised!

A trophy is not a trophy without explanatory text — where the fish was caught, its size, date of capture, etc — so that was incorporated in Photoshop along the bottom edge. I was thinking of adding our monikers too, just as a captor's name would have been included for a cased stuffed fish, but thought that overkill, especially in my case because it was just a mid four-pounder and not a specimen fish.

For anyone thinking of doing the same with a low res picture, I made the tiny 72 dpi file up to 300 dpi so that text placed on top would be pin sharp. Otherwise it would look truly ghastly with horrible jaggy edges spoiling the whole thing. With pictures there's quite some leeway but no one can abide a fuzzy typeface.

Conrad McKee of Canvas Design, who offered to make these prints for me has done a really great job of them you know, and they do sit well on the wall. Therefore, I recommend them to you wholeheartedly.

This is your discount code saving you 15% on the deal — idler15

Click on the link below to find out more...

Canvas Design

Canal Tench — Dustbin Lids & Farthing Kites

Location: Coventry Canal. Subject: tench. Swim: particular. Arrival time: critical.

Four O'clock in the afternoon is a little too late in the day to be certain of securing it and so I thought we'd probably not get the right peg because it is the most desired swim on any canal round these parts. Either side of it you'd think the cut was entirely fish-less the way some local anglers behave about it but we did get it and set up in it. About half an hour after we'd settled down a couple of well-known middle aged lads, bikes strapped up with tackle and hung down with bait buckets arrive for their pre-planned canal carp overnighter.

Round the corner, no doubt, they were brimming with optimism, laughing and smiling as they discussed the night ahead and how best to go about it, but now on the home straight and with us two interlopers in plain view — they approach — flying faces like a pair of farthing kites!

We're fishing, of course, right where they'd planned to be...

You'd think they'd either have gone home and forgot about it or more likely set up nearby and fished till our planned departure some time after dark, but no. They plonk down dejectedly on the bench to our left and do nothing. It'll be a quarter of a day before we'll move but they're going to sit and grumble and glower at us till that long distant moment arrives.

"Jeff, when you've finished fiddling with that fag come over here and feel my rod' Says Martin, "It's throbbing!"

Sure enough, stroking my hand along his stiff, sleek, black length, it is...

"That'll be your electric magnetism, mate". Says I.

My circle hook experiment continues. As before, one rod fishes a traditional J hook, the other a circle pattern. Both are baited with corn and both use the same helicopter rig with six-inch hook-lengths. What would the canal tench make of the difference, if and when they turned up?

I thought my first run (and what a belter it was)! should confirm things but picking the rod up and winding down to the fish it was clearly not a tench but a bream. However, at the net it looked for a brief second like a very big roach — and I do wish it had been because it went 2lb 6oz on the scales. A hybrid but a very nicely proportioned one more roach in appearance than bream.

As with the roach caught the previous session, once again the circle hook hold was perfect with the fish hooked squarely through the lower lip and as before, dead centrally. This fish's mouth was very much like a pure roach's mouth, in fact. And that was duly noted as — and later turned out be — significant.

All the tench I'd caught at Lemington Lakes (see previous post) were hooked the very same way. However, all the bass I have ever caught on circle hooks (and once I began using them it quickly became a running total of many hundreds) were all hooked in the scissors and remarkably all were hooked in the lower left hand side of the jaw but never the right and the result was the same whether ledgering or trotting a float down a creek. That has to be because bass snatch up food items and just like J Edgar Hoover, they never turn left.

Tench, roach and hybrids, and probably all bottom grazers, clearly don't do that. They'll pick up the bait with their heads down, rise up in the water, and straighten up. Also, unlike bass or perch, pike and zander too, all of whom have generally similar jaw arrangements, such fish are not predators and don't have pronounced 'scissors'.

I wondered, though, if the circle pattern would snare the inevitable by-catch of all my canal sessions to date — bream — a fish with an extensible tube for a mouth...

The answer seemed to be, no, they wouldn't, because Martin was landing one after the other while my circle line to his immediate right was twitching away, the bobbin jumping about every now and then, but without true runs developing. I thought it must be bream taking the corn but the hook failing to prick. I was pretty certain it had nothing to do with tench what with Martin hauling bream after bream just yards away.

Then at last, the right hander fishing the J hook sprang to life and a fish was on, but then it was off again. In a fraction of a second it was lost but not before sending up a large vortex wherein Martin spied a big orange tail. A carp. The hook-link had snapped clean off near the swivel. An unfelt wind knot or a nick in the line had lost me a good fish.

I changed the rods over, the J hook now fishing amongst the bream. Certain I'd have a bream in ten minutes, I was proved right and my theory that circle hooks will not easily catch them possibly gaining credence.

Imagine that, you, you died-in-the-wool tunnel-visionary carp fanatic, you. If circles will catch tench reliably (and I intend to prove it) then they will certainly catch your species reliably too, but even better than that. If they won't also catch bream, in fact make it almost impossible for them to hook themselves, well, then we have just about the most perfect hook for the long-winded job of laying carefully planned traps for the chosen few but avoiding the attentions of the unchosen many, do we not?

We'll see...

Departing when it was clear that tench would not show we left the peg open to the farthing kites.

I have it on reliable account they caught now't besides dustbin lids...

Early Season Tench — The Width of a Circle

Last year the tench season lasted about three days according to some. Depends what you mean exactly by 'the tench season,' though, doesn't it? If you say that three days was the entire time frame in which a specimen was to be caught at maximum weight before spawning commenced, then yes. It really was that brief.

So very brief that I blinked and missed it. Not that I missed blinkin' much by all accounts. It was dire at best.

I decided to put out an experimental rod equipped with a circle hook. I've used them before for tench and with startling results, results that I'll publish one day but not before catching a few by the same method from fisheries altogether less easy than Lemington Lakes where I conducted my initial experiments (hooking in excess of thirty in the five hour session but losing not a single one...) and at far greater weights.

Circle hooks really do work with thick lipped fish you know. It's just that you need to get the gape bang on or you lose them due to the mechanics of their hook-up. Get it right and it clamps down on the lip like a padlock ensuring that the hooked fish will never come off but just slightly too small a gape and it cannot get a proper hold. That means using hooks that look outsized for the intended quarry but actually are not.

Anyhow, I chucked that rod out left and fished a standard J hook rig at right. Both employed corn — two grains side hooked on the circle hook and two hair rigged on the standard. Martin fished two rods with worm on the hook and large feeders packed with groundbait and chopped worm.

He had the first run. A perch. I had the second. A roach.

I thought it a good enough roach for a photo considering that just two years ago they were unheard of at this venue unless young blades caught by the occasional match angler. They started to show up as by-catch on tench rigs at around the half-pound mark and have come in well over the pound recently. This was a lovely looking fish of 14 ounces.

On the J Hook ?

Nope...

It was caught on the circle hook, was hooked perfectly in the lower lip, and that's food for thought...

Then Mr Rat made a visit and then Mrs Water-Vole too. Rodent bait spill battle entertainment whilst we whiled away the hours for the first of the expected tench of our evening

Martin had the third run. Another perch. I had the fourth run. A tench at last!

It was on for a minute or so before it was gone. Gape slightly too small I'm afraid and no doubt I'll explain exactly why that was the case at some length and in great detail at some future point but in a nutshell, the gape of the hook I was using will hook up but never let go of every tench that takes the bait up to a certain size but will not hook any fish above that weight. However, I don't actually know what the watershed weight for this particular gape size is!

Sounds mad? Circle hooks are...

But when they work... they're super bad!

Fifth run was Martin's. A perch exactly the same size as both of his previous brace. Worms won't work for tench here then...

There was no sixth run. So, we had our lake mate, James, take trophy shots of ourselves holding a couple of stand-in specimens we'd caught earlier...

And I'll tell you all about them...

Soon enough!