Canal Roach — Never Said They Were Easy...

Coventry Canal just round the corner from home and a short roach session snatched from a ridiculously busy work schedule that has pretty much robbed me of fishing opportunities the last few months. 

Whilst waiting for the mashed bread to settle in the track and the bites to commence I thought I'd take a butchers at a new book I'd stashed in the bag to while away the usual occasion of a twenty minute to three-quarters of an hour wait for the first.

I'd gotten through Des Taylor's opening foreword only as far as ' Make no mistake: nowadays canals aren't so tough as they once were...' before the float shot up the full length of its antennae and a feisty spring fish was on.

Maybe... and just maybe... Des was right?

I really, really was hoping for roach because the weather was just right for them. Good grief I can't remember my last roach from this swim it's been so long since the last. It was of course, one of the Cov's ubiquitous and very welcome skimmers. Never mind. They're always welcome on my hook and in my book because on the whole, and in the main, being rather greedier, more willing and less fickle  than roach they always accompany them about the groundbait, but usually precede them to the net.

Next cast, another bite. This was going to be one of those sessions, you know. The float dancing merrily and fish after fish coming home. And then a boat appeared...

"Oh, bollocks!"

Such a great start and let me tell you, a potentially great session in the offing, and it was all over in the first ten minutes.

I'll explain.

If you build a bread-based swim fishing big disks of the stuff on the hook and all goes well you may well catch a two-pound roach on my local Cov or Oxford canals given enough time, and George Burton has done just that just recently so you can believe me when I say it. However, no-one in the entire history of committed specimen roach fishing on either canal (that's George since 2012 and myself since January 2009!) ever successfully rescued a well-prepared and cooking bread swim from the outright and utter disaster of a boat going through.

So far as we know...

Yes, you can catch blades twenty minutes later in one's wake as proved to me beyond any doubt by Norm timing the introduction of fresh feed against his watch at Electric Wharf but in my long experience of this form of fishing on these particular venues, it never fully recovers where the big fish are concerned. Where they go to is a mystery but they don't come back in hours and the only answer seems to be to move along and start afresh in another peg or go home.

At that moment I thought I'd give up and go home, and that's what I intended to do, but before I did I thought I'd try a rescue mission. Ball in another couple of mashed slices. See what happened. Then go home when it didn't.

But it did. I caught another bream about half an hour later. However, then came through another boat!

The swim never recovered again and finally I decided that Des Taylor wasn't quite right. My canals are just as tough as they always were...

But then again, Des wasn't quite wrong either, was he?

He never said they were easy...

Next, a review of the book itself

Like a Virgin...

Dave Fowler, Martin Roberts and the Lesser Spotted Bankswooper (Ballivus rara)

50 years an active angler I've been asked to produce a rod license just twice in all that time. The last occasion was at Bury Hill, and actually, thinking back I never got to actually produce because Martin Roberts and Dave Fowler stole the thunderous import of the moment chitchatting the swooping official into such a state of utter submission that he ignored me utterly and in the end walked away denying the rare honour of waving it under his nose. 

On the first occasion I didn't have one, in fact I was a license virgin who'd never ever considered he'd be required to hold one at such a tender age let alone lose his unblemished criminal cherry by such an act of buggery. 

Marched from the fishery I was then summoned to Brentwood Magistrates Court where the magistrate pretty much laughed the bailiff out of court admonishing for him wasting court time over such a paltry issue, then fined me £5 and awarded £5 costs. 

Those were the days, eh?

That was 1974, though, and me just a teenager. Forty years on and things are rather different with non-possession or fishing during the close season carrying a maximum penalty of either shed loads of money or in the case of celebrities, serious career damage and ignominy in addition to shed loads of money.

Once bitten, though — twice shy. I may have come away relatively unscathed from my first punishment which was akin to having a ruler whacked rather lightly across the knuckles by a headmaster going through the motions of punishment but without meaning it, but I never forgot from that moment on the necessity of never fishing again without that slip of paper in my wallet. So, Martin was to pick me up at five, and, I applied for my license at 10 minutes to, took note of the reference number just in case, then, off we went to Warwick Racecourse ressy for a spot of fishing.

It's a pretty little lake, triangular in shape, and full of fish. Quiet and peaceful it is too.

A couple of lads on the far bank sharing the same swim fishing for carp were chatting away merrily...

"Oi lads...turn the volume down..." Shouts Martin.

We then proceed to talk across the bush dividing our two swims every bit as loudly as they!

There was nothing much to shout about in the sluggish early season fishing. A brace of crucians for Martin, a small tench for myself and a fair number of silver bream between us both. I did lose a good fish though. Pulling steadily toward the safety of the bush without ever deviating in its determination to go in the one direction only, eventually overpowering the light float tackle it got where it wanted to be, snagged firm, and stole my hook. An eel perhaps?

Then swooped in a master angler who proceeded to fish his chosen peg without a care in the world for bailiffs and their little pocket notebooks, court cases, fines and costs and whatnot. Didn't even have the wherewithal for the day ticket...

The View from Atop the Hill, and Other Stories

The first post from Idler's Quest for some considerable time and it has little to do with Mr Jeffrey Hatt Esquire, the proprietor, and his fishing exploits.

Exploits! Which and what piscatorial activities are these he speaks of now, you may well ask?

Well, since New Year's Day and my last missive they've consisted entirely of selling redundant sea fishing tackle on eBay. I haven't whet a hook or wet a line in all that time, and quite frankly, haven't had the urge to bother to try.

I thought the floods entertaining though. I liked Colnbrook resident, Asif Khan, blurting "It's something out of a horror movie," and yes, plagues of locusts journalists are very frightening in full swarm, aren't they? But particularly loved Chancellor George Osborne's statement that, "rain is not the fault of any one person". A classic slice of politicianese double-speak, but wrong, wrong, wrong.

Oh yes, George, it was one person's fault! It's Mother Nature who should be named and shamed for her excessive behaviour and made to pay reparations in the form of a nice hot Summer...

Good grief, I'd've hated to have had to live through such a winter confined to the upper floors of my multi-million pound Walton-on-Thames riverside pile and do fear I'll have terrible trouble selling the once charming and secluded but now miserable and remote Somerset Moor's weekend hideaway bungalow now or at any time in the near future and get back even half what I paid for the place, when and if I ever manage to flog it off.

Good job I shack up in my main residence. Longford Manor, for much of the year. The crumbling old edifice is also sited nearby a river, albeit a very small one, but was erected by Georgian builders circa 1815 who had the good sense to calculate a decent elevation above the high water mark laying its foundations firmly and squarely upon the moral high ground from where successive residents have always enjoyed looking out the top floor windows and down upon poor people suffering the predictable annual plight arising from the ill-judged situation of their mean abodes just a little way down the hillock.

Bottom of our road during an early 20th Century flood. Poor people's children look on terrified, and aghast...

Daniel Everitt, Duke of Stoke and landlord of the Lure of Angling Inn down by the banks of the River Sowe (into which my own local trickle itself flows) has kept his feet dry and been industriously busy with a mind freed from the worry of pending insurance claims. There's a story unfolding over there that I think you should run over and take a butcher's hook at ~

One Last Run

The tale of George (no, not you, Osborne...) and his desperate quest to end a terrible run of blanks, it involves Esox lucius, and so, as with all good piker tales, I guess there'll be a leviathan coming along at some point...

I think the next episode is due quite soon so get the first under your skin before the next arrives through your letterbox.

Avon Perch and Bream — Glad I've Had Enough of This...

"Ooh, it looks nice, don't it? " Is what I said to Martin on arrival.

And it really did look pretty good considering recent weather events. Cold, warm, dry, wet, icy, mushy, topsy turvy, you name it, we've had it. Why, we even had a rare winter thunderstorm the other day with really heavy hail that for a brief moment transformed Longford into a passable imitation of the winter wonderland we didn't get for Christmas.

The water was a really great colour. Not yet bottle green but sandy olive green and fining down well. How could we go wrong here today?

First cast into my current favourite pool, I had a bite on ledgered bread, the bait I always start off with just because I think it tells you the most about prospects. It's a diagnostoic bait where rivers are concerned because in my experience, if dace, chub and roach and the like won't bite on bread you can be sure you're not going to have an easy time of it with any other bait, or any other species come to that.

Second cast I had a small chub of a pound and a bit, so things really were going to go well.

Then, after a few more taps on the tip the skies darkened, the wind began to howl, the rain began to fall when the the tip fell still — well, not still as such because it was bouncing about in the rest — but certainly not bouncing to the attention of fish.

Then it came down in a massive and surprising torrent lasting all of twenty minutes, the brolly flapping, rain drumming on the canvas, and me holding on to the pole hoping no bites would come now because I'd not strike them if they did.

They didn't, and when the rain passed and the wind calmed they didn't return.

Martin hadn't fared so well, either. His day had started as mine had. A few encouraging bites on maggots but then nothing after the welcome cessation of unwanted precipitation. It seemed we were in for a tough one and as it transpired, so we were. I didn't have another bite in the next three hours and nor did he.

In the end I decided to go all out with worms and try for a perch. Worm being the bait of choice for the desperate because when nothing else will work, they just feasibly might...

That's when I found I'd left my river float tube at home and brought the canal one instead. Luckily it contained a little perch bobber amongst the other useless-for-purpose ones, so that was pressed into service. It just about worked. The water in the pool was a good ten feet deep and the tiny thing was strung a long, long way above the low slung bulk shot necessary to have the bait near bottom in this swirling eddy.

It ambled about for an hour before it finally did something positive. I struck, and a fish was on, which turned out to be the target species — a very welcome perch about a pound in weight. Naturally, I thought it would be the be the first of many but I thought wrong. Its shoal mates had other ideas and the next hours passed by as fruitlessly as they had before.

Then the sun came out blasting the land with fantastic low shot beams of light turning the far bank reed beds incandescent orange. All very pretty, but who cares when there's no good reason to enjoy the spectacle? Without fish to catch along with them, Mrs Nature's sublime lighting effects are just so many coffee table photo opportunities.

But I took them anyhow!

Martin came downstream to join me.

I took pictures of him — then him and me — then me and him — then me myself —and when bored with the exercise went back to fishing.

The perch bobber went about its business, as before. It was kind of relaxing watching a float do what a float does without the prospect that at some point in the foreseeable future it would be doing what it should. And then, about ten minutes after deciding I'd had enough of watching it do what it shouldn't, it dragged under.

Amazingly, the onerous chore of pulling the rig free of a snag turned into the pleasant throb and the enthralling job of a good fish to bank. And it did feel a very good fish too, and it really didn't feel anything like a chub either, and that meant it had to be a perch, and then I got a little worried!

When I saw the broad yellowish flash of an enormously deep flank, way, way down in the pool, I went a little wobbly...

Blimey this was a good perch! A bloody huge perch!!

But, of course...

It was only what I'd least expected!

Ah well...

In the closing moments of a long, grim day, a slim three-pound bream — that for a few exciting seconds really was a fat five-pound perch — made me glad I'd had enough of this.