54 Des Taylor’s
Diary of a Countryman
THIS week I moved into a wooden cabin on the riverbank for around three weeks while we wait to move into our new bungalow.
My wife Maggie and I are treating it a bit like a holiday. We have no phone line, the mobile has no signal and we have no internet.
All we have is the river that flows past the back door, the wildlife and a supply of wine and food.
Most of my fishing gear is in storage except what I have in the truck to go carping, drop shotting and eeling. This will probably be our last move, although when my granddaughter has grown up we may go and live by the sea in a little apartment where I can look over the water as I write.
In the meantime it’s fishing, guide days and writing.
Here’s how my week went.
FRIDAY
Took young James Truscott carp fishing, and it turned out to be a red-letter day! His personal-best carp before today was 13lb 8oz and all he wanted to do was break that.
Conditions on the day were perfect – overcast, with a fresh westerly wind blowing across the two-acre lake. I baited up three spots with about 30 Nash Key boilies and half-a-kilo of feed pellets, then started to get the gear out and tackle up.
Too many anglers want to get fishing too quickly and I can’t blame them – they have been at work all week and can’t wait to get their rods out – but the start of the day is most important. Getting the feed in is more important at this stage than getting the rods out.
It was around an hour after arriving on the bank before we cast out, and just nine minutes later James was landing his new personal-best common carp of 17lb 10oz. What a start!
While he was still playing the fish I catapulted 15 more boilies into the swim, something I planned to do with every fish caught. This worked well, and in an eight-hour session James had 16 carp, six of them over 20lb!
Best was a 24lb common, and at one point he had a twenty in one net as I fetched another net to land a second fish! If Carlsberg had done a carp fishing day for James, this would be it. I told him this could be the best day he will ever have in his life, because sessions like this don’t come around often for many anglers, that’s for sure.
I used 2kg of boilies and 4kg of pellets throughout the day, topping up the swims when we caught a fish, but if the swim went dead I would fire in six boilies to produce a few ‘plops’ on the water, spurring the fish on to feed again.
Lots of carp anglers put too much feed in at the start and then don’t have any left for when the fish really get their heads down. It’s better to keep it trickling in for a big catch. Anyway, that’s how I do it, and over the years I have enjoyed some big hits.
SATURDAY
The Perchfishers annual meeting. They have asked me to do another three years as president, which is a real honour.
The meeting went well, as
expected. The Perchfishers are laid back, nice chaps who aren’t looking for a row! Then some members went fishing on the lake where the meeting was while others of us propped up the bar till the early hours, talking of perch that got bigger with every pint.
Perch fishing has become very popular with anglers because of jigging and drop shotting, but it seems to have settled down a bit now.
I am seeing lots of drop shotting gear for sale from people who used to do it, but there are still a lot of anglers who are doing it and always will – lifelong lure anglers like myself.
For me, lure fishing is not the be all and end all of perch fishing, it’s just a small part of the big picture.
TUESDAY
Carping again, this time on a very small lake full of wildies. Well, that’s what I was told, but my first fish was a long, thin 6lb mirror carp which means that the ‘wildies’ are probably just stunted commons. Still, I had good fun with these hard-fighting fish on my float rod.
Sweetcorn was the order of the day, and lots of it, mixed with spray-dried corn steep liquor powder which sent the fish crazy.
I must have caught 50lb of carp or thereabouts, but nothing like the catch James had the other day. In fact he has just called me to tell me the exact weight he had on his guide day – 295 lb on the dot!
I have not caught any true wildies for years. It seems today that most anglers are more interested in huge mirrors and commons than the smaller wildie.
Don’t get me wrong, I would much rather catch a big carp, but if there is true wild carp water I think it should be left that way and not be ruined by the stocking of king carp.