Des Taylor’s weekly diary
When the rivers are out of sorts you can always turn to stillwaters for your fishing fix
IT’S been a slow start to the year for me, especially on the river. But, let’s be perfectly honest, I expected that because the Severn has been up and out of sorts for 12 weeks now.
Very little bait has been going in, and the fish have been pushed around a fair bit, so it’s going to take time for them to settle down again. But when you go fishing as regularly as I do you know a decent fish is just around the corner… and so it proved this week as a specimen perch put a bend in my rod!
TUESDAY
The Warwickshire Avon looked perfect, and was the best ‘catching’ colour I had seen for the past three months.
I got down there at 3.30pm and stayed until just before midnight. The only problem was, the barbel hadn’t read the script and besides a chub of about 2lb I didn’t have a single take!
The barbel hadn’t seen boilies and pellets for months, and the only anglers putting bait in have been match anglers, and so perhaps in hindsight I should have fished maggots – but it’s so easy to be wise after the event.
My mate Wayne is having a couple of evenings down there, so I’ll wait for him to report back before I plan another session.
I gave him some of my ‘pudding mix’ and some Nash T&G boilies to throw in over the next couple of visits, hopefully priming the fish for when I next venture down!
Wayne lives right by the river, so it’s easier for him to prebait than it is for me to make the 90-minute drive to do so.
FRIDAY
I headed up to Charlies Lake near Bridgnorth for another go at the big perch it holds. Last week my good friend Ed Mathews had a 4lb 2oz fish from there, and I’d be fibbing if I didn’t say I was after a ‘four’ from the venue too, having had a few three-pounders from there in the past.
I started on a bright green Ned rig – the very same pattern Ed caught his fish on and one which has served me well up there.
I expected it to be difficult, because that’s the way specimen fishing is most of the time, but on my third cast the rod slammed over and I was into a big fish.
There is something very special about hooking a big perch on a light lure rod, and those big thumping headshakes let you know instantly that it’s a perch, and a big one at that.
Shaun, the lake owner, was at my side with the landing net and straight away, in an excited voice, he said: “It’s a big ’un, mate!”
When it slid into the landing net I knew it was the hoped-for giant I’d been chasing, and the scales confirmed it when the needle spun round to 4lb 2oz.
The good news was that it was a different fish to Ed’s. That makes it three different ‘fours’ from this water so far this winter.
The fish was a cracker, as you can see in the photograph above, and although I have caught much bigger perch I have never before caught one that’s such a looker!
But the day could have been even better because around six casts later the rod slammed over again, before the hooks pulled, and I’m sure it another big perch was responsible. Still, with an equal venue-best perch already under my belt, the loss was not going to ruin my day.
On the way home I stopped in at the Squirrel pub for a quick cider to celebrate the capture, but I needed to get back to the tackle den fairly quickly as I had my live podcast to do at 7pm.
To say I was buzzing was the understatement of the year so far, and the big perch was the first thing I was going to be telling everyone about that evening!