DES TAYLOR
“Memories are flooding back...”
I’VE JUST bought a scanner to convert thousands of my old slides and photographs to digital so they are all on my computer. You might well think this would be a bit of chore but not so. Besides, the river is over its banks, so I can’t go fishing.
I’ve already found a few images which reminded me of some great days on the bank. The first was back in 2004. In those days I used to make an annual trip to Anglers Paradise in Devon in search of its monster golden orfe. This particular year I arrived late in the evening and put a couple of kilos of CSL pellets into the water, hoping to attract the bigger orfe into the area and keep them there till dawn the next morning, when I’d fish for them with sprayed maggots on the waggler.
Right from the off it worked, and by doing this each evening more and more big orfe moved in. I finished up with a number of 6lb-plus fish, topped by two over 7lb to a best of 7lb 6oz.
The next shot is of a 25lb pike caught from the Cut Off Channel over in the Fens and part of a catch of seven 20-pounders in two days, shared between Nige Williams and me.
We’d started fishing above a bridge, and for the first few hours neither of us could buy a bite. Looking over the bridge we could see lots of pike, but they were in private water. Frustrating or what?
So Nige and I jumped over the fence for a closer look. Sure enough, lying there as happy as Larry, not moving or feeding, were those big pike literally just 20 yards down from our traps.
Behind us was an apple tree, and on the ground were hundreds of rotten windfalls. I suggested to Nige that we got a load of these and walked up the drain, throwing the fruit at the pike to drive them to our swim.
What happened next was incredible. The fish were driven like sheep up the drain and the rest, as they say, is history.
Our indicators dropped off every few minutes as the pike took our baits aggressively. We did the same the next day and yes, exactly the same happened again. Unbelievable but true.
My last story is about big trout that I could not locate on a fairly large water, but I had a cunning plan to sort the problem out. The water in question was stream-fed, so I filled a hessian sack with trout pellets and a house brick and put it into the feeder stream so the pellets would dissolve and be slowly washed down into the lake.
I put the bag in on a Thursday, and by Saturday, had you fallen in, you’d most likely have been eaten by giant trout attracted by the smell of those pellets.
A small Muddler Minnow worked fairly quickly soon saw me catching a number of big trout well into double figures.
I’m having fun looking back at these old photos, that’s for sure!