Improve Your Coarse Fishing (UK)
Bob Roberts’ diary
Itching for the start of a new river season, Bob reacquaints himself with a secret pool, ‘tests’ the commercial selected for a final and visits a gravel pit, prior to opening-day success
IT IS said you should never go back. Unfortunately, I had a hankering to visit a few old stomping grounds and set aside a few days to go time travelling to places where I fished as a callow youth, making up for what I lacked in experience with boundless enthusiasm. Quite a few of the places I used to fish no longer even exist, or are infested with carp. That’s not the same, is it?
Week One: Back in time
But there was one very special pond (above), hidden well away from prying eyes and breathtakingly unique when compared with my regular haunts. This mysterious spot is surrounded by tall sedges. Forty years ago it was mostly inaccessible with just a few rickety platforms giving access to the water. It was my idea of tench heaven. It was a place where I could catch up to a dozen fish, the best around 4lb, and I loved the place. I couldn’t wait to see how it looked today. Research revealed nothing except that it is now a protected SSSI site. So I went for a mooch round. The old layby access point had vanished, indeed so unrecognisable was the lane that I had to take an inspired guess and head off across fields and through woodland searching for the place. My inbuilt radar is clearly not as good as it once was and it took ages to find, but what a sight for sore eyes. Nature is gradually reclaiming the pool. Head-high sedge surrounds it, the platforms have long rotted away. The club that once held the rights disbanded around the time of the miners strike. I found just four spots where an adventuring angler might poke a rod through the vegetation and someone had done just that because I found a tarpaulin abandoned with quite a lot of old rubbish. Someone had been camping by the pool and I suspect they weren’t practising catch and release. I never saw a fish roll but that’s not always
a reliable guide with tench. The question remains, should I just walk away or should I risk poaching, just once, for old times’ sake? That’s not my style and I’ve no idea who to approach for permission. It’s in such a remote spot. A quandary. Maybe next year... With the Club Match Angler Championship taking place just a week into the river season I took the opportunity to have a dabble at the venue I’ve selected for the final, Bank End Fisheries. I was under a misapprehension that the winning weights were likely to be made up with F1 carp. Turns out that’s not quite right. Yes, there are loads of F1s but there are also ‘huggins’ of regular carp, too, some proper lumps among them. It didn’t take me long to appreciate that I desperately needed to step up on my elastics. That wasn’t a problem. What was a problem is I’ve used my pole rather a lot this past few years. In fact I’ve hammered my pole without mercy. I’ve also been pretty clumsy and snapped a couple of sections. The traditional quick fix of sliding the broken sections through each other and applying parcel tape is absolutely fine as a temporary measure when catching roach and skimmers, but you really must either replace the section or get it repaired rather than making do for six months or more! Unfortunately it’s no fun at all when your fifth section explodes loudly and rather dramatically at the point of its ‘temporary’ repair and I swear every other angler on the lake had a quiet little chuckle at my expense.
Week Two: Fishing for fun!
I’m trying to spend a little more time fishing with fellow Daiwa consultant Brian Skoyles. Not serious fishing, but proper fishing. Fishing for the hell of it. Fishing for fun, like everyone should be doing. Too many folk regard fishing as a ‘career’. It’s not. It’s a way of avoiding work and if you can earn a living from doing that then good luck to you. But a lot more will fail than succeed and there’s neither pension nor sick pay. Fishing’s about a lot more than competing with strangers for a list of PBs that are at best weighed on dodgy scales by some even dodgier characters so the rest of the world can look at your social media pictures before broadcasting to the world that you’re probably a liar! It doesn’t have to be like that. Brian and I went fishing on a large gravel pit where any carp over double figures would be a fantastic result. We shared a swim, two rods apiece, Brian to the left. We sat by the kettle and put the world to rights while dunking biscuits in our coffee. I couldn’t believe he’s never had a Tunnock’s Caramel Wafer before! Brian wanted to catch carp and he did so quite successfully, netting half a dozen fishing pop-ups over a scattering of particles. It’s good to watch an experienced angler tackle a water he’s not fished before. The meticulous process of feature finding, application of bait with a Spomb, accurate positioning of the hookbaits and carefully considered rigs. A few yards away my goal was to avoid catching carp using maggot feeders with my fingers crossed hoping for a big bream. The conventional wisdom of laying down a bed of feed to catch bream doesn’t work here. Well, that’s not strictly true, but you will have to be prepared for catching carp, too. Picky, aren’t I? I so wanted Brian to catch and he didn’t let me down. I, on the other hand, struggled for bites. That’s not unusual with big-pit bream because being on the fish is everything. My first fish kidded me it was a bream until it was under the rod tip where it promptly went mental. Turned out to be a rather nice perch and one that set me wondering about the untapped potential of the place. My second fish almost gave me a heart attack. Again it plodded like a bream before waking up at the net. Let me explain that this water has, in the distant, past produced roach to over 3lb but the cycle appears to be
over and there’s little in the way of small fish coming through, thanks in no small part to impossible levels of cormorant predation. Anyway, what swirled in front of me looked like the mother of all roach. My heart leapt, my knees turned to jelly while my head said, ‘Behave yourself, it has to be a hybrid!’ Which it was. But for a few moments I dared to dream. It was a glorious dream and I care less now that it was a hybrid because I enjoyed catching it immensely. Eventually I caught my slab and what a slab it was, too. The evening sunshine lit her up perfectly for a picture and it was two very happy anglers who shared the drive home. No-one weighed a fish but we both wore huge grins. That’s how fishing should be.
Week Three: Bring it on
With just a week to go to the new river season I found myself in A&E waiting to have my foot X-rayed. Thankfully, it wasn’t broken but, by gum, did it hurt and just hobbling to the bathroom was a challenge. Fishing was out of the question for a few days but the timing could not have been better. It gave me plenty of time to tie-up some new rigs and check my gear was in perfect order. With spools reloaded, pellets and boilies restocked, it’s time to boil some hemp and then I’m ready to rock ‘n’ roll. The river season is now so close I can almost taste it.
Week Four: Scoring early
Heavy and persistent rain blighted the final week of the closed season and rivers the length and breadth of the country went into summer flood mode – swollen, chocolate brown and awash with debris. Lots of folk were out on the 16th but most were struggling to cope with a metre or so of extra water and the sheer volume of rubbish fouling their lines forced them to recast every 10 minutes. I decided against fishing the morning. Instead I drove down into Nottinghamshire at lunchtime, found a country pub showing the England v Wales game and then went looking for a quiet sheltered spot on the river. The footie was great, the sun came out to shine, the banks were predictably deserted and the volume of rubbish coming down was easing off. I picked a swim just off a bend where a large tree deflected most of the flow where the meat rod was barely out for 15 minutes when it hooped over and my season was off to a flying start. Not exactly the biggest barbel in the world but it fought like a fish twice its size. Don’t you love it when a plan comes together!