Improve Your Coarse Fishing (UK)
Bob Roberts
My monthly fishing diary...
THE days of strolling around in shorts, lathering on sun cream and insect repellant, swallows, the sound of combined harvesters and normal river levels all seem a distant memory now. Anglers need no Game Of Thrones warnings, they already know, winter’s coming! And the going gets tough. Floods and frosty nights mean the rivers will need time to settle down. Time for a change of approach.
Week one...
After Mike Townsend’s funeral a bunch of us decided to have a little get together and catch a few roach as a kind of tribute. We decided Holme Marsh on the lower Trent might throw up a few fish but the river was a constant washout. In the end we gave up and switched to a stillwater.
I’ve always harboured a fancy for fishing the Swan Pond at Messingham Sands but it’s restricted to matches- only. Perhaps two ambitions could be satisfied in one go, so I explained the circumstances to owner Kevin Johnson and asked if we might book nine pegs and pretend it was a match.
Kev kindly agreed. I was actually excited about fishing a new venue for the first time in a while. It has thrown up some remarkably good perch and roach in matches and seemed perfect for our needs.
Of course, you rarely get perfect conditions and this was anything but. Cold nights, flat calm, fog, a cloudless sky and then the sun in our eyes. Just our luck the roach didn’t want to play ball. But everything else did.
My first fish was a crucian carp. And the second. Although I was having to wait, I was soon enjoying a bite each drop in and it almost seemed to be a different species each time the float dipped. I had crucians, F1s, ide, roach, skimmers, silver bream, perch and even a couple of bright red goldfish, almost every fish a netter, all on red maggot or caster over loosefed casters at a comfortable nine metres. I even lost a huge lump of a carp that appeared oblivious to the fact it was hooked for ages. I swear it kept on feeding and refused to swim off. When it did, it did so ever so slowly but no way could my 2lb hooklink stop it.
With 10 feet of water in front of me, gradually sloping away, I fished a 1g float set to dead depth. If I wanted to lay a bit of line on the deck I could pull back a foot. If I wanted to come off bottom I pushed out a short way. Comfortable fishing with doubled up No. 5 elastic – just soft enough for the smaller fish, a bit of backbone coming into play on the bigger ones.
Those fish should have risen off bottom to meet the loosefeed but for the life of me I couldn’t tempt them to rise in the water nor get them competing properly. I kept trying my much lighter ‘ drop’ rig set at 7ft to begin with but not one bite came on the drop. That really surprised me.
The fish were in grazing mood and come lunchtime, so were we. Lee Swords had brought not one, but two picnic hampers. Martin Abonyi’s wife had cooked brownies, Brian Skoyles chipped in with biscuits and chocolate crispies, two kettles boiled merrily. It was that kind of occasion.
All agreed we should do it again, and soon, how about we target perch next time? And so our little private Facebook message group feed lit up that evening with a stream of ideas and suggestions. At heart I’m a bit of a loner when it comes to my fishing but I do enjoy these gatherings.
Everyone went home happy, vowing to do it again, and soon. Skoylesy was double happy. His prawn offering, meant for a perch, produced a cracking common carp.