Anglers’ shock captures
Every so often in the life of an angler, fortune strikes or something bizarre happens and you catch something totally unexpected. Dom Garnettt takes up the story...
ONE of the great charms of angling is that, besides the result we actually planned for, there is always the possibility that something totally unexpected will take place.
Just about every keen angler will have their own tale of a wild streak of luck, or a huge fish that came out of the blue. In my own case, this was on honeymoon in San Francisco. I’d decided to have a scratch around the piers with a really light LRF-style set-up.
Minutes later, instead of a small rockfish, I’d hooked something intent on destroying my light lure rod. By some miracle, and with the aid of a borrowed drop net, I landed an impressively meanlooking California halibut.
25lb pike on a lobworm
Pike quite often feature in anglers’ tales of wild fortune, but would you fancy playing a real brute on 5lb line? That’s exactly what happened to Ian Petch from West Sussex, as he presented a lobworm for perch.
“The pike season hadn’t been great, so armed with my usual Avon rod, float tackle and lobworms I’d switched to spring perch on a club water,” he recalls.
“My float was cocked nicely in a margin swim. After just a short wait it yanked under, but I missed the strike. Next cast, it happened again, the float this time dragging under violently. I struck again and it was apparent this was no perch!”
Assuming it was a large carp, Ian applied as much pressure as he dared to try and stop it ruining his perch swim. Moments later, his annoyance turned into a very different emotion as he saw the form of a seriously long, angry pike emerge!
“Things suddenly got more serious and my legs turned to jelly,” he remembers. “It gave several mad, fast runs, between which it would just hang in the water, its huge tail waving like a flag when it broke the surface.
“Luckily, I’d packed a larger landing net in case of carp and eventually the fish came in. There was a huge thrashing and to this day it still seems like a dream that there was a pike nestled there in the mesh! It was a new personal best at the time of 25lb 9oz. I had to laugh after enduring such a tough winter fishing for pike with nothing even close to that size!”
Salmon are another species that will occasionally snatch a bait or lure intended for other fish, but Nigel Evans’ random salmon encounter is amazing in more ways than one.
“Back in December 1990, I was pike fishing in a Thames weir pool,” he remembers. “Standing on the gantry I could just make out a long fish shape holding in the flow above the weir sill. I presumed it was a pike and cast my wobbled sprat to it.
“After several failed attempts to get it interested it suddenly turned, grabbed the sprat and screamed off upstream!
“After a lengthy battle I finally landed a hen fish of about 10lb. The lock keeper called the NRA, who sent a van with a tank and took it away. They wrote to me to say they had stripped 9,000 eggs from her, fertilised them and released her back into the Thames!”
Fly surprise from the sea
While virtually all species will sometimes attack a lure or fly, one family of fish you never hear about being tempted in this manner are the rays. Which makes the encounter that Colin Macleod, from Fareham in Hampshire, had, all the stranger.
“I’d been fishing a Flexi-worm very slowly for mullet, through a deep trench in a fading current. I thought I’d hooked the bottom, until it accelerated away. I couldn’t believe my eyes when I saw it was a nice thornback ray!” he says.
You might have expected the fish to be foul-hooked, but after a rod-wrenching fight, the evidence was plain to see. It had swallowed the fly fair and square! Before you start digging out your fly or lure rod for a ray, though, we should probably add that this is the only account of a ray caught in this manner that we’ve ever heard!
Big fish don’t always read the rule book and huge coarse specimens are caught every week on carp tackle. The reverse can also be true, although a large carp can be a heart-stopping prospect on light tackle, as Scott West discovered during a session on a Cotswolds gravel pit.
“I’d set off for a sociable tench fishing trip to the Cotswolds, which is something I do every year,” says fisheries scientist, Scott. “We chose a small gravel pit in the waterpark, known for its carp, but it was the tench I was hoping for. Finding a deep margin under some willows I baited with hemp, caster and corn and fished fake casters on a light leger set-up. The spot started to fizz that first evening, but the first fish really took me by surprise.”
Played on 8lb mainline to a 6lb hooklength, with just a size 12 hook, it took half-an-hour to land on Scott’s Avon rod, and was the biggest carp in the lake at the time, a mirror weighing 37lb 1oz.
“Luckily I’d remembered to pack my bigger unhooking mat,” says the captor.