First Fish on the Avon.

4th February 2014
Usually I write about fish captures after the event,  but today I am taking the alternative route, for this fish will be a little special.  I hope it will be a grayling,  and that it will be caught on a trotted float.  I have already started to plan the event.    Usually I just grab the gear and head on  out when after grayling, but this time it is rather different.

The postman brought me a drainpipe this morning.   A chunk of plastic a little over five feet long arrived at my door with the eleven o'clock post.   The contents are rather precious.   A long term friend from overseas has sent me a rather superb present.   His Hardy's Richard Walker Mk 1V Palakona Avon  split cane rod.   Mk IV's, both the Carp and the Avon were very state of the art, and still command tremendous respect amongst older anglers.   Everyone had heard of them, many anglers wanted one, or two,  but supply and price prevented most anglers, including myself at the time, from ever owning one.      The local rivers are still very high, and I want my first trip with this rod to give me a fair chance of a fish, so the rod will sit there, poised for action, for a while yet.   

Now it is true to say that modern rods are probably much better suited to the job, in a strictly functional way, but as with cars, in which there can be immense pleasure derived from driving a really old MG as opposed to a much faster modern hot hatch, so there is a rather special pleasure in using such a classic rod.    

To complement that rod, I have dug out my centrepin from where it has resided, largely unloved in the utility room.   It is an Okuma Trent, a fairly modern centrepin, quite a competent device I would guess, although maybe not one that is as acceptable to the purists as the rod would be.   I am not, and probably never will be, a centrepin expert.  The last time I used one in reel anger was in about 1960, when along with all my other mates, I had a tiny 3 inch  aluminium centrepin  that probably cost me half a crown, mounted on an 8 foot solid fibreglass rod.  For my younger readers, if I have any, half a crown was the equivalent of twelve and a half pence in new money. 1/5th of a Mars bar. A pretty useless object, that reel, but I remember it did catch me a few fish.    It was ultimately discarded for an Intrepid Monarch fixed spool reel.  Bees knees to any kid at the time, but I saw one recently in a fishing shop window display of old tackle.  And what a mess the Monarch looked.  Very old fashioned and inadequate looking.  It must have been pretty awful to use. But it stayed longer than that eight foot rod, which was replaced with another abomination: an 11 foot tank aerial.   Yes, a very floppy, heavy metal  tapered tube, with a screw ferrule, made into a fishing rod.   It was last used in the desert against Rommell  and was totally unsuitable for fishing....but maybe it was better for fox hunting?    It was fully eleven feet long and therefore, to any kid, a dream of a rod.

Multi-functional Okuma Trent Reel Case.

So what of the Okuma Trent?  Firstly, as you may see from the photo, it came with a dual purpose cloth reel bag. Of great use when the river is out of sorts.   But joking aside what do I expect to see in a centrepin?   For trotting a float it needs to be very free running, the pull of the river on float and line must be able to easily overcome the friction of the reel bearings.  The quality and cleanliness of the bearing is important, but also the greater the spool diameter, the more leverage is exerted by the line tension and the better the spool will spin.   Pointing the rod down the line will help reduce other friction from rod rings of course.   Another factor to be considered is the weight of the drum,  or more precisely expressed, how difficult is it to get it moving, how much inertia it has.   This is less important than friction, because the angler can always get the spool moving himself.   Changes in river flow speeds are all that is then likely to affect the spin speed of the reel.  Again the reel could be given a helping hand to match speeds, but it is all extra work for the hands, which I am sure at this time of year would much rather be deeply seated in thick gloves, or perhaps lounging by a coal fire.    I feel the Okuma is quite good in this respect, it seems to spin well, with little friction, unless the spool retaining knurled screw is overtightened.

The other thing that affects ease of spinning is reel cleanliness.   In this I think the Trent is maybe poorly designed.  It is full of holes, designed to reduce weight, and to maybe make the reel look pretty.   But every hole is a possible entry port for dirt, mud, blood and groundbait, any of which might lodge between the moving surfaces and add significantly to friction.  There are holes in the backplate, and holes in the spool itself, allowing dirt into the backplate area, behind the spool.   So I have sacrificed looks, and sealed all the holes that access the area behind the spool with tape.  The more mud and sand I can keep out the better.

A centrepin will never have the retrieve speed of a fixed spool reel, and so it is usually necessary to wave the rod around with a greater level of skill, when playing a fish, so as to avoid being caught slack.  Batting the reel will speed things up, but only works whilst there is little tension in the line, and this can also lead to softly wound coils.   This is likely to intensify the other centrepin problem:   that of line bedding in.   When a coil becomes trapped between earlier coils, or between coils and the spool, it can inhibit the ability of a float to pull line off the reel easily, stopping the smooth flow of the float downstream.   So most centrepin experts only fill the spool with a short length of line, usually less than 50 yards.   There is always a chance that, when after the grayling I might hook into a barbel, and on light line I want to have a chance against any fish that may run a long way.   As an experiment I have a good hundred yards of line wound on, but I have manually spooled this line using a cross hatch pattern.  A bit of a pain to do, manually having to emulate a bale arm with my fingers,  but I think a cross hatched line lay may well reduce, if not eliminate bedding problems.   Of course that barbel, if caught, would undo all such tedious spool filling work in an act of sadistic revenge. 

So my first session with the Avon will also be with a centrepin.  But until the weather permits, this post will lie fallow in the drafts folder.

There will now be a long break for refreshments, and adverts.
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1st March 2014
OK,  you all still awake out there?  Practically a whole month since I started to write this, and my first chance to get back out there, with the river in a good enough state for catching a fish or two.   It was a very late start, in deference to my wife, who was without me all day yesterday whilst I fished on the Derwent, I didn't leave home until after lunch. But when I did leave it was with the MK IV, and not one of my usual 12 foot carbon fibre rods. On arrival the river was gin clear, but in my haste to get the rod near to the grayling, I had forgotten to don my wellies.   I wanted to fish on a gravel bar, an island in the stream.  Fortunately some kind soul had created a couple of stepping stones, and with two steps, followed by a fairly long jump, I made gravel, with dry feet. The day was warm and dry, and between the clouds the sun occasionally shone.

I set up the rod, with the centrepin and started to fish.  This was a quicker process, the Avon having just eight rod rings, as opposed to 13 on my more usual rod.  Nothing, not a nibble for an hour or so, and then a somewhat tentative bite.   Good scrap, and I picked up a gallery of walkers behind me, watching as I played the fish, 8 or 9 of them, all standing on the skyline.   Today was the first day with a fair amount of sun for some weeks, and being warmish too, and a weekend, it dragged out all those ramblers and dog walkers.    

First Fish On The Richard Walker Avon

Landed the fish, and as you can see, sadly not a grayling.   However it was an absolutely gorgeously spotted brownie, out of season, but a totally suitable fish with which to christen the rod.   Photographed it, returned it,  and a few moments later thought "Damn!". I had not weighed it.   Bugger!  I was more concerned with getting rid of the gallery and forgot all about the weight.   I had not even done a mental guess of its size, and the best I could come up with was a couple of pounds.    Anyway I fished on, and over the next couple of hours had three more trout, none over about 1/2 a pound.  The grayling remained elusive though.  I did lose another good fish that, because my gear came back with a fish scale on the hook, must have been foul-hooked.  As I fished I started to think maybe the first fish might have gone 2-4, but decided to leave it in my head as 2 pounds.

Then a fifth fish, a much better scrap, piccy 3, a fish which was bang on 2 pounds.  I knew now that the first fish was considerably bigger than two pounds and was really fretting about not checking its weight.   I had left my big coat at home intentionally, so as to prevent me from staying on the river too long, and it was starting to get a bit cold as the sun went down to horizon level, and that final, definitely the last, last cast was called for.   Result!   Another good fish on.   Played it, on the Avon, which I will say deals with fish very pleasingly indeed, better than I had dared hope for.  I did have a little trouble with the length at first, for I am unused to rods shorter than 12 feet these days.   The cane is obviously heavier than carbon fibre, but the short 10 foot length compensated well for it, leaving the rod feeling quite light.   I loved the way the sun lights up the pale of the cane too.   The rod is probably near to being fifty years old, but you would not think so when using it. Anyway I landed the fish, and to my surprise it was the very same fish as the first, the fish I had not weighed.   I did this time: 3 pounds exactly, and a fine wild brownie for the first fish taken with the rod.  

A Three Pounder is Returned to its River

This picture was taken as the fish went back into the river.   Superb spot pattern, mainly black with very few reds.   Yellow pelvic and anal fins and a scarlet patch on the adipose fin.     All in all a very pretty fish, and ample compensation for not catching any of my target grayling.

I have no idea as to whether to count that as two three pound trout in a day or just one though!  Perhaps, being out of season, it should be not one or two, but none?  Ask yourself this: if you caught the same double figure barbel twice on the same day, once at 5 AM, and again at 8 PM, would that be two fish or one fish?  If you say two fish... remember that it was actually just one fish.    If you say one fish, was it any easier to catch than two separate fish would have been?   Supposing you caught it the second time on the next day?  Or a week later?     Yet another reason why I try NOT to name fish, or to recognise them as being of my earlier acquaintance.  Not only do I not want to know if you have caught the fish before me, I also don't want to know it as a repeat capture for myself.

And the Okuma?  It performed its job well enough, but it was greatly limited by my incompetence with its use.  I need much more practice with it, before I get anywhere near proficient.  

So, time to go home, and I suddenly realised that the stepping stones were something of a one way system.  On my arrival it had been two short simple steps onto small, slightly stable rocks, followed by a long jump to reach the gravel bar.   On my return, that easy path had become a long jump onto a tiny unsteady mid stream rock, and then two short unbalanced steps to reach the bank.    I drove home with the car heater on full, aimed at my boots.

Confessions of an Olde School Specimen Hunter: The Prologue and Rant.

This post is part zero of "Confessions...", and will serve as a prologue to an occasional series of such articles.  Their ultimate aim is to tell, and preserve, if only for myself, a number of amusing incidents  that occurred.  But first, an introduction, and some history.  (This post should have appeared last year, but I forgot all about it, and it has remained in the draft folder, gathering dust.)
So: "The Prologue and Rant".   Hmmm....that would make a pretty good pub name. Along with "The Frog and Bucket", "Elephant and Castle" and other odd names. So, if any publican currently residing in a boring old "Red Bull" or "White Horse" would like to rename their public house with a rather more memorable name, then please make contact, and for a small(-ish) fee I shall, on  a franchise basis, license you the name.

My early fishing, from age eleven into my teens was largely split into three parts:  a small club pond, match fishing and lastly the Macclesfield Canal.

The club pond held delightful crucians, the odd tench, and a few carp, supposedly growing to 20 pounds.  It was where I fished for pleasure, and I did quite well there, poking a rod out just past the rushes, with bread fished lift method. The pond has disappeared now, run over by the Manchester M60 ring road motorway. Match fishing was usually the weekend coach trip, to the Trent, the Witham, or to many other distant waters. Occasionally the local clubs held  Club Federation matches mid week on a nearby canal.  I did well in all these matches, very well, enough such that some seniors actually objected to juniors being allowed to enter the sweepstakes, and even to compete for the overall club championships.   They were outvoted. They lost in two ways. ;-)   It was not difficult in those days to win: most seniors, and practically all juniors, had absolutely no idea how to fish, and certainly were clueless as to how to fish to win.  And there is a huge difference between fishing, and fishing to win. There were none of the myriad of modern aids to learning that exist today. So on those matches, 90% of anglers were just cannon fodder, and they were all standing immediately in front of the muzzle with their eyes closed. One that was not was Ian Heaps, who went on to become a world champion.  On the Federation matches, I used to beat him about as often as he beat me. But I quickly grew bored of match angling whereas he did not. 

It was fishing the Macclesfield Canal that gave me the skills to win.  I taught myself how to fish there from about 12 years old. In those days the canal was usually gin clear, and the fish very difficult to tempt.  In three feet of water you could watch your free offerings all be snaffled on the drop by roach and perch, whilst your baited hook was repeatedly ignored. It was a training ground of great excellence, bar none.  At the time it was bailiffed by one Albert Oldfield, who, sometimes assisted by the ancient Mr. Grindley, riding an even more ancient bike, used to sell day tickets on the bank.  Albert was famous in the angling press for catching numerous 2 and 3 pound roach from the canal.  But none of the canal regulars seemed to have ever seen him fishing, we saw no photographs, either in the press or elsewhere, and despite years of fishing the canal, with all sorts of baits and methods, including copying those techniques supposedly used by Albert, none of us ever had a roach bigger than a very nice fish of  1-6 that I managed to  hook into one day.  A fish of a pound would have been a season's best...and I probably only caught two or three fish over that magical one pound weight. We were all certain that the Albert fish reports were merely a method of increasing Albert's ticket sales. Had two and three pound roach existed in the numbers Albert claimed, we would have had at least the occasional big fish ourselves. We may have been mistaken about Mr Oldfield, but it seems unlikely. I would welcome any genuine photos of him with big fish from the canal, at which point I will publish my apology.

A 2 pound plus Macclesfield Canal Perch that I caught recently.

One day, high excitement: a guy I spoke to said that he had a two pound roach in his net.  He showed it to me....a beautiful fish, yet 12 oz was my highest guess for its true weight, however I said nothing to dampen his joy.  A number of us had formed the "Macclesfield Canal Roach Specialists (MCRS)", who were determined to get that good fish out, despite none of us really believing they ever existed. We never succeeded, and the fish of 1-6 remained the best any of us ever saw.  It was to be some years later that my first 2 pound roach came to the net, and that was not a canal fish.   The canal is very different now, the boat traffic has multiplied by a factor of at least twenty, with moorings occupying most of the deep water stretch that I loved, and the water is therefore constantly coloured, even in Winter.  Most of the edging of rushes and reeds has gone, replaced by awful metal shuttering to prevent erosion, consequently the water voles have all gone, and it is no longer such a pleasure to fish from the towpath.  Oddly it does now produce some good fish, and two pound plus perch have become quite common.

Specimen groups were beginning to appear in the mid 60's, and I leapt at the chance to join the Manchester Specimen Group when it was first formed.   There were probably still no more than 500 anglers in the UK who called themselves Specimen Hunters, and most of those were so only in their own heads.  I felt I did not deserve the title myself at that time, although  I was soon to become ridiculously dedicated to the task, always aiming at that even bigger, better, higher, faster fish. I even became records officer for the NASG, whilst Eric Hodson was in the secretarial chair.

Richard Walker and friends were probably the first group of anglers who might have been referred to as "specimen hunters". Walker's book "Stillwater Angling" was certainly responsible for an upsurge in the "big fish" interest that followed.  The MCRS slowly evaporated and was no more, and the MSG was to fold sometime later, although I am still in occasional contact with three of its members, who have remained anglers ever since.   I had formed a partnership, with Chris, who founded the MCRS, and we were to fish together very intensely over a number of years.  In those days, the late 60's and 70's, being successful as a big fish angler meant finding waters where few others fished, which were not heavily stocked with fish (and therefore were seen as difficult to fish), putting in the hard work, and most of all, being confident that you could catch those big fish. ( Nowadays, catching big fish seems to be mainly dependent upon visiting waters that are fished very often, and therefore those which have masses of bait fed to the fish...in short go fishing in fish farms, for obese overweight unhealthy fish). I gained that big fish confidence quite early, Chris taking much much longer before he got his fair share of the fish.  I can only put my successes then down to that confidence: nothing else could explain it, illogical though it may seem.  In due course we both became very successful, big bream, tench, carp, roach, rudd etc etc.  Chris and I were largely responsible for showing Alan Wilson how to catch big fish. John Watson occasionally joined the party, and much later became a well known pike specialist.  Alan later also became very famous, breaking the tench record. Shared a lot of superb breakfasts with Alan, cooked in his old grey Austin van. He was a great guy, and could occupy a swim more completely than any other angler I knew. Not an innovator, but so incredibly patient.

But my own dedication was not to last,  and after about 12 very successful years, I had convinced myself that big fish were not so hard to catch after all ( and I had annoyed a fair few other people by saying they were actually quite easy. The reality was that some "specimen hunters" regarded themselves as being very special, and here was I saying "Bo.......ks! ). For me, the challenge had gone, and I also realised that fishing some 60+ hours a week, whilst working, was leaving me shattered, and with no social life at all.  So one June 16th, first day of the coarse season, after landing a personal best tench, I consigned the rods to the attic, where they were to remain for over 30 years.

So, 32 years later, following a combination of starting to hate the work I had loved, and my wife getting cancer  ( she is looking good now, 6 years later, following tumour removal and chemotherapy, cross fingers), I decided to dig the rods out of the dust, having seen some small chub in the River Mersey.  Last time I had held a rod, all those years ago, even the shopping trolleys could not survive in the Mersey.  No plant life, no insects, no fish, just a bottom covered with dead bricks.   So the chub both shocked and pleased  me.  However I promised myself that, when I restarted my fishing,  I would fish for pure enjoyment. If a big fish came along, fine, but they would not be my be-all and end-all targets.   As luck would have it, over those 30 years fishing has changed, Oh my God! How it has changed.  Big fish have become even easier to catch!       ;-(  or maybe  ;-)

The fish of today are far bigger, thanks to modern bait technology, and there are so many more of them, catching a big fish is so very much easier that everyone does it now, almost routinely, not just those few isolated specimen hunters as in the 60's.  Tackle is so much better, no need to build your own alarms and specialist rods.  Tuition comes in so many forms: DVDs, the internet, the TV, paid professional guides, facebook, websites, forums. Books and magazines have proliferated. I used to be the only person I knew who had caught a double figure barbel, nowadays it is hard to find an experienced anger who has not done so.  Bream record up from 13-12 to about 22 pounds.  Everyone knows what size fish a water holds, how many there are, and even their names!   People fish for a specific fish, and all the speculation, all the watercraft needed to work out if a lake was worth the time of day (or night) has gone. What happened to the wonderment, the mystery?   Fishing now works straight out of the box.  New, young anglers, who don't know one end of a hook from the other, target big carp on their first angling trip. And many succeed there and then... because carp have become so very commonplace. Would they be able to recognise a gudgeon? Even the match anglers go after carp these days.  Unheard of in the past. I heard a rumour that F1s were introduced so that match anglers could land them, without risking getting their poles and tackle smashed up by real carp. I have no idea why we needed to introduce ide, F1 hybrids, golden orfe and tench, koi carp, blue trout, sturgeon and various other exotics  into UK angling.   And it is no surprise to me that they have all propagated into areas where they should not be.   Even the Wels, which used to be confined to about two waters, Claydon lakes and somewhere else "dahn Sarth", ( Woburn Abbey I think),  is now such a widespread species that anyone can target them fairly locally.  Don't anyone dare mention goldfish!  Poncing around with their fancy fins and having unprotected sex with all our beautiful crucians! Grrrrr!  Commercial fisheries have appeared and proliferated, and together with irresistible baits, these vastly overstocked waters guarantee a good catch.   The fish have to feed on anglers' baits, there is far too little natural food for the total fish biomass present in these waters. And I suspect that, to a large extent, fish that would normally NOT feed during the winter now do so because they have to, they are unable to build up enough fat reserves over the Summer, due to heavy competition for food, and to their frequent exercise workouts when they are hooked again and again.

It would not be incorrect to say I rue most of these changes.  Angling has changed from being an art to being a science.  Mechanistic.  Of course, all this comes at a price: an expensive price. Angling has become so commercialised.  Tackle shops are brim full to overflowing with all sorts of gizmos and gadgets, whose purposes frequently elude me.  But is there any subject, other than angling about which so much utter rubbish is talked and believed?  I doubt it.  Not even football. Reading about modern angling these days gives me many a secret grin. So much science and so much nonscience...perhaps that word should be spelled n.o.n.s.e.n.s.e?   Unfortunately we will never go back to basics.    Too many anglers accept the dumbed down approach, and the big fish it nevertheless can give them.  And then they tout their catches around as being evidence of their great skill.

So there you have it, some history, some introductory stuff, and tired fingers.  Some moans and the odd rant or ten.  Taken me so long to write and publish this that I almost feel the epilogue coming on.