Expedition Zander Part II

The fishing this last week has still not been the best:  rivers not ideally suited to my quest for grayling. Still high, after a Wednesday night downpour. The same night dislodged many, many leaves from the trees, probably the largest leaf fall of the year.  About a hundred and twenty percent of those fallen leaves are now flowing downstream, making legering difficult. The stillwaters are quiet following the fairly rapid temperature drop of the last week or so.  Nevertheless I went out to  a gravel pit to seek perch.  A couple of carp showed themselves, one within an easy lob of the worm, the other right on the far side of the water.  Once again, one of the only fish to show was right near to me. It is at times rather uncanny.  I threw a lobworm on top of it, mainly as a perch bait, but should the carp choose to take it, I would not be overly complaining.   It didn't,  neither did the perch, and I feel a strongly worded letter to the editor coming on.   

But after the industrial background to the zander fishing of last week, to be out in the countryside, out of sight of man and his creations ( gravel pit apart) was gratifying.    The usual robin kept me company and begged for maggots, successfully, for who could not give in to such pleading,  but apart from a couple of magpies in the woods behind few birds moved on the land.  All was very peaceful.   The usual mallards, coots and tufted ducks adorned the water, and as with my last trip, I saw some curlews.   But far more of them this week.   A few solo birds and pairs were bonuses to the loose flock of about a hundred curlews that flew

Curlews at Distance ( Wrong Lens Fitted)

over the lake 3 or 4 times.   Their enigmatic eerie calls carried well over the water.    Too far away for a good camera shot, but close enough to make a positive visual ID.   Later a similar number of lapwings were to pass over.   I would like to say a shoal of a hundred big perch also passed through, but if they did their passing went unnoticed by both myself and my lobworms.

The river still being too high for my comfortable fishing, I decided on part two of the zander hunt, and headed back down to the Midlands.   Someone pointed out to me that last week's mini zander cost me about forty quid, in petrol costs alone. Over 300 pounds Sterling per pound of zander caught. But, and I know that this makes little real sense, either logical or economic:  it was all paid for by my pensions: government pension and company pension.   They give me money every month, and I do absolutely no work for it.  So although I know, deep in my brain,  that I have paid for it all during my working career, it still now seems very much  like free money.   So I spend it on fishing without so much as a nervous twitch of the wallet.

This week Jane guided me flawlessly to the destination, about a mile or so from last week's spot.   The tongue-lashing I gave her last week had worked, and she navigated  without hitch or argument.  I arrived with two hours of darkness in hand , rods built and primed , just needing baits  for the cast.   Minnows added, the rods were cast into the canal boat channel, where they swam about until daylight, unimpeded by any nearby predatory presences.   As daylight broke, I re-cast them very near to some moored barges, on the assumption that any local zander would now be seeking to avoid the light.   Two or three times the

Getting a Little Bigger....But Not Much.

minnows went crazy, causing the small floats to bob about dramatically.   But no runs came.   Later, when a decent roach splashed in the boat channel, I threw a minnow at it, or rather into the same spot as it had showed itself.   The float never settled, but immediately made off, if a little jerkily.  A strike hit a fish, which proved to be a small zander: well under a pound but much bigger than last week's fish.   

Jeff Hatt, of Idler's Quest blogging fame came to visit and stayed for a chat.  Local lad. ( How was the jam Jeff? ).  Jeff writes with far more flair than I.  My scrawlings are, I feel, contaminated by my years of working in a scientific research and development environment.  Writing dry reports has not helped my blogging style one jot. Jeff's blog article last week shows him riding a bicycle along the towpath carrying his rods and tackle.  The photograph reminded me of one of my long held ambitions, which is to be able to cycle with my own fishing gear to the nearest river.

My Next Fishing Vehicle. ( Photo: Snow White Productions)

A little differently to the approach used by Jeff though. On Tuesday evenings I run a juggling and unicycling club, teaching people both skills.     Being of somewhat unsound mind I want to ride to my local stream by unicycle, or maybe by reverse steering bike. It is a couple of miles to the river, and I still need a little more practice first. I will get there. Possibly in one piece.

Jeff was to return later for a couple of hours' roach fishing.  The roach were also to prove uncooperative, probably due to the week's rapid temperature drop, for Jeff was confident that he should in theory have caught something. One of my minnows had another crazy few seconds, the float

Foulhooked Mini Zander

bobbing about like mad, but no actual run.  I lifted the rod to find a foulhooked mini zander, of a size that might suggest it to be the brother of last week's fish.  Time to theorize:  was it really the minnow making the float jiggle about like a "Strictly Come Dancing" competitor? Or was that small zander scrapping and fighting with the minnow, unable to swallow it?  The minnow itself was still lively, and last week's mini zander was hooked a good minute after the float movements had ceased.  Have all these crazy float movements been due to immature zander?  And if so, should I be using a different bait?    Jeff had suggested a chunk of dead roach rarely fails.   I tried it for quite a while, but the fish were still playing away from home, the roulette ball consistently landing on the zero.   One more run produced a tiny perch, which had performed a Herculean task by half swallowing the minnow.  Its mouth was so full of minnow that I had immense trouble getting the big single hook out safely.

Very Greedy Perch.

Birdlife on the canal was restricted to mallards, a couple of swans and a moorhen.   The aquatic equivalent of sparrows, pigeons and starlings.  Very common on just about every water I visit.  But I did get a half decent photo of a stray goldfinch.  Always a delight, the goldfinch.

Goldfinch

So, do I return for another bash at the zander, or do I wait until more settled weather before I try again?  I think I may wait a while.     Success has been largely eluding me for about three or four weeks now.   I might just  have a go for a barbel or two next,  something a little easier, to enable me to carve a notch or two on the rod handle.   We will see.  Decisions, decisions.  If I do go fishing for barbel I will have to ignore the far preferable à la carte menu of perch and grayling.  I wonder where I put those dice?

Little and Large, Pike and no Perch

More fishing for perch this last week.   The results though have not been at all encouraging.   The perch have been eluding me completely.   This time last year some good perch were almost crawling up the rods, eager to greet and meet me.   Not so this year.  

Trip one saw me on a reservoir, lobworms at dawn.    I might as well have stayed home and  fished in the bathtub for all the interest the perch showed.   But the day was not to be a total blank.  Not quite.

A single lonely bird was flying above the water.  It was in silhouette so I could not precisely identify it, but it was either a swallow or a house martin. 

Tiny Pike...but the Biggest of Three!

All its mates are long gone back to the African sun, so maybe this one was still working out how to use its Sat. Nav.   Far too late in the year for it to be in the UK, and I do wonder whether it will manage the journey South successfully.    But back to the fishing, which was very slow, only two very tentative bites showing on the floats all day.   But two bites, two fish.    Neither bite was the hoped for perch,   neither produced the hoped for pike.  They were pike,    but the two smallest pike I have ever caught.  Worse than that, they were the two smallest pike I have ever seen anyone catch.  But even at that size, efficient little hunters.  About three ounces apiece. Note the full belly in the photo, and the Argulus Fish Lice on its body. Note also that the orange stains on my fingers are starting to fade a little now.  I wonder whether these little fish were six months old or eighteen months of age?   Earlier in the year one of a similar size, maybe a little larger, was to be seen in some shallow water near my feet.   I was feeding it maggots, which it seemed quite happy to eat.  It probably swallowed half a dozen: red ones.   Why are so very few tiny pike actually caught, if they are prepared to take maggots in this way?  And so the day ended.  A few terns, magpies and other common birds flew past, but nothing out of the ordinary.

The garden, next day, held more of interest from the birds.  A gang of long tailed tits drifted through,

Long Tailed Tit eating a Seed

stopping on the feeders for a few minutes before disappearing again.   They occasionally hang upside down from one leg, whilst eating a nut that they hold in their other, free leg.  Very acrobatic.

On to day two, and another, different water.  Two rods out for the perch once again.  As I sat down I heard what I thought was a curlew.   Two or three times I heard it.   Thirty minutes later, the same call, directly overhead, confirmed that my bird call identification is not totally useless.   A second pair of curlews were to fly over later, but their calls had all ceased by 10.00am.  I have never really known how to correctly pronounce curlew.  Is it Cur-loo  or curl-yew?  I must look it up.  Take a break from reading this whilst I consult the OED....................OK, back now,  still there?     Curl-yew apparently.

A little later a good fish rolled right over my right hand float. I had glanced away just before it did so, and so am unable to guess at the species.  Apart from one carp which jumped clear of the water later in the day, 150 yards away, it was to be the only sizeable fish I saw.  It is odd, but I very often seem to pitch my spot exactly where good fish show themselves.  I don't know if it is luck or instinct, but it happens far too often for me to explain it happily away as coincidence.  Within a second or so of this fish rolling, my second rod, fishing 20 yards away to the left, produced a good bite, and it was obvious fairly soon that it was no perch.  The fight was characteristically pike, and soon a fish of about six pounds lay in the landing net.   I was probably fairly lucky to land it,  no wire trace, five pound monofilament hooklength,  but I didn't look the gift pike in the mouth: well, not too closely anyway.

Earlier in my angling career, although I did occasionally fish for pike, I never felt comfortable doing so.  It all seemed rather barbaric.  As a young teenage angler, I was advised to buy a gag, which I understand are now illegal  ( and should be).  Jardine snap tackles were de rigour, universally used, and I was told that I must always wait for the second run of the pike bung before striking.   Always livebaits of course.  Many fish were hooked deeply in those days.

Later, I fished for pike up at Loch Lomond, and it was to be my first experience with deadbaits, which were then the new buzzword in piking.   I stood on the shores of Lomond, half a mackerel dangling from my rod, feeling really, really stupid.    There was no way that heaving so much of the catch of a North Sea trawler out into such a huge body of fresh water would ever work.   Damned ridiculous, and I bemoaned the fact I had been unable to catch any livebaits the previous week.    Ten minutes after that first cast hit the water I changed my mind, for incredibly, the line started to run out, and the first of five pike that took mackerel over the next two hours was landed.  And it was a personal best too.

But I still had that most difficult of jobs to do, and I had to do it five times.    Getting a snap tackle out of a pike was never easy, it always seemed risky for both myself and for the fish.   When I returned to angling after my long 30 year "holiday", things had changed.    Someone had invented a way of sliding your fingers in through a pike's gills, as a way of holding a pike steady.  It also seems to help cause them to "open wide", as a dentist might say.  This is a truly magnificent way to deal with a hooked pike.

This blog is not intended to teach people how to fish, nor even to give them tips.   But where pike are concerned there are two things I would advise strongly.  Firstly, if you do not know how to hold a pike as described above whilst you remove the hook(s), then get someone to show you, before you next fish for them.  It really does make things far safer for you and the fish, and makes access to the hookhold much easier.    Secondly, if you are able to bring yourself to use single hooks, do so.   All you need then is a set of long nosed pliers and most pike will be easily and safely separated from the end tackle.   I did a few experiments about three or four years ago, and discarded trebles as being needed only when lure fishing.  I also experimented with braid as a hooklength:  failed: the pike easily cut through it.  I tried 80 pound monofil as a hook length: failed in the same way.  So I now only use wire and a big single hook. Micro-barbed or even barbless if I can get away with it.   Does it work?  Well my best day's piking, two or three years ago,  produced 14 fish to 22 pounds, all on single hooks.   I only missed three runs, and 13 of those fish were hooked in the scissors.   You be the judge.    

Back to day two, this week: the 6 pound fish was easily unhooked and quickly returned, the swim going dead then.  A little later, an exploratory cast to another spot produced an instantaneous bite: perch? no,  yet another pike.   A third three ounce fish.   Must be some sort of record: three pike struggling to make half a pound between them.

The day was to be cut short, as my son phoned me to say that his car had suddenly stopped on the motorway.  He is a fairly new driver, and didn't know what to do.  I even had to explain that his car insurance does not cover such mechanical failures.    I hope he knows how to pay the estimate of £800 quid to repair the damage done as a result of the cam-belt breaking at 60 m.p.h.

Day three, and packing a few deadbaits I drove back to a river I fished a couple of weeks ago.  I had seen a swirl as I walked back to the car.  A long shot this, a hundred mile plus round trip on the off chance that the swirl was  due to a pike, especially with the river now carrying some extra water. But the trip, my first specifically  for pike this year, was to produce a success.   Look closely: the pike in the photo is undoubtedly smiling, maybe even laughing,  smiling because she knew that, when weighed, she would be another of those "annoying ounces" fish.   Nineteen pounds twelve ounces of very fat pike.  I was too impatient.  I should have waited until she had eaten her breakfast.  Not, by a long way, the hardest scrapping Esox I have caught, far too well fed a fish for that. 

This evening at home, a couple of photo opportunities came, even as I was writing this.  Under dull lighting at about 5 o' clock, the sparrowhawk revisited. so: through the glass of the lounge window:

Sparrowhawk, 300mm Lens,  Back Garden.

Being  a poor tactician as usual, it was perched very near the bird feeders, scaring away any potential prey.  But it was probably non too hungry, as there were a lot of pigeon feathers on the roof of our utility room this morning.  The sparrowhawk fed rather well yesterday I think.  A few minutes later there was a very loud crack of thunder, and the light outside at the front of the house started to look very eerie.   I grabbed the

View From Front Balcony

camera, bolted up to the top of the house, and saw the best complete double rainbow I have seen for some time. Ever noticed that the sky, or clouds, as seen inside a rainbow, always seems to be a slightly different shade?

One of my very first memories is of a rainbow.  Like most people my age I can remember just a half dozen or so things from when I was about three years old.  The most vivid of such memories for me is that rainbow.  My mother was gossiping with the neighbours from across the street, and I asked her what it was.  "A rainbow" was her reply.  But I wanted to know more, how it got there, what made it, how far away was it, could we go nearer. I stopped short of saying that I wanted one.  But as you might expect, neither she, nor the neighbours could give me the answers.  "It comes from the rain" said one.    But it isn't raining said I.  And it wasn't, at least where we were standing.  It was the first time I had met an adult who did not appear to know everything. And it came as quite a shock.