"There are no Rudd in Ireland."

It has been a mixed up fortnight, very mixed up.     My wife departed a couple of days ago to spend two months in the Far East with relatives.  No one to shout at me when I have done nothing wrong.  I'll really miss that.  No, I really will.  So before she went we had a week's holiday in Ireland.   I took a fishing rod of course.  Ireland is an odd place, wonderfully clean, very free from all the dreadful litter problems we have in England...although I did not get to see Dublin City, which may/may not have been similarly clean. I didn't have any trouble with the accents either.   The only Irishman whose accent is unintelligible to me is that of a friend's husband, a guy who has lived in England for many a year.   I have yet to successfully decode more than the odd sentence from him.   His wife tells me she had little idea of what he says either.

So: car, Holyhead, ferry, Dublin, avoid the toll roads, and then exit stage left, driving east towards the West Coast.   About 300 miles of driving in total.   I am not a fan of distance driving, especially on our motorways, but the Irish equivalents seem so much friendlier, so much cosier, and with very few other cars getting in the way.  The driving was so easy and leisurely, none of the frantic motorway stuff we have here. Those few Irish drivers who did take to the road, seemed positively scared to perform any sort of overtaking manoeuvre.  Even so the odd break from the road was inevitable and if there happened to be a big Irish lough where we stopped, then that must have been purely accidental.  

Incredibly clear water in the lake, several boats out fishing, for, I would think, trout.  I was already starting to think that only trout and salmon matter in Ireland. No licence is needed for coarse fishing. There was a noticeboard by the lake which was interesting.  It would appear that in Ireland the word jetski is a politically incorrect term.   You have to call them personal water craft.  So the next time one of these ruins your fishing just remember: you must ask them to try to keep their personal water craft at a greater distance.

The next stop was nearby a countryside statue.   

I don't usually find these things at all appealing, but I must make an exception for this horse and rider, made out of welded bits of scrap stainless steel.  This was truly artistic, and shows what can be done by real artists.  Of course I am not an art critic, and therefore I have no appreciation of what real art is, and so who am I to tell anyone else what a superb work of art this horse is?  But sometimes I myself feel that the only people NOT qualified to define art are the well known art critics and those artists that they promote.

I like this horse. I hope you do too. As for the Tate Modern...I would happily burn it down together with all its contents, and add any artists in residence to the pyre.

My wife is catholic, and so an assortment of churches monasteries, convents, roadside shrines needed to be visited.  Two amused me, one was a church out on the moors, or on whatever the Irish call moors, in the middle of nowhere.  It had a large sign outside.  "Stop and Pray".    I tried to convince the wife that it was an option, not a command, just a non-mandatory suggestion.   But she had to stop.   Later the same day, having seen a road sign pointing to a holy well, we had to find it. Ten miles and a lot of missing signposts later we eventually found the pathway to the holy well.  Right next to a handwritten sign in a garden, that accused the school next door of pumping sewage from their leaking toilets into the garden, together with a request that all people using the school should not use the conveniences therein.  So we walked up the pathway, quite a nice pathway, to the holy well.    The holy well was a hole in the ground at the base of a tree,  There were no fish in the well, which was about a foot square.  There was no water in the well either.  Now I fully realize that big G has probably got a lot on his plate at the moment, sorting out religious wars in Iraq, Syria, dealing with the occasional wayward priest, etc etc,  but you really would think he would have time to keep a holy well topped up and functioning.    I would not have wanted to drink from the well anyway.  A hole at the back of a tree might look, to some, rather like an excellent alternative to not being able to use the nearby school's facilities.

Well, I have come a long way with scarce a mention of fish, but you knew it had to happen, didn't you? So it will.  

In Sligo city there were two anglers fishing from off the town bridge.  Much to my wife's disapproval, I had to go and chat to them.   I wondered what they were fishing for. Salmon apparently.  "Lots in the river but they are not taking." said the guy fishing a bright red artificial prawn.   Easy fishing from the bridge, none of that silly casting and stuff.  Dangle and drift. Hook one and you walk off the bridge and onto a bit of spare land on the right bank to play it.  I didn't see any salmon...apart from these:
salmon parr, hundreds of them, each with its own bit of personal space.  Give me a few maggots and half a dozen "salmon" would have been on the bank in moments.  Being serious, I would not intentionally fish for them, too easy and quite unfair...probably illegal too   And in any case the tackle shop near the bridge did not sell maggots.
I did ask the dealer about rudd fishing. The owner of the only fishing shop in Sligo: Barton Smith's, which incidentally, is quite a big shop, said:


"There are no rudd in Ireland....not unless someone has introduced them."

 I was flabberghasted.  As Frankie Howerd might have said, my flabber was truly ghasted.   Rudd have always been, more or less, the most common species in Ireland, certainly until some idiot pike angler introduced roach into the Blackwater system over a century ago.  Roach do tend to out-compete rudd, but there are surely plenty still to be had.  How the owner of a major Irish tackle shop could think the rudd is none existent in the country is quite beyond me. Later in the week I stopped as I drove over the Royal Canal.  In its gin clear water, I saw very few fish.  Those I did see were roach, not rudd. In such clear water the fins of rudd would have been blood red, not orange. The tench, pike and other species must have been somewhere further down the length, hiding in weeds, avoiding the sun. There were none to be seen.
As I exited the fishing shop the wife was already moaning about my being near to the river again, rather than in the shops.  She did not quite get my "parr for the course" joke, and in any case tends to see being on holiday as having a whole new and different set of shops available.  I pointed her at

those shops and wandered off down to the harbour.  Looking over the railing I saw a movement. In the clear shallow water a small flatfish was wafting its way over the sand.  It stopped, and instantly disappeared from view.  I just could not see it at all, despite knowing exactly where it was. Impressive.  Another movement caught my eye to the left, and a group of grey mullet were heading my way.  There were perhaps a dozen of them, clearly visible, and posing better than Naomi Campbell.  They ignored small chunks of bread I threw at them completely, exactly as Naomi would probably have done, so I did not rush to get the rod out of the car.   As I watched the fish I was approached by a pleasant young Chinese lady.   I was a little worried as to her motives initially, but she was on holiday and just wanted to chat.  I showed her the fish, and she was fascinated.   Her interest may have been more menu driven than mine.

Later in the week, early evening, I was to see some hundreds of mullet in an estuary, all well within casting range, but Nina was putting her foot down. This was NOT a fishing holiday.   I was not best pleased and had to watch them drifting past, rod locked in the car boot.  I know when I need to lose an argument.  In a feeder stream there was also a huge shoal, certainly 500 plus, of small six inch mullet feeding from weed growth on submerged rocks in the stream.  Without a polarized lens on the camera, the photos are not worth the silicon they are burnt into, so I shall omit them.   So you must now just imagine a seething mass of 500 mullet crammed into a couple of square yards of foot deep water.  Fabulous, are they not? What a wildlife spectacle you are now witnessing!     I sneaked back early the next morning with rod and bread, but the larger mullet had all disappeared.  All that was feeding on the mud flats were a few curlews.  Curlews don't eat bread.

P.S.  Interesting fact:   I just did a little research on rudd in Ireland, and was surprised to learn that, like the roach, the rudd too, is an introduced species, as are bream, gudgeon, dace, carp, tench, perch and pike.  Ireland originally had no coarse fish, just some game species including those that can live in salt water: salmon, char and trout.

So, back home and in need of some fishing.    Grayling.    I had seen a swim I quite fancied, a few weeks back, but had not the time to fish it.   So I approached it yesterday.   Not an easy swim to reach, and I somewhat precariously edged my way across a 45 degree slope, to a spot that I thought might be a way down.   The slope was very dry and dusty, there having been no recent rain. A covering of newly fallen dead leaves and beech mast added to the negotiability problems.  On reaching my chosen descent route I realized that I needed a rope, so abandoned the swim.   I moved elsewhere and eventually had 4 grayling, a couple over a pound, and a few small nuisance trout.  I moved swims for that last cast, and dropped a bait a few inches upstream of a fallen tree.  Several seconds later I was playing a fish. A chub of about three and a half pounds had made the mistake of picking my bait up.  After one initial strong dash it gave up the fight quite quickly, and was returned.  First chub I have had from this stretch, so quite pleasing.  It would seem that a fallen tree will attract chub, even from a shallow stretch of river where their existence was not suspected.  Never pre-judge a river, there are invariably far more fish than those you can actually see.

I returned today, travelling even lighter, but with a rope.  I carefully negotiated the slippery slope, tied the rope to a tree, and descended further down the slope towards that swim. It did indeed look to have great potential.   Alas: on reaching the bottom of the slope, I could then see that I still had a nine foot vertical drop to the fishing spot. I gave up, and hoisted myself back up, grumbling a little.   A while later I found another way down, by paddling down a very steep streamlet, and with wet feet, I was able to get down to the spot, and was quickly playing a 3 ounce trout.   More clones of that fish followed, with only one small grayling and a single pound plus, but out of season, trout to add to the total.   Of more interest than the trout was a solitary bullhead.   The swim was quite disappointing, not fulfilling its expected potential, but I got to spend the morning in quiet peaceful solitude, with only three dippers for company.   I enjoyed watching them duck and dive in the stream, chittering away a few yards from me, for well over an hour.  As I was packing up, I heard a couple of noises, as if a stone had fallen from the bank onto the exposed bedrock of the river, which is running very low and clear.  Just as I prepared to leave there was a loud noise a few yards upstream, and I turned quickly to see a young lad falling head first down the cliff.  He was up in a moment, head already bleeding very profusely, and was shouting at me.
"What do I do now?  What do I do now?"   He wore a pale blue sweatshirt, already covered in blood.

I said he would have to walk up the streambed, showed it to him, the only way back up to the footpath, and that I would follow him.   I had no phone signal here and so it seemed best that, if he could get up under his own steam, then that was his best chance.  I could not have carried him back up myself in any case. He reached the top ahead of me, being a lot nimbler than myself, and by the time I had reached the top, he had disappeared.  After a short search, I walked back along the pathway which runs along the top of the bank, and adjacent to the grounds of a nearby school.   It was lunchtime, and there were kids on the field, some wearing the same pale blue coloured tops as the young lad.   I assumed he had gone straight back to the school.   I walked back to the car, pausing only once for a cast into another swim....which brought me a grayling of about a pound and a quarter. I drove home and once there, looked up and phoned the school, to explain what I had seen, and to enquire as to his health.   An hour later they phoned back to say that none of their kids was missing, but that they would contact another local school, whose children wore similar colours.  It was apparent that, if from the second school, the lad would have been a truant.   The school was too far away for a lunchtime trip down to the river.    I have heard nothing else since,  but cannot help worrying that he might have collapsed somewhere after disappearing.   If so he would then have been on a regularly used pathway and someone would have found him.   I was shaking a bit myself...not often someone falls out of the sky into your swim.   He was lucky in a number of ways:  I suspect that no-one else has fished, or even been to this very inaccessible spot for months, maybe years.  Ten minutes later and I would have gone, and he would have had difficulty finding his way back up the cliff. Had the river been in flood, and floods at this spot are often carrying six feet of extra water, he might never have been found.  And finally he was lucky to have survived the fall onto what are quite sharp rocks.  All in all quite an eventful day.  I can only hope he is all right, after treatment.  My son, a doctor working in A&E said that he would certainly have been given a head scan in hospital, as the risk of internal bleeding in the head was more serious than the external blood lettings.


P.S.  Now a day or so later, the police contacted me to say he was alive, had been treated in A&E, and would be up and around in a few days.

Hello again.   Apologies for my overly long absence.  I am sure that most of you will be pleased to hear that I have not died of columnaris, bird flu or rananculus. I have not eloped with a dusky maiden, not been the subject of a fatwa from the carp anglers I occasionally poke fun at. Nope, still here.  My big roach water had been playing silly games with me.    It had decided to send in massed legions of 4 to 6 ounce roach to mop up every bait I threw at the water.  Immaculate fish all of them, all uncaught because no-one ever fishes for roach on the lake.   Still a pleasure to catch, but when you are seeking to commune with and make contact with their great grandmothers and grandfathers, they do become something of a pest.   And the perch had started to join in too.  These were also not the huge fish that I optimistically suspect may be present.  The nights were devoid of fish, but I was joined by a spectacular lightning storm, with the attendant drenching downpour.   Crouched under my brolly, I watched the sky clear after an hour or so, and was able to see the odd orbiting satellite, the Pleides star cluster, and even, faintly, the milky way.  Daylight brought the roach back, in what was obviously a huge shoal.

Other problems beset me.  I set off the alarm walking into Aldi, and once again as I left.  I stopped and held my hands up, as you might with a gun pointed at you, protesting my innocence, as the manager rushed out to intercept me. I was checked, searched, and proved innocent, but the alarm went off again as I left the building.  It did it again the next day, and I almost decided to keep walking around until they adjusted it, but contented myself with a good moan at the manager, told him that the alarm was effectively accusing me of being a thief, in front of other customers, was highly embarrassing and thus gained an assurance that he would call in the engineer and have it adjusted. He did not grant my suggested bottle of apologetic wine.

Over the next two days I also set off alarms in Tesco and Morrisons.  I don't like getting sunburned and had bought some long sleeved shirts in a sale at Decathlon.  The alarms were only going off when I wore the blue shirts.  Weird.   Have Decathlon declared war on Aldi and Tescos?  Tennis balls at dawn? Baked bean cans in retaliation? The shirts are in the wash now, and I can only wait until they drip dry before my next experiments and altercations at Aldi's exit.  

So I decided to run away, and take a few days off, hiding and fishing in Wales.   The plan was:  River Severn, River Wye,  wild carp, and mullet.    Far too complex a plan, and such intricate plans often do not go as desired, and so the first river I hit was the Wye.  Arriving in darkness on a strange river with steep banks, the safe option is to find the first easily accessible swim and to cast in.  More difficult distant swims can be sought out in the comparative safety of daylight. I have never fished the Wye before, and so that first cast was made entirely at random, into a river whose depth and nature was entirely unknown to me.    But the two hours before dawn did produce a bite on a large lump of bread, and a chub was heading towards the net.  At about 3 pounds, not huge, but my first Wye fish. Blank saved.   Soon after,  dawn broke, and I had my first real glimpse of the river close up.   Beautiful. Idyllic.  Not another angler in sight.

First View of the River Wye

   I was not to see a single empty tin can or plastic bottle float down, not a single half submerged supermarket trolley, not one old tyre over three days. I did NOT feel at home.    In such circumstances I might have gone on to say no fish either, but that was not the case. The river was low, and I scrambled down a difficult embankment some few hundreds of yards further downstream into a swim with a visible snag.  Rain was to make getting back up the bank quite difficult a day or so later, with resultant muddy knees and hands. A felled tree in the river was caught up on an old salmon fishing stone jetty.  Jetty is not the correct word...I'll think of the correct one sometime I hope.  I had seen a fish rise near to the tree, and so in the absence of any other clues where to fish I plumped for the spot.  An unfashionable word these days: "plumped".  Years ago you would often hear people "plumping" for things, rarely today though.  "Groyne"...that's the word I wanted....not "jetty". Feel free to cut and paste it into the original sentence.  Thank God for a working memory, even a sluggish one.    Now where was I?

Oh yes:   the day proved fruitless from a fishing point of view.  From about 8 a.m. a constant stream of Canadian canoes and kayaks paddled downstream.  Well over two hundred, most keeping to the far bank,

With a bad phone signal, the nearest I could get
to Wi-Fi was Wye Fry.  Sorry!

especially when I had cast a long way across the stream, and it seems the Wye attracts canoe day trippers by the hundred, and canoe hire companies by the dozen. One lonely kayaker had totally the wrong idea. He paddled upstream. What an idiot, going against the flow in both senses of the word.   So no bites, although an angler I was to meet a couple of days later said that the canoes did not disturb the fish or fishing at all. He may well be right, but the last canoe passed by at 7pm, and my first barbel took my bait 20 minutes later.   The fish looked to be waiting for the canoes to pass, rather than for darkness.  At about seven pounds it was more lightweight than it looked as I drew it over the landing net, and on the bank it was a far leaner, sleeker and fitter fish than those caught in the other barbel rivers I have fished in recent years.  It was not overfed on pellets and other angler's baits and hence fought far better than such fat fish do.  It was a barbel as barbel should be. A barbel as they used to be.

A Wye Chub....Rotated 90 degrees by Blogger

This was my first serious barbel session for two or three years, and I admit that the first sight of the river was a little daunting.  Where to find fish in a new, big and shallow river?   But the fish were there, and I finished with four more barbel.  None to worry my personal bests, but fish from 6 pounds and up to 8-15, the biggest of the session will always get a warm welcome from my net. Four or five chub completed the catch.  None reached four pounds, but were still welcome. The chub photo may well give you a crick in the neck, but it was Blogger that rotated the picture, not me.   Blame blogger for your whiplash injuries.

I also lost five barbel to hook pulls, and was probably a little silly, and slow to figure out why.   The river is very rocky, and although a cursory glance at the hooks did not reveal it, the hooks were becoming slightly blunted by the bedrock.   I had changed to a straight hook, one with the point parallel to the shank of the hook.  Next time I think I shall revert to an incurved pattern and see whether that improves things. And I will add a magnifying glass to check the points more thoroughly.   We all make mistakes, but if we can learn from them...

Whilst chasing the barbel I photographed this bird.  I am not sure what it is, but would guess at a cirl bunting.   Never seen one before so my ID may well be in error.  An inconspicuous little creature, but rather nicely marked. (P.S. George, one of the readers of this blog, tells me the bird is a female reed bunting, and I am sure he is correct.)

On to the next part of the plan: remember the plan?  The wild carp lake.   I was sent a written set of directions to the lake, daylight fishing only, and so at 4 am I was close by, and the directions were working well.  1.2 miles and then turn right towards xxxx yyyyyy.  At 0.6 miles a signpost suggested that xxxx yyyyyy was to the left, but I drove on and found...there was no right turn signposted xxxx yyyyyyy.  So I tried the left hand road half a mile back and was lead to a track, impassible to my car, too rough, too steep a track.  If the error in the directions was simply the turn right, rather than left then this might be the correct route, and the lake would be just half a mile up that hill, and be visible in the next valley.   Not sure if I was in the right place, I did not fancy walking half a mile uphill, carrying my carp gear, abandoning my car in the middle of a large chunk of tundra and hoping that the lake would be visible.   At that time there was no one to ask, and with no visible signs of human habitation anywhere in sight I backed out of the carp fishing and headed towards the mullet. One day ticket wasted.

I arrived at the estuary and chose a swim a little upstream of where I had my one and only mullet a couple of weeks previously.   This was a snaggy swim in the extreme, old tree trunks, and what looked like an old bedspread spring mattress made the prospect of hooking one of these fish quite a challenge. As the tide

Mullet in Some of the Snags

   flowed, so some fish started to show themselves.  Grey Mullet!  In my swim!   About 30 fish going to over five pounds swam back and forth in front of me.   And apart from nosing at my bait constantly, and swirling often, see the photo above, that is all they did.  They refused completely to take any of my baits, and it quickly became apparent why so many sea anglers get infuriated by the species.  Grey ghosts would cruise happily under my rod tip, sneering at my inability to hook them. After two days and three high tides I gave up, and gave in to the mullet and text messages from wifey to come home.

Ugly Duck.

During that time spent mullet watching I also saw another unidentified bird.  This photo, zoomed into a blurry magnified picture show it, some sort of duck.   It is a dopey looking individual,  and my best guess is an immature sheld duck.  But who knows for sure what this ugly duckling might be?  Not I .   And this one ain't no swan to be sure.  And my commiserations to any old bugger reading this who fully understands the hidden reference in this paragraph.

Tinca, Tinca, Tinca, Scotland and Wales.

I thought that we had totally escaped the effects of the bad weather up here in the North, and that I could nip off fishing without any problems left behind by mother nature.   Not quite.   After the North West's hurricane force winds last weekend I found my usual route to the fishing grounds blocked by some very large trees that had been snapped off at head height by the wind.   As I searched out an alternative route, my mobile rang.   My wife; asking that I return home immediately because the burglar alarm was going off and we had lost all downstairs lighting.   So I returned to also find water dripping from the kitchen ceiling under the bay window.  In 25 years I have never had a lighting fuse blow before, and so its seems highly likely that, when the installers fitted the PVC window, and as requested, removed the strip light that was up inside the old window, they had not completely removed the associated wiring, nor sealed the joint properly.   So I have had to fix the leak over the window, and reset the alarm, which had triggered when Nina removed the wrong fuse holder whilst trying to fix the problem.  This was in retrospect useful, in that it showed that the internal battery had died at some time in the past and was thus not able to maintain power during the power outage.   The lights stayed on for about 3 hours minutes after replacing the fuse and then blew again.  Repeatedly, and sometimes instantaneously.

So yesterday, " in order to allow the circuits time to dry out",  I went fishing. Leaving the ground floor completely in the dark, I headed out to another trip after those tench.  The day was almost balmy, I recorded 11 degrees through most of the day, and apart from an hour or so of light drizzle, it remained fine and very still.  Water temperature was still at 5 degrees and so I was fairly confident I would catch.   I was legering whilst watching the line meniscus as it entered the water, with a back up bite alarm made of a bit of old reed, lying across the line near to the reel.   By mid-day the line had not even twitched, but then a slight ripple from the line suggested that something was nearby.  It was probably a minute, teensy line bite, but it readied me for action, and sure enough, ten minutes later after the reed suddenly flipped into the air, I was fighting a male tench of 4-14.   This exact scenario happened twice more each fish separated by about 90 minutes.    So alike were the scenarios, that each fish pulled the scales down to exactly the same weight.  For old times sake, I weigh any tench that I think might scrape 5 pounds.  The first two fish were of the pale green colour

A Beautifully Fit Winter Male

that the venue usually produces, but the third was a far darker and much prettier fish altogether.  Swims on the lake were in short supply, it was half term and the kids were out in force.  So, sometime after lunch another angler arrived and asked if he could fish about 15 yards away from me, in one of few remaining pegs.  No problem.  He travelled fairly light, and had one of the old wicker type fishing baskets.  Good enough to carry his tackle, but not good enough to sit on for 4 or 5 hours: he had also brought a flashy folding seat.  He opened up the basket and the first thing he brought out was a large mallet. I hate mallets.  They are wielded by the bivvy brigade with no thought to scaring the fish of other nearby anglers.  It does not matter to them, as they will probably have a couple of days in which the fish might recover from their fright.  So I tried to forestall his use of the mallet by saying telling him that I hated such fish scaring devices.  

He asked "Do you really think that they scare fish?"

"Yes."  I said  " I have occasionally been watching fish, and seen them spooked by someone using a mallet over two hundred yards away."    Sound does travel far better through water than it does through air.

He replied that he had seen someone bivvy up, wearing a recently Dazzed or Persilled white T-shirt and then caught a carp in the margins just 15 minutes later.

I said that after it taking 5 hours getting the first fish feeding in my swim I would hate them to be scared off now.  There was nothing unpleasant about the conversation and he assembled his gear, having returned the mallet into the wickerwork, which was quite gentlemanly of him.   Two leger rods, swimfeeders, and two very high tech buzzers were soon in place.   These were the sort of buzzers with which, by flicking one of the many switches, he could have probably monitored and displayed much of the data being sent back by the Mars rover mission.   And he had been unable to mallet their supporting bank stick into the ground.    As he cast in the second rod, I hooked and landed the second of my fish. I wonder if I would have caught it had he ignored my plea?  Ten minutes later he was upping and moving 50 yards further down the bank.   Wanted to give me some room apparently.   I had lots of room, and would have been happy to have had him fish there.  A few moments later I heard the mallet going hammer and tongs at the bank sticks.    He was just not comfortable being forced outside his usual routine.  If the banks sticks were not thoroughly well seated into the ground he was certainly not going to catch fish.  Maybe he was terrified that his buzzers would fall over and electrocute anything swimming in the lake within mallet hearing range.    Sadly his move  along the bank brought him no fish during his session, and I would like to think his mallet had scared them all off.  

Should mallets be banned?   Any views out there?    To compensate, it might be possible to fit out all  the man-made comfortable pegs with built in rings to enable the anglers to tie down their bivvies?  I don't like these pretty pebble dashed pegs myself.  I would rather poke my rod out between the rush and reed beds, sitting, if need be, with my backside an inch or so above the water, hoping that the legs of my seat sink into the mud no further.  Each to his own I guess, but why do so few modern anglers ignore the advice about noise from as far back as "Still Water Angling" and still feel they should be allowed to make as much of it as they wish?

Spring was in the air, and the male mallards were already chasing the females, and the robins visited in pairs.  Dunnocks were displaying to any available females.  The lake's kingfisher and grebe were still in residence.  All in all, quite a pleasant trip. Yet it was a trip that was missing something.  It was my fifth trip this year chasing those tench.  Every one of those trips has produced tench to my rod, 12 in total.  And although catching any tench in Winter is wonderful, I did feel that today's trip was a little predictable.  I expected to catch tench, and had I guessed, I would have guessed at my landing three fish. Spot on!  I need more than that from my fishing, or perhaps less than that. I don't want to be able to make such predictions and be right.  Five trips is too much of the same old thing.  I don't know if I needed a blank, or just something very, very different.  Conversely, the other angle that I also have to look at this from is:    eat your chips before they go cold.  And today I did.

I have no idea how some anglers are able to do the same thing every single weekend.  Mainly it is carp anglers, but barbel anglers are getting close too.  They go out, set up the bivouacs and fish right through the weekend.  Some of them don't catch very often, they are on hard waters, others catch most trips.  But in either case it all seems too much same old, same old.   There seems to be little imagination involved.  Shut up in, or under the bivvy all weekend, or perhaps longer, using methods tried and tested, prescribed by angling press, TV and DVD's with a little extra input from mates and forums.  The objective, the only objective that matters, seems to be to catch  fish. Little else is of any concern at all.  Catch the fish no matter how long it takes, no matter if it is exactly the same modus operandi that was involved last week, and indeed during every week of the last year or few.  Further evidence of this attitude was evident after the anglers on the far bank left.   I could see the  litter they left from 150 yards away.  I can moan all I wish about litter here, or in fishing forums, but the fact of the matter is that, until anglers see fishing as being much more than just catching fish, until they learn, by themselves, to appreciate the outdoors for what it is worth, then no amount of cajoling will ever persuade them to take their rubbish home.  And I fear that many will never have the  vision to see any  further than the fish in their net.

But to return to the matter in hand:  one of the reasons I gave up fishing all those years ago is that it had all become too predictable.   I was simply having too much success, and finding that, even for big fish, before the advent of fancy baits rigs, commercials etc, grabbed hold of all our fish and magnified their sizes, it was all too easy for me, the challenge that I needed at the time was no more.   So nowadays my fishing has to be very varied, with some of those blanks, or I fear I might once again think about giving up.  Of course, to find any other activity with as much daily variation as fishing is going to be damn near impossible, so giving up is probably not really an option.  I need a little bit of planning ahead though, to set up one or two objectives to mix in with the more usual stuff this year.   So, two or three things in mind at the moment.  I have already  a trip abroad planned for next month...more to come on that after the event,  then, come the close season I might have to dig out the fly rod, and actually catch a fish or two with it this time.   The third thing is a complete, all the balls in the air sea change.  Grey mullet are starting to call me.  So I shall be spending some time in Wales, once the shoals move in from wherever they go in Winter.   Never seen a mullet, so that promises to be fun.  Oh yes...and I want to photograph a mole.

Whilst talking about Wales, it is looking slightly more likely that Scotland may go independent.  I don't think Cameron is well liked above the border and it may well be that the Scottish will vote so as to specifically spite him, especially now that he is calling for UK continued unity. It may well benefit Cameron and the Tories to lose Scotland of course, and now that the oil is running out, might he not push too hard to keep us together?  I wonder what he really thinks? 

It would be nice to see a more logical approach to student fees. At the moment students from Europe must be offered courses fee free in Scotland, but English students in Scotland have to pay, because the EU only dictate that there is equal opportunity between member states....not within member states...which is why Scotland is allowed to charge English students. I wonder what will happen to the State Pensions Provision in Scotland if independence kicks in?    Pensioners have been paying in for years,  the government spending the money immediately, and funding current pensions from existing workers' taxes, but after independence what remains of the UK population would be paying pensions to a foreign nation...in the currency of thistles or whatever that new currency would become. So, maybe Scottish Pensions would have to be paid from Scottish taxes?  All looks to be an interesting time in September.  

In my spare time I run the local juggling and unicycling club, and at one juggling event I met a wild Scottish juggler:  A BIG guy. Complete with crazy red hair and a beard like Hamish in Braveheart.   He was juggling with three hatchets whilst wearing a kilt.  A very scary sight indeed, far too scary to check whether his backside was painted blue. If there are many more like him up there, we will have to rebuild Hadrian's wall after independence, make it higher  and fit it with gun turrets.

 But what about the Welsh.   Where do they fit in?  One answer is that they don't. For some time I have wondered why Wales, if it really is a fully functioning and patriotic part of the UK, does not have its flag incorporated into the Union Jack, or Union Flag as some prefer to call it.   I really like the Welsh flag, it is one of the best in the world, and it is something of a shock to find that the Welsh have not insisted that it be incorporated within the design, so that the UK flag would look like this:

There is one other major advantage. No-one could possibly fly it upside down by accident. So come on Taffy, Dafydd, Rhys, Megan and others.  Fight for your flag!  I have already done the design work for you.  As an afterthought, having  the English flag,  St. George's Cross on the flag as well might lead to conflict, St George being the slayer of dragons, allegedly.

Stop press: the drying out time fishing trip appears to have worked, and we have let there be light in the house for about the last nine hours.