Not as Good as it Would be if it Were Better.

It was my first day in grammar school.   Being a "fresher" I had to stand, with other first year students, right at the front of the school assembly hall.   I positioned myself at the back of the organ, and joined in at the first hymn.  I wasn't an atheist then, probably because I had never heard of atheists.   After the first hymn, the teacher playing the organ turned around and said:

"You boy, what is your name?"

I told him and was instructed to remain behind after the assembly. He then told me that my caterwauling had severely upset him, and quite put him off his notes.   He had no idea of why a benevolent God would have ever allowed me vocal chords. The tirade continued awhile, and he finally banned me from singing...FOR LIFE.   I was quite proud to have been banned in such a way, and probably boasted about it to my new classmates.    Sadly the teacher suffered a fatal heart attack a few weeks later.  Although I am fairly sure that my singing was not instrumental in causing his death I have actually, partly in memory of him, but mainly because his assessment was entirely correct, never sung anything since.   The teachers in the school were well practised in the art of the put down.  School reports were littered with juicy comments. I would like to have been able to say that "lamentable progress" had been written in my report by that music teacher, but it was from the art teacher.    He also used the phrase:

 "This work, boy, is not as good as it would be had it been better." 

Those two phrases adequately and accurately describe my tench angling to date this season. 

   Plenty of tench from the smaller venues, during short sessions, but nothing over about three or four pounds.   A few carp and crucians have slotted themselves between those tench.  Delightful fish, all of them, but not entirely within the plan.   I even resurrected the Sunday Challenge: you may remember that, in the 45 minutes of my wife's church service, I challenge myself to drive to the water, tackle up, catch a fish, and get back in time to drive her home.  ~~The result this time was two tench, a carp and a roach. 

None of these challenge fish would have weighed as much as four ounces, but there is something quite wonderful about tiny clearwater tench. Nice to have a moorhen for company too. I understand that the seasonal yellow tip of its bill acts as a target when the young are pleading for food.

 My longer sessions, after bigger fish, have so far resulted in seven consecutive blank sessions.   I came close, contacting a fish that shed the hook, and my best guess as to its identity is that it was a good tench.  But I don't give up that easily and expect my final school report for the year to have some better grades. 

The blanks did give me a chance to test out my theories on line twist, and I can say, certainly for short casts up to about 30 yards, the process for removing twist does indeed work well.   On longer casts the twists do not seem to  equalise along the length of the line quite so easily, but results there have remained encouraging, if not quite so good. It may be that I need to allow more time for the twists to disperse along the line, or else perform the process on land, rather than in the lake.

The birds have been rather more co-operative, the herons in particular have posed quite shamelessly for me.

 

  

 The bird below was catching quite well, swallowing something every couple of minutes, but they seemed to be very, very small and although he had to turn his take-out prey items, I was unable to determine what they were.   The pond abounds with tiny rudd though... and tadpoles. I shall make no further comment about this heron's photograph in the blog. Work it out for yourselves.

 The local pair of peregrine falcons are again nesting on the old mill by the river.  I understand they already have two chicks, but these have yet to be visible when I visit with the camera. The birds are of course nesting quite high up, and having to stand some distance back means that I cannot  see any of the actual nest site, just the cavity containing it.   Distance is a problem too: my camera even in bright sunlight cannot really capture the majesty of these birds at such distance, and so the shots remain slightly blurred. I have not seen them catch any prey yet, although there are numerous local feral pigeons that seem rather keen to get themselves eaten. I shall remain hopeful on this one, and visit as often as I am able to.

 

 As I drove to the pond one morning, still a couple of miles away and on a main road, a female mallard was walking along the middle of the pavement, trailing, in a line behind her, six quite small ducklings.  Right down the middle of the pavement, and so confident and law abiding ( no jaywalking here!) that I expect they would have been aiming for the nearby pelican crossing.   Unfortunately due to traffic, I was unable to stop and take a photo.

Reaching the pond had minor compensations: a couple of morning trips ( back home before 9) led to

Plump Little Common

 a total of three tench, a couple of nicely coloured middling roach, a rudd, a perch, and a carp. I don't mind common carp so much, they do at least look like proper fish, not some oddball creation designed by man for the food or aquarist trade.  All the fish on the centrepin which was quite satisfying. A second hooked carp headed along the bank, passing through two stands of lily pads.   With the 4 pound line I was a little restricted, but managed to get the carp back through one set of pads before the hook pulled free.   Better than the day before when, during the Monday Bank Holiday, I had taken a tour around the pond.   A few picnickers and non serious anglers were around, together with a group of guys passing the time of day.   One, who was a little worse the wear from drink, pleasantly enough, but he greeted me as "Pops".   Never been called "Pops" before, and I admit I hated it.   I know I have a few miles on the old clock, but having told my lad to keep it in his trousers and not make me a grandfather any time soon, and struggling with the "pensioner" thing anyway, I really detested being called "Pops".  Especially by a drunk.  I keep thinking about it: it being one of one's life defining points when you are first called "Pops".  I knew I should have worn my woolly hat,  that would have prevented being called such.   Anyone else calls me that and I will hang, draw and quarter them, not necessarily in that order.    

The Pound Shop Swim

About ten or twelve days ago I fished for a little over three hours on one of my regular rivers.  The river was quite low and clear for a winter's day, but I had a really good session.  No shortage of fish, rather a surfeit of them, although a couple of dozen of them were out of season brown trout.   The trout were being a little suicidal.  None were over a pound, most much smaller. But the day was made by 14 grayling.   The grayling in the river this season appear to be in one of two size bands.  Between 8-12 ounces, or over about one pound two ounces.     I might simplistically say that there are two year groups present, the result of two separate, very successful spawning years, but I suspect it is a little more complex than that.    I don't know what sort of ages these fish might be.     The odd scientific paper I have read about grayling relates length to ages, and in that respect do indicate growth rates, but will in any case be specific to the river that the fishery biologists were sampling.   So I don't  really have any idea how old these two groups of fish in my river might be.     That I don't catch any smaller, or many in between these two size groups suggests that spawning is not very successful every year, although the numbers of fish suggest that if spawning is successful in one particular year, then it is very successful.   I read something else that described grayling as prolific breeders.   Maybe floods, or other river conditions largely wipe out the deposited ova in some years.

Of those 14 grayling, the last two were taken in what I have started to call my "Pound Shop Swim". The first time I fished the swim I landed  five grayling, all over a pound in a fairly short session.   I now quite often drop in on the swim on my way home, and it usually gives me a fish or two, and if I do catch, there is always at least one pound plus fish landed.   It is a useful end of day confidence boosting spot.

A couple of other trips elsewhere on the river also produced a few ( far less) fish, but then plans had to be abandoned.  I became ill. Very ill.   So ill that I stopped fishing for 6 days.  I spoke to the lad, who as a qualified doctor said  "Sore throat".  I mean:  5 years of medical school, Over two years as a hospital doctor, and the best he can do is a sore throat?     After my phone conversation things became worse overnight and I was struggling to swallow anything, and the throat was ever more painful, deep pain on swallowing, a prickly sensation on top if I actually succeeded.   So next day: see the GP.      She quickly summoned up all her years of experience and concluded I was not at all well, and prescribed for tonsillitis.   A diagnosis she was forced to revise when I revealed that my tonsils went over half a century ago, and I doubted that I have grown new ones.   But it is a little worrying that a GP, dealing with flue, sore throats, coughs and colds on a daily basis, cannot, even with that modern instrument of torture, the "tongue depressor", is unable to determine that I have no tonsils.  Now even I, as an ex avid consumer of TV cartoons know what tonsils look like: they are those those flappy things that you see in Tom's throat, dangling down and wobbling about frantically when Jerry has just done something else horrible to poor old Tom.   Maybe medical students don't get to watch Tom & Jerry as part of their training these days.  Oh yes: tongue depressor...wooden spatula to you and me.  So it was antibiotics to attack a mass of nasty material blocking my throat.   Except that I could not swallow them, even in liquid form.   Had to visit A&E overnight as, if I could not swallow the medicines, I figured I would not get better.   Additional stuff prescribed and I could then just about swallow the prescribed doses.   Eight days from onset, my throat remains sore, but I have picked up my rod and walked...several times now actually.   So all over bar the shouting....not that I feel my throat is quite up to shouting just yet.

So it was time to try yet another river. I chose one that I have fished very little.   As a kid my parents took me to picnic near it, and between banana sandwiches I fished for big minnows, one a cast...brilliant!    But then one day I tried a lump of cheese and was astounded to catch a decent chub.   Later as a teenager I fished it three or four times, catching bags of roach, dace and plenty of gudgeon.  There may have been some chublets in the keepnet too...cannot really remember.  So it is at least 50 years since I fished it.    

Male Pheasant

Nostalgia cut in deeply, and so I decided to fish near to where I had caught that chub.   As I walked down towards the river, I disturbed a couple of pheasants in the undergrowth, the flurry of wing beats being as diagnostic as their croaking calls. I didn't see them though.  In summer their croak is always followed by a short wing flutter, but I have no idea why they do it.  Maybe either linked to mating or territory I suppose.   The chub swim gave up no bites, and I hadn't really expected it to do so.  Even at the time, all those years ago,  I was surprised to find a chub there.  So I moved higher upstream, to a deeper spot just below a shallow rapids run, and was quickly rewarded with a decent gudgeon, and a couple of tiny dace.  Pleasing to see some of the  gudgeon remain despite cormorants, goosanders, mink, and if I am informed correctly, the odd otter.

Gudgeon

A little later, another fish, silver with black mottled spots.  It was, as I was swinging the fish to hand, looking like another gudgeon, but no: a small grayling.  Grayling of an ounce or so could easily be confused with gudgeon...but only until you get a closer look at them in your hand.    Later I was to catch an even smaller fish, no more than 4 inches long.  A silver sliver of a fish.  And it was a dace until in my hand ...when the typical grayling snout and therefore the true identity of the fish was revealed.  Nice to see all these small grayling as it demonstrates good breeding success.   My usual river never produces any grayling for me of less than about 7 or 8  ounces.  Why it doesn't is an unanswered question, but suggests that in some years breeding success is minimal.  The day continued, with several more grayling...eight in total and four inevitable trout.   The trout all looked a

Small Grayling....Gudgeon Sized.

little thin, a surprise after a long summer, and so near the breeding season, although one was nevertheless well over two pounds.  Conversely many of the grayling had quite portly stomachs.  Back the next half day for more of the same, and as the grayling total for the two days reached 15, with no fish over about twelve ounces, I started to think I was again on the wrong river.   But yet another swim change produced five more grayling, each of them being a pound plus, three in the first three casts.  Maybe I have found another pound shop swim?   Somewhere else to drop a float in as I walk back to the car.     Two more half days, and two different stretches of the same river and my total grayling count was 43, with 6 of them over the pound.  Some of the grayling came from very shallow water under some overhanging

A Dark, Thin Spotty About to go Back.

trees.  Another similar swim gave up the largest trout.  Out of season but a very dark and heavily spotted thin fish, that looked as if it needed a good plate of fish and chips.  A couple or few more trout, and a solitary three pound chub completed the list for the four short sessions.   Very nice indeed.  

But it is not all about the fishing, especially when the weather has turned cold overnight.  But a welcome gang of a dozen long tailed tits, marauding up and down the banks of the stream, stopped to forage in a very nearby willow.  Some were as close as 6 feet away from me, their pink, black and white plumage very much on display as they acrobatically hung from the branches. 

My Wallace casting was briefly on display...luckily there was no audience.  Most of the time I was managing without any major tangles around the reel, and I had no need to cast any distance.   My first attempt though was nearly a significant disaster.  Having travelled light, I was seated on a small folding stool, and the cast unbalanced me.  I was heading towards the water. And as the old joke says: it was deep too.    But, calling on my skills as a unicyclist, namely a precarious sense of balance and blind panic, definitely not in that order, I regained my seat and remained dry.   But it was quite a close call.  The cold water of a river in winter has never seemed quite so near.

I had kept moving over those four sessions, having found that a few fish taken put the rest down...or maybe I had caught all that were there?   In one swim, I cast in, but then saw, in the overhanging trees on the far bank, a long dead bird. Probably a sparrowhawk.   It had become entangled.  I could not see any fishing line, but I am sure it was the cause.   Now I am not going to cast the first stone here, for I feel that the line was simply the result of a bad cast...actually a very bad cast given the location of the bird in the middle of the tree.   But tell me the angler that has never lost a float, nor a lead, in a far bank tree and I will show you an angler who never takes any risk, never tries for that bigger fish that just might be lurking in that little barely accessible corner, I will show you an angler who has far less fun.  But seeing the stricken bird does make me wonder whether I should continue to make all those risky casts.  Only the other day, I pulled a length of line from a bankside tree.  On winding it up into a ball for safe disposal, I found it had a small fly on the end of it.  A green colour.  Fly anglers also get caught up in the trees. Not sure what fly imitation it was but I'll call it a Greenwell's Glory.   One of few fly names I can remember from way back. Others were the Muddler Minnow, and the Hairy Mary.  I do wonder whether Hairy Mary was ever a suitable name for a fly, and just what materials it might actually have been made from?   But I don't wonder for long.

On seeing the dead sprawk, I was unable to fish that swim.  Too upsetting to see the bird hanging in

A Buzzard

front of me, so I moved twenty yards upstream.  A plaintive call high above improved my mood no end.   There were no less than five buzzards circling above me.   Five that the gamekeeper in today's news had not poisoned.    I know what sort of suspended sentence I myself might have given him,

and it would not be anything like the suspended sentence the judge gave out.  Late in the day I had a very unusual catch: a stone, a smooth pebble.  My hook had somehow slid into a caddis fly larva's case, and the caddis was attached sufficiently well as to lift the stone, remaining attached as I reeled in.
Late evening and a flight of cormorants in "V" formation passed over. Don't know where they were headed.  Some years ago I saw a flight of an estimated 3 or 4 hundred of them flying over Stockport.  I don't know where they were  headed either, but they would be trouble for some angling club or other.  

A Flight of Cormorants in V Formation.       ET   Eat Your Heart Out!

....and then the rains came.

    

Tench and Bream

A slim 7 pounder slips back into the lake.

Late May: Tench: one of my favourite fish, and they always have been. Probably always will be.  There is something about their colour and that smooth muscular shape, a real fish shape that imbues them with that "must catch" essence that I am unable to resist, as well as a powerful fight when hooked.   They can be easy to catch, or, given a suitable water, they can be a nightmare to find and hook.  That green and the contrasting red eye will always draw me in and I have so far fished three different waters for tench this year.   One easy water with small fish did not hold my attention for long.  I would have stayed longer, had the crucians I was also catching, been pure crucian, and not part goldfish. Another water, rumoured to hold the odd tench did, and 4 trips produced 3 fish. A good result with one of the fish becoming a new personal best, despite being a long, slim, fit fish with no signs of any spawn in it.  Such are early season fish, especially after a long hard Winter's fast. 

The third lake is what I consider to be an easy water.  Not lacking some good fish though, as a number of fish well over 6 pounds soon demonstrated by falling to my baits.   But the predictability of almost certain catches soon paled with me, and the time was ripe to go and try a hard water, one which I thought might hold some good ones.

So I arrived at the lake, early, about 4am, tackled up, cast quickly and the lobworm soon attracted a small perch, and a second bite at the same spot was probably another small perch.  But to my left a fish rolled: obviously a tench, a majestically slow roll, barely rippling the surface.  Had I not seen the fish, the ripple could have been put down as a small roach.  Two or three other fish rolled, and so I cast to the left.   As another good fish rolled right besides my float, the tension mounted.   Two bites followed, long slow runs of the float, but both fish were missed. Inexplicably missed.  7 AM now, and all has gone quiet, but the day remains dull, cloudy but rain free, and so hopes remain high.
And so it was to remain, throughout the day.  No bites, little sign of fish, no carp jumping, nothing.  So I occupied my time watching the wildlife.  In the margins scattered over a wide area near to me

Massed Toadpoles

were a great number of toadpoles.   The tadpoles of toads are blacker and with shorter tails than those of frogs.   Also they taste dreadful, so nothing eats them.   As the day progressed, the toadpoles gathered near the very edge of the water, forming a huge black wriggling mass.   Thousands of them. I don't know why they concentrated so, as there seemed to be little food for them.  A foot further out was a feast of silkweed.  The tench remained elusive though.  I did see a couple of tench cruising above the elodea though, small fish of maybe three pounds, but tench, and in the right area of the lake.   As evening approached a roach took a bait, a handsome but quite dark fish of some six or seven ounces, and a prelude to an evening rise of fish. 

As darkness approached, fish started to roll with quite large splashes.  Tench , I was sure,  and lots of them over an area of some 30 yards square, within casting range but outside my baited area.  I was perhaps rather silly to think they were tench as it happens: for they were not.  Good big fish though, each trying to make the most surface disturbance it could, as it breached, and over a ten minute period, at least a hundred such fish showed.  They continued to roll but in reducing numbers, and I started to get bites.  Easy slow bites which I was unable to hit.  I finally hooked one briefly, and the line came back with a large scale on the hook point.   I now assumed carp were responsible, but was to be proved wrong yet again.  So amateurish of me, I should have known far better.  Finally, after at least half a dozen inexplicably missed bites I hooked one.  A bream, 7-4.   On bread.  Two more followed: a fish of maybe six something, and then a 9-8.  All three fish were hooked just outside their mouths.  I have no explanation for this effect, all the bites were the usual big bream, slow rise of the bobbins. I never used to miss bites like these back in the old Cheshire Meres Big Bream days, early 70's..   More bites were missed.  I continued to fish after dawn, and on through a second night.   The day finally gave me my first tench from the lake, a male of 5-1.  Something of a Nemo this fish, one of its pectorals being small and deformed.  But a tench.  

As evening arrived the bream moved back in again.  5 more fish being landed, with three more hooked just outside their mouths.   All on bread, the bait being hooked conventionally, no hair rig, or other fancy doomahdiddle rig in use.   The fish were again quite good ones, with a 9-13, 9-0, and 8-13 the three best fish. All in all I missed a lot of what would normally be very easy-to-hit bream bites, and hooking six from those eight fish just outside the mouth was weird. I put it down to the roughness of the breams' skin allowing the line to stay in closer contact with the fish, maybe even catching the line itself, and the following strike hitting home outside the mouth, as the fish played with, rather than eating, the bread.   But any other theories held by readers would be most welcome. As all the fish had head tubercles, I assume all the fish were males.

 I have stopped fishing the lake, for the bream were most unpleasant to the touch, and in this spawning condition, my interference with their lives was probably not for the best, even though I am sure double figure fish were there for the taking...and on the float too!   I'll go back, maybe in September to try specifically for those bream, once they have regained their condition.