Apocalypse Last Week

It has been a long time since I did any serious walking,  a mile or two, quite often, but anything longer seems in the dim, distant past.   So I decided to have a far longer stroll, and chose Salford Quays in Manchester as the destination.     I'll tell you the end result, here and now, rather than at the end:   serious aches in the legs and ankles after walking about 12 miles.   But after a couple of days I definitely felt better for it, and will have to get back to taking such longer walks more regularly.  The Quays is Salford's old docks, served by the Manchester Ship Canal. Locks close off the canal, and the Quays are unlikely to ever again have much, if any at all, boat traffic. A few ships still use the canal though. So the Quay lock gates have been closed for years and the pounds, or basins as some are called, are effectively cut off from the Canal itself.     As a consequence there is no water flow through them, only rain and very minor seepage between the lock gates ensures a steady water level.   The level in the canal itself is controlled by additional huge locks further downstream, and is, I think kept fairly constant.   I say downstream because the start of the Canal is in fact really the River Irwell, dredged out to some 25 feet deep, 36 miles long and I would guess some 90 yards   wide.   Nearer the sea it follows part of the route of the River Mersey, of which the Irwell is a tributary.   Together with the steady water level, comes great water clarity, and provided that the algae is not "breaking" it can be easy to see a good 12 feet or more deep into the basins.  So fish can often be seen.  I watched a carp of about 10 pounds idling away its time near the basin wall.   As I left the Quays, an angler was just unloading his car.  I admit to being surprised at how much gear he had with him.  A very large piled up wheelbarrow carrying of all sorts of stuff, enough to enable him to survive an apocalypse.   He was after the carp.  One of his bags contained his beer, he said.   Another had in it an electric battery powered drill.   I guess this was to drill anchor points into the concrete banks for his bivvy.  But also all the gear, several thousand pounds worth I suspect,  looked to be brand new.   How on earth he keeps his tackle so pristine I have no idea.   Mine always looks battered and used.  Maybe because I use it and don't worry too much if the rod hits the odd tree or two as I change swims.

I walked back into Manchester along the Ship Canal.  One good fish swirled as I passed, maybe it was another carp. I didn't see it, and I don't think it had seen me.  I determined I should fish it soon.  But first, the next evening, I watched a small fishing match, on the Piccadilly basin of the Rochdale canal, right in the city centre.  The match was won by about three pounds of roach, including some nice half pound plus fish. The winner had to cope with a bunch of youths behind him, break dancing and generating some interestingly and highly scented puffs of smoke. Roachpole fishing is something I have no experience of and it was rather educational to see it. I can appreciate the advantages, but for my own style of fishing I suspect that it is all too much of a bother.  Too much messing about for me.  Or as the locals might say: "I can't be doing with all that."  But very good to see goodly numbers of fish so near to the centre of Manchester.

This Week's Rant:

At sometime during the fishing match my mobile phone was sabotaged.  I have never been an expert with a mobile phone, despite my life-long computer industry background.  A situation that my son takes great advantage of, in order to poke fun at me.   He suddenly had an ally.  That damned woman in my SatNav, she who must be obeyed, or perhaps argued with, had moved, and set up home inside my phone.  When I pressed the "go" button, she started to read my screen, quite loudly, and very annoyingly.  "Twenty-one thirty two":  she announced was the time.    "Battery seventy eight percent full",  and so on.  Worse still, as soon as I touched any on-screen key, or even just the screen itself, she announced my actions to the world.

"e key pressed".

As I typed my password, she made a vocal confirmation with every key pressed.  Being security conscious, she did say: "full stop", "full stop"  rather than repeat my actual password letters.       Worse was to come.   She took great delight in telling me, whenever I  touched the screen,  exactly where I had touched it, whilst not allowing me to slide a finger across the screen to accept a call.   I was unable to answer the phone.   What is the point of my having a mobile phone if I cannot answer the very occasional calls that come to it?   I concluded that some special feature must have become enabled, maybe a switch to help a blind person, and that all I had to do was to go to the "settings" screen to revert it.   She shouted "settings" as I touched the key, and I found I had to then make two more quick taps in order to action the key.   Up came settings,  but the first screen did not contain the required change.  And then disaster:  slide would not work here either.  I scraped off several layers of skin from my forefinger, desperately trying to scroll down to page three of the "settings" screen.  Every time I touched the screen she would again tell me which part of the screen I had touched:

  "Wifi", "Data usage", "Bluetooth".

But would she allow me to scroll down? Not a chance.

My son was off in the Far East, swimming with whale sharks, and I was quite jealous of the lucky so and sod. Huge beautiful fish, up to 35 feet long, exclusively plankton eaters.  Pretty yellow spots.  I had texted him the day before, suggesting he use two krill on a size 14 hook, but didn't get a sensible reply. But he was not, being under water, and 9000 miles away, able to help me kill off this loud mouthed smooth telephone operator lady.   By this time my wife was joining in, taking the Mickey at my total incompetence.     Desperation had set in, and I plugged the phone and its resident woman  into the computer, praying for 240 Volts, then upgraded and reloaded the phone's system software.  That procedure might have actually impressed my son, had he been able to watch,  but it didn't deter the lady in the phone.  Instead she got even stroppier, and it took me a good 30 minutes just to figure out how to re-enter my security codes, whilst she was rabbiting on and intercepting my every key stroke.   Eventually I got past both the phone password and the SIM password, but to no effect. She remained.  I was getting increasingly annoyed and frustrated by this time,  calling Sony and the Three network all the names under the sun. So I finally bit the bullet and went down town to the Three shop, where none of the five staff were able to resolve the problem.   But they did put me in touch with Sony support, and the gentleman on the line had seen this once before.   And he revealed to me what must be a closer kept secret than was "Little Boy" during the war.   You can also scroll by using TWO fingers at the same time.   I did so, with my two fingers configured so as to show the lady exactly what I thought of her.   It worked and I was able to scroll down to an "Accessibility" icon, under which a feature called "Talkback" had mysteriously been turned on.  "Accessibility"...really? It had rendered my phone totally out of bounds.  How on earth a partially sighted person would have coped defeats me.  I had not changed it to "Talkback" myself, and had no idea that the feature was there.    But sanity returned, the world order was re-established, and I was already wondering whether the wife might have a similar off switch, as I rode the bus back home.

The next morning, early, having travelled light, I set up two rods by the side of the Ship Canal,  or "The Shippy" as it is known locally.  I did not think that it was worth my while to try for a carp, especially on such a big strange water, so I put in a smallish amount of bait and decided to look for a bream or two, or some roach.

Manchester Ship Canal by Night

The last scientific report I read about the Shippy was a technical evaluation of its water quality, and its flora and fauna.   It was said that the roach lived in the upper layers, and, holding their breath, dived to the bottom to quickly search out a bite to eat, the lower levels having more or less zero dissolved oxygen.  This report was maybe ten years ago, and I feel things might be better now, so determined to bottom fish.  The depth was not the anticipated 25 feet,  maybe little more than ten.  Probably, because I was fairly near the Irwell, a spate river,  any sediment carried during a flood would tend to settle out once the flow rate decreased, so I think I was fishing over a good 15 feet of slowly accumulated sediment.

One rod breadflake, one maggots, both with a maggot feeder.   As daylight dawned I could properly see my surroundings.  The bats disappeared.

Ship Canal Decoration

The carp angler's apocalypse had occurred.  As far as I could see, every square inch of the substantial concrete banks and walls was covered in graffiti.    More paint than the spray can manufacturers could have made surely? And how do these people summon up the cash for so much paint?  People who create graffiti are either artists or idiots.  There were a few artists on display, and many of the idiots who "tagged" their own names over the good stuff.   I quite like good graffiti, and certainly there was little real harm done in it being here.  It would require considerable work by the council to transform this post Hiroshima bombsite type environment into something nice, and into a state where graffiti should not be tolerated.

But I did see a kingfisher flash past me, and a kestrel hovered over the far bank. So maybe the devastation is not so bad as mine eye thinks?  A good three dozen swans sailed past, followed by the usual Canada geese, and the odd mallard. Swallows and sand martins also cavorted over the water.  The advancing light soon revealed a number of old car and truck tyres around which I would have to steer any fish hooked. A cormorant, one of many that live on the canal, sat on a floating barrier.  It rocked uncomfortably as every wave passed it by, and looked well fed.

Then I had a shock, my rod tip rapped slightly.  I admit quite freely that in this environment I was not expecting any action at all, despite rumours of there being fish. I waited, but nothing.   But over the next hour or so half a dozen smallish roach took the bait.  All very cautious bites.    Less cautious was my last bite, and a heavier fish was hooked.  Most of the fight was typical...of a bream, although it did manage a couple of sharp pulls as well, which briefly impressed me.  After being steered around the tyres it was netted.

My Swim on the "Shippy".

 A bronze bream of  6 pounds 12 ounces.  I would not usually have bothered weighing a bream of this size, but on my first expedition to the Ship Canal, I thought I should.  Surprisingly it was a very healthy individual, a nice shade of gold, a thick deep fish.  The photo is a little disappointing, but I did not have an unhooking mat with me, and the photographic options were concrete, or in the net.  So the picture is a little blurred and the fish in the net.           

Impressed by my first encounter with the Ship Canal, I decided to fish in the clear water of the Quays themselves the next day.    Similar amount of concrete, but without the decorations.  A few hours saw me catch a few small perch, and eventually another bream.    This one was most unlike the fish of a day before.  It was VERY dark in colour, super-slimy, was still recovering from spawning, remnants of the head tubercles still being present, It was thin, side to side, and quite shallow.    I had expected the opposite, that bream from the clear waters of the quays would be very good looking fish.   But I suspect that they spawn later, in the deep water, that they do in the canal itself, which, fed by the Irwell undoubtedly warms up faster.   The Quays fish was certainly male.   It prompts me to wonder, whether the golden fish are all female, and the dark ones all male.   I have caught both "varieties" gold and black, from several waters now, and it makes some sense to see them as the males and females.   Speculation at the moment of course.

A Depressingly Ugly Quays Bream.  A Definite Male.

A Far Prettier Canal Bream.  A Female?

A Particular Change in the Whether?

Well, there has not been much change in the weather, the last week has been both wet and warm, and the rivers are still a little bit too high for my liking, and so the answer to whether grayling? on the river remained the same.   So a change was needed  and  whether I might have a bash on a stillwater came into the frame.  But what stillwater, and what to fish for?

I decided that, because the weather has been so mild, at least for the time of year, I would have a go for a Winter tench.  Water temperatures in both the rivers and lakes locally seem to be about 5 degrees.  I don't think that I have ever caught a Winter tench before, carp yes, tench no.   In the good old days of tench fishing I would be poised to cast in at midnight on the Glorious 16th of June.   The close season used to ban all coarse fishing between 15th of March and June the 15th.  A good thing? A bad thing?   I won't be drawn on that today, but the 16th of June was always very special.   It no longer is. We usually were successful in that 16th quest for tench, and the thoughts in our minds were that the tench had started to feed maybe just a couple of weeks before the season opened. That they had only woken up in late May.  Most tench used to be caught in June, and by the end of July, they were getting hard to find.  Anglers thought that they fed very well to produce the spawn and then again  to recover their condition, but that after July they mainly changed their food intake to much smaller items, and thus became hard to catch.  We all now know that not to be the case, as I confirmed it myself , having caught a few tench in mid April over the last couple of years.  But how early in the year would they feed?  January still seemed a wildly optimistic prediction.

Yet I felt strangely confident, for despite the cold, 5 degree water, it had been unseasonably warm the last few days, and it was quite cloudy, and had been so right through the night, and consequently I did not have that "today will be a waste of time" thought in my head.   No, I actually had the idea that I would be in with a chance.  I arrived at the water at first light, and was not too surprised to find it a good foot higher than it had been back in June. There is still much water in and on the land that has yet to flow back into the rivers.  Donned the wellies and made for a swim about half way along the lake, one that would give me a good view of the entire water surface.   In the almost complete windless conditions, that lake surface was flat calm, and  as the day progressed it never got to more that a very slight undulation.  It never managed to break into a ripple, but the surface moved fractionally with that "oily" look,  just enough to blur the reflections of the trees on the far bank.   Unlike during the Summer, the lack of leaves revealed to me that the lake was very near the town. In Summer little evidence of dwellings and other buildings is visible.   Within minutes a carp jumped near to the far bank, It jumped four times in quick succession.  Even after much thought and considerable reading, I still have little real and convincing ideas as to why fish break surface in this way, jumping and rolling.   I didn't have the chance to further that investigation, for the fish was the only one, of any species, that I was to see on the top all day.

A flight of birds passed overhead in a "V" formation.  About thirty of them.  They were not geese, but

Cormorants on the Moon

cormorants, and I mentally trained an ack-ack gun on them as they passed.   Thirty is not the most I have seen at one time,  a few years ago a flight consisting of several branching "V"s passed over near to my house. I estimated that there were about 500 of them.   Here is another picture I took a couple of years ago.   I had to run so as to get the moon in shot too, and actually ended up invading the pitch of the Lacrosse game I was watching at the time.  I was lucky to get the picture, and probably lucky not to lose my life in the mêlée  of jolly hockey sticks and heavily armoured players.   Vicious game, lacrosse. Probably why my son likes it so much.

A young great crested grebe positioned itself over my bait.   It was to remain there, seemingly at anchor, for over two hours.  It looked like one of those raised in this last year's brood. The lake being so quiet, I settled down to read  Hemingway's "A Farewell to Arms".  I find that, on slow stillwater sessions, I am able to read, whilst still watching the dough bobbins from the corner of my eye. Hey! Proper dough bobbins mate, made from real bread! The day was slow enough to enable me to read half the book.   About 11 o'clock the left hand bobbin twitched a bit. Nothing more, just a twitch.  I reeled in a couple of minutes later to find one sucked maggot, the other one missing.   The most likely candidate was a small roach, but I still had a tinca in mind as the culprit.  My two rods were fishing about 25 yards out, ten or twelve feet apart, and I had chucked out 7 or 8 small feeder fulls of maggots.   The maggots had languished for over two weeks in my bait fridge.  The fridge is probably a little too cold, and when I first opened the lid, the maggots looked to be quite dead. I compensated by not clipping the lid down on the maggot feeders, hoping that, on hitting the water, the maggots would be spilled and scattered immediately.  The maggots did recover and start to wriggle, but it was a full three hours or so before they showed any visible signs of life.   Note to self: back off the fridge thermostat a smidgeon this evening.  The fridge though has been a boon. A freebie from a friend who had had quite enough of both her student tenants, and Manchester council's heavy handed rules for landlords.   She gave me two small fridges, and one now, with the wick turned up full, acts as a bait freezer,  the other has reduced my maggot costs tremendously.

So at about eleven, I had a bite on my maggots, maggots which were lying in a thin small carpet of maybe two hundred other similar maggots. This is worthy of some thought.   How likely is it that a particle bait is picked up by a fish, from amongst an area of scattered, similar particles?  It is possible that only your hookbait has been picked up.   It is equally likely, or perhaps equally unlikely, that yours was the very last to be eaten.  Neither is the most likely scenario.   Provided that your hookbait is no less attractive, nor more attractive than any other particle, then on average, half the free bait will have been eaten before yours.  Some days a quarter will have been eaten, on others 4/5 might have been consumed. There will always been minor, or perhaps major differences in how your hookbait is seen by the fish, when compared to the free offerings, maybe the hook will put the fish off a bit, maybe you have presented it in a way that might make your hookbait more attractive.  Therefore it will never be truly rigorous to apply statistics in this way, but it most certainly can give a general idea.

So, ignoring such bait/hookbait differences we can say:

1) When you get your first bite, the most likely scenario is that only half of your freebies remain. 

2) When you get your second bite, the most likely scenario is that a quarter of your freebies remain.

3) When you get that third bite, the most likely scenario is that just 1/8th of your freebies remain.

4) Regardless of accuracy of the statistics, by the 4th or 5th bite, very little feed will be left.

Is this important: Yes it is.    One other obvious conclusion is that on a stillwater, if you are getting NO bites at all, yet have thrown in what you feel is a sufficiently attractive bait pattern, then there is no point in throwing more in. Just a waste.   Either the fish are elsewhere, not feeding or they don't like the dinner you have provided for them, and maybe they are away getting another of their five a day.

The consequences get harder once you start to get bites: do you feed more, and if so, when?  If you do feed more to enthusiastic fish, how easily and quickly might you overfeed, or might the splashes scare off a feeding shoal?   One thing that is certain when adding bait, the number of bites you have been getting is another factor to consider, along with how many fish are expected to be in the swim, the time of year, how warm the water is, and are they feeding hard or just peckish.  I cannot give precise answers to any of this, it is just one of those questions about which the experienced angler will think, and then strive to get the right answer on the day.   There is far more for an angler to consider, than there is for a golfer facing that 6 foot putt on the 18th green. It is the infinite variability that makes angling so wonderfully fascinating, and which  also gives rise to the mountains of absolute rubbish talked (and written!) about it.

So I put in a small amount of extra feed: two more feeders full.  I was rewarded, if not instantly, by two line bites.  A few chapters later, in the early afternoon, a good bite on the left hand rod, and I hooked into what I initially thought was a perch.   But as the fight progressed it intensified, and was unmistakeably a tench...or a carp...    Tench it was, a nice slim fish of 4-6.   Always a pleasure to see that tench shade of green.   It fought no worse than any Summer fish, although it was initially sluggish.   I had expected a poor fight, but in a cold-blooded creature it might be that the muscles get more efficient as they warm up with use?   The fish was no slouch and gave an excellent account of itself.  My first Winter tench. In water of just five degrees Celsius.  So pleasing when the plan works out.

There were no more bites.   A kingfisher  flashed down the length of the lake, eighteen inches above the water and at speed.   It landed in a low overhanging tree a couple of hundred yards away, just a tiny orange-brown point of light in the distance. It looks as if quite a lot of them have so far survived this Winter, as I see one or more on most fishing days.  A bunch of about twenty finches flew over, each bird flying very randomly in the overall group.   Very untidy looking assembly of birds, each bird exhibiting random motion within the group:  goldfinches? greenfinches? 

There is more thought that can be applied to bite frequency.   In the lazy hazy days of Summer, bites can be frequent.   Even without the use of groundbait of any kind.    It is common for anglers to get dozens, in some cases hundreds of bites in a single day.   So what can we read into this?    Certainly that the fish are hungry....but look deeper.   That single maggot on your hook has been seen and taken dozens of time during the day.   And that means that any other visible food item in the same area of that lake will have been seen by the fish too.   And almost certainly eaten by them.   So the conclusion is simple: there can be very little natural food easily available to the fish, if you are catching fish regularly.    There may be food there, but it must be hidden in the weeds or buried in the silt.    Every small handful of bait you throw in represents a very large increase in the local food supply for the fish.  I may have said this before, but any heavily fished water becomes a fish farm, with MOST of the fishes'  food being hand fed by the anglers. Cold-blooded creatures like fish have a very low requirement for food outside of the breeding season,  very little is needed to retain their body weight constant.  Once anglers supplement that very low food level intake, then the fish can grow easily to the huge sizes we now see in our waters.

All this may explain why, in the past, large fish were seen as hard to catch.  Before the introduction of heavy baiting, large fish were only present in very rich natural waters.  Waters with a lot of readily available natural food.  And so, unless you were able to introduce food that they liked better,  catching the fish was difficult.   All this changed with the introduction of various modern baits, when suddenly there were available a large choice of very tempting items for these fish.   So big fish became far easier to catch, at the same time as they have grown larger and become far more numerous.    And as long as anglers continue to pay for the bait, so they will keep catching. 

Female Blackcap

Not too much news in the garden,  except that all those bulbs I drilled into the lawn are sprouting very early.  It will not be long before we have crocus flowers and snowdrops.   Unless a sudden frost gets them.   Our male blackcap has been joined by a female.  The only female blackcap I have ever seen.  It may have been around for some time, as I initially thought it was just another dunnock...until I looked closer.   Its presence is not universally welcome in the garden, as the bullfinch chasing it away in my photograph clearly shows.  

Blackcap Being Chased Away by the Male Bullfinch