Barbel forays and more commercial perch

On Sunday I conceded and spent the four hours that I suddenly found that I had free barbelling on the River Soar. The temperature was well up and the river was just about within it's banks, so I was told, plus I couldn't think of anything else to do at short notice so I went for it. Pulling up at the road side I looked across towards the river beyond the lake that the field had become and it looked like I could make it to the bank, Once I'd got within twenty yards of the lake I started to have my doubts but I found a fairly narrow crossing point that just about failed to swamp my boots at full tip toe.

Just about within its banks

 Starting at the top of the stretch I worked my way through a swim an hour most of which required five ounces of lead to hold steady, but of the whiskered ones there was not a sign. What I did see though were some tracks running along the bank in the freshly deposited silt. It would be very unusual for a dog to be in the area and I suspected that it was an otter which I confirmed when I compared them to some pictures on the internet. Sightings are now being reported on a very regular basis on most of the stretches of river, only time will tell what impact they will have.

It looked the part

The far bank snags looked a bit iffy!

The warm spell continued into the week inspired I was not but eventually the need to fish persuaded me to visit another commercial fishery to try for a perch or two. This particular fishery had been kind to me in the past and in fact was where I had caught my biggest stripey to date at 3lb 11oz's several years previously on a day which had given me another three captures in excess of 3lb's, I say captures and not perch as one of them visited me twice in the space of half an hour or so.

Was this fella still there?

I arrived at dawn to find the place empty which was not unexpected to be honest seeing as it was midweek after a holiday. My mate Rob would be joining me later but until then I had solitude which was some compensation seeing that the water isn't what I would call scenic, more functional in the normal fashion of this type of fishery. I started off on the windward bank and float fished a prawn down the edge in four feet of water over a bed of chopped prawn and maggot. After an hour and a half I got wander lust and wound in to have a look at a swim in the opposite corner that covered the largest reedbed on the water, it certainly looked good. As I was debating the move Rob pulled up behind me and after five minutes of chatting I had convinced myself that it was the place to be, Rob was going to drop in further along the bank towards where I had started.

Once I had got myself reorganised and had plumbed the depth in my new swim I started to feed a pinch of maggots every few minutes along the reed lined margin while I set up another rod with a live bait rig. Within twenty minutes I had the odd fish boiling sub surface, this was starting to look good. I decided to give it half an hour on the prawn before trying to catch some bait but that didn't produce any positive bites so it was time to get the maggot on. Straight away it was a bite a chuck, a couple of micro perch first, then a 6oz roach that I returned as being a bit big for what I wanted, then a small carp of some description, possibly one of those F1 hybrid type things, it certainly didn't look quite like a true carp anyway. The bites kept coming but very few were from my perfect bait sized fish. Eventually I had three small roach in the net and gave up at that, I stuck a prawn back on the float rig after I had swung out the paternostered roach on the other rod.

This time the prawn was getting more attention, mostly nibbles from small fish but I had two more small carp and a bream of about 2lb's, no sign of the decent perch at all. A shout from down the bank told me that Rob was getting a similiar result, he'd just been given the run around by a carp of 3 or 4lb's. I gave the lure's a go for an hour before dusk and thought I felt one possible hit but it could have just been debris. The method was very productive on the water previously and I was starting to think that maybe there was no longer a head of larger perch present. I don't plan to return any time soon to try and find out to be honest, it was a days fishing and it was nice to get a few bites in these hard times but I do find many of these commercials to be soulless places especially in the depths of winter.

I needed to get back on the rivers, levels were almost back to normal on the Soar and with the weather being incredibly warm for the season I decided on another barbel trip. The stretch that I had in mind had been difficult to get to for quite a while due to the floods and I wasn't certain that I would be able to park in the usual area, there is a layby that can be used but memories of broken windows from years gone by puts me off of that one if at all possible. I drove slowly across the first field avoiding the main ruts and it was looking good, then I saw a very soggy looking patch of grass ahead and no way was I going to risk that so I swung the motor off into the rough grass and carried on towards the second field. Within a hundred yards I could see that I wasn't going to make it and decided to park where I was and carry on by foot, the field was a mass of mud made worse by a heavy vehicle of some sort that had been through making walking tricky and driving suicidal.

As I suspected the banks hadn't seen much traffic since the flood had receded and as I also suspected the going was tough, it was slippery as hell and great clods of mud stuck to my boots making every step hard work. I started off in my old faithful spot which was looking in great condition with the floods having pushed away a lot of debris while also scouring away the river bed to create what will be an excellent sight fishing spot next summer. if we get a summer that is.

Thoughts of summer stalking came to mind

Two rigs went out complete with pva sticks of small pellets and crumbed boilie, a spicy tuna boilie being on each hair. After an hour or so the downstream rod banged over a couple of times, no doubt due to a chub attack, but other that that it seemed strangely dead. I stuck it out for three hours which is much longer than I would normally stop in a swim on the Soar but I was confident that barbel weren't far off, eventually though I knew that I had to move.

I walked another three hundred yards downstream to an area that I've never caught a barbel from which is a strange choice maybe but I know that they do turn up there at times and the more I blank the more I want to catch one from the spot. Again I only made one cast per rod and just with a small pva stick for a bit of extra attraction, despite it looking good for a bite the last swim had proved that the barbel weren't ready to crawl up the bank so there was no point in going over the top on the bait front. I sat down and surveyed the huge amount of debris deposited in every bush and tree by the high water, almost entirely plastic of some description and the vast majority of it will still be there for months to come. Even if the rubbish does get dislodged the problem will only be elsewhere, many plastics take an eternity to degrade and even if they do so they release toxic elements into the environment. It's a sobering thought to consider that we have only relatively recently been producing these materials, what kind of state will we be in another few hundred years?

Rubbish,  that just about summed the day up

I was shaken out of my thoughts by a swirl mid river and twenty yards downstream that caught my eye. I stood looking directly at the spot and suddenly there was another swirl that developed into a bow wave that travelled for a few yards before disapearing, then two more big swirls heading into the near bank. That didn't look like any kind of fish to me, the nature of the bank stopped me from seeing any further along the bank and no other activity was seen, was it another sign of an otter? Whatever it was it was the most excitement that occured all day, it seemed so right but it obviously wasn't.

On the way back to the van I stopped to check the permits of two anglers piking. They too had struggled with only one jack between them when they would normally expect more, it's a funny old game this fishing lark. Talking about it later someone remarked that the day in general had seemed strange with hardly any bird life about and when I came to think of it he was right. No matter what we think we know there will always be a lot that we don't understand, it makes things so much more interesting, and frustrating.

Stillwater roach - the helicopter bolt rig

There is nothing more frustrating to me than having a lot of free time and not being able to fish, it is my idea of hell. When I say not able to fish that isn't of course totally true, let's make it not able to fish where I want and for the species I want and recently that has happened week after week. The weather people have now decided that 2012 was the wettest year on record, nice of them to announce it but I think we may just have guessed don't you? I watched a tv program on the year's weather the other night, one of those programs that just rubs it in a bit more but there wasn't much else on so I left it. It appears that the last twelve months or so has been messed up by the Gulf stream flowing too far to the south, of course you may have known that all along but I'm not a great viewer of the news and all that business so it was fresh to me. One theory is that this shift in the Gulf stream's flow is down to the melting of the polar ice and if so then this may just just be the start of things to come, and if so I for one am emigrating! Anyway enough of the depressing talk, let's go fishing.

Two or three winters back I spent several sessions on an old quarry after it's roach. There were rumours of 2lb fish and I did find a couple of pictures of a brace roach claimed to be that weight online though as they were in a net there was nothing to judge them against so there was only one way to find out and that was to fish it. I had been tinkering with the short hooklink helicopter bolt rig for the roach on my local reservoir and with the water in the quarry plunging steeply to twenty five feet odd it seemed that it might be a good idea to continue with the method on that water too. Nevertheless on my first session I went in on a standard feeder rig fished on the tip, plenty of fish were caught of all sizes up to a pound or so but I decided that I was going to fish two rods on my next session as it was obvious that I had to get through a considerable number of fish if I was to have a chance of a better one. Next time out one rod was fished on the maggot bolt rig and the other on a mini boilie in the hope of putting the small fish off, it did in fact it put everything off and only the maggot rod produced fish all day. The decision then was do I stick it out on rod rod with the boilie or switch both to maggot, I had tried the mini boilies extensively on my local and they didn't work for me, in that case they just didn't prove to be selective and caught roach of 10oz plus just as regularly as did the maggots, in the end I decided to go all out on maggot and play the numbers game. The end result of the mini campaign was a best roach of 1lb 7oz to me, Leo's biggest was 1lb 6oz and I believe Steve had one at 1lb 5oz, between us we had caught a lot of roach and my conclusion was that a brace of 2lbers was incredibly unlikely, maybe it could do a "2" but if so it would be a very exceptional fish for the water.

A nice fish from the previous campaign

So back to the present and a return visit seemed as good an idea as any of the others that I could muster up, at least I knew for certain that the place wouldn't be flooded. Leo joined me and we timed our arrival perfectly, a head torch was needed to get to the swims but by the time the kit was set up it was light enough to line up some casting markers on the far bank. Both rods had been rigged up with bolt feeders and I just had to clip on the hooklinks and get fishing. Hooklink material is one thing that I am still messing about with on this rig, almost all of my previous fishing has been done with 4.6lb (0.14mm) Silstar Matchteam, 3.3lb at times too, though as a pre-stretched line it does tend to kink and twist easily. I decided to try something out and started out on 4.6lb non stretched mono with a diameter of 0.18mm, tow rope to many roach anglers I know, most wouldn't have used the size 16 wide gape hooks with a single maggot either but my experience has been that you can normally get away with that or dare I say even bigger. I know friends who have scaled right down with the rig and who assure me that it was essential in the prevailing circumstances so I'll always keep an open mind but my current thinking is that with such a short hooklink subtle presentation may actually work against you sometimes. Compare it with the carp anglers stiff rig on a smaller scale, the fish only has a very small amount of play in the rig before hitting resistance. A stiffer hooklink combined with a relatively large hook in my mind exaberates the fishes problem in dealing with the situation, once the bait is in its mouth the more supple the link the easier it becomes to eject. Of course that only works should the extra stiffness not make the bait harder to take in the first place.

Two 50 gram Blackcap feeders were positioned about thirty yards out into the lake, in this instance clipping up wasn't practical due to the depth, on a shallower lake I would use a pole elastic stop knot positioned at the tip ring while the line was clipped at the reel and would lower the feeder down through the water by following the line with the rod tip. Trying the same technique in such deep water with a steep bank behind me to stop me sweeping the rod back wouldn't work and the feeder would swing back towards me spilling maggots during its arc, in this case the cast was so short as to be easy to judge anyway so no problem.For half an hour or so I just kept working the feeders, casting one after another every few minutes to get some bait into the swim and I then slowed it down to a cast every twenty minutes. It took an hour to get the first bite but once they had arrived the action was frantic to the extent that I considered winding one rod in. The fish weren't big by any means, mostly roach to 8oz's or so with the odd small skimmer thrown in and unfortunately a few roach/bream hybrids too. I don't recall catching any hybrids when I last fished the water so it was a shame to see them now appearing, of course they may just remain as an occaisional occurance but it still puts some doubt on the roach stock in future. It was bite after bite after bite for maybe an hour and a half and then it slowed down, by midday it had slowed to a halt which was a bit unusual. My first thought was to scale down and see what happened and one rod was fixed up with the 4.6 Silstar to an 18 with the other on 3.3lb and a 20, neither made a blind bit of difference with just the odd fish coming to either rig. I then swopped one rod back to the "tow rope" and size 16 and got the same result, just the odd fish, it makes you think doesn't it. In a nutshell I think that they had moved, I think that they were up in the water. A standard feeder rig with a long hooklink may have caught me a few more fish at that stage but Leo had been struggling all day for his chosen perch quarry and I was suffering considerably due to a stupid mistake I had made so we decided to call it an early finish.

The stupid mistake was to assume that the already wet inside walking boots I was wearing would be fine if I wore my Sealskinz waterproof socks, wrong, the socks made my feet damp and I froze, the Sealkinz are now definately for work use only which is what I bought them for. I should of course have been wearing my winter boots but since getting my new van I've discovered that the pedals seem to me closer together than in my old one and it isn't safe to drive in my size 12 snow boots, next time I'll not be so lazy and just get changed after the drive!

Here's a quick look at the short bolt rig the way I set it up, It's very straightforward, the most important thing is to try and avoid any twist caused by the hooklink or feeder. I include an extra swivel above the feeder which helps in that respect, a snap link between the two makes it easy to change feeder size/weight and a small piece of silicone over that stops the line tangling on it. The mainline is 6lb to cope with the continual casting, some use flouro but I'm just using bog standard mono. A small Korum quick change swivel is fixed between two grippa stops but either side of the swivel I use a tiny glass bead which keeps it all nice and free moving, I tried various tyupes of specific fishing beads but none are as friction free as those glass ones, you get hundreds of them for pennies on Ebay sold for jewellry making and I believe that they are 2mm in diameter. The hooklink which is tied to three inches or so in length is then attached via a loop onto the swivel. Tying the hooklink is by far the most fiddly part of setting the method up. I use a hook tyer and cut the tag end long so that I have plenty to play with, I then make a figure of eight loop knot as normal but keep a small baiting needle to hand. It makes it so much easier if you catch the loop with the needle and pull the knot together that way, a tiny piece of silicone float rubber then holds the link in place on the swivel. After casting the line is tightened right up and a bobbin is attached but instead of having a drop I fish it tight up to the rod, it is only there to indicate drop backs. I also sometimes clip the line to the rod just above the reel which aids the bolt effect further.