Looking Back, Moving Forwards.

It is as good a time as any, with the traditional fishing season now at an end and this blog very nearly a year old, to take stock, look back at the year gone by and lay down some achievable aims for the months ahead.

Last season was very much a learning curve for me as I haven't fished regularly for quite a few years and things have changed markedly in my absence. A variety of new waters have added to my confusion and found me struggling to catch on several occasions.

Fishing in general has changed with the emphasis very much on carp these days and naturally baits and methods have moved on, I have quite a bit of catching up to do in this respect.

Ryton Pool, Jubilee Pools, Stockton Reservoir and Phil's stretch of the Warwickshire Avon were all waters I had never seen let alone fished before and each presented it's own problems to be overcome. Although I caught fish from every venue and I was successful in catching both a 20lb carp and a 10lb barbel along with some smaller carp and numerous good tench, I feel that there is certainly room for improvement particularly with regards eliminating blank sessions.

There are one or two methods in mind which I may experiment with in the near future and I will be using a greater variety of baits too, I may fish a match or two as well if the opportunity comes my way.

What I did do last year was achieve two of the targets I set for myself as a teenager. While I will always be happy to catch big fish of any species there was four in particular that captured my imagination and three of the four eluded me in my teens. The capture of a roach of exactly two pounds from the river Leam at Hunningham was the only real specimen fish of my teens and remained something I was very proud of until I bettered it by four ounces some years later.


Last Summer the capture of a carp of over twenty pounds from Jubilee fitted the bill as another of my four targets and this was followed by a barbel of ten and a half pounds from the Avon which made three. Top of the list however is, and always has been, a bream of ten pounds or more. The fourth and most highly prized of the quartet, bream are, for reasons even I don't understand, my favourite fish and a double figure fish would be amazing. I think the blame lies largely with the impressionable age I was at when the angling press were reporting the bream catches of the likes of Alan Wilson, Phil Smith, Tony Miles, etc. Stunning bream of thirteen, fourteen and fifteen pounds featured on the front page most weeks, fish from legendary waters such as Queensford Lagoon and tc pit. One particularly iconic picture of Smith behind a bag of four bream each over eleven pounds still sticks in my mind today.


Over the years I have of course fished waters which hold bream of the target weight and above, Napton Reservoir, Coombe Abbey Lake, Ryton Pool, Jubilee Pools, Overstone Solarium to name a few, but really big bream are scarce in each case. In order to get after a real whopper I will probably have to extend my search area, this is one place I've got my eye on http://www.bluebell-lakes.co.uk/ and may try to take out a 24hr ticket at some point this season. It strikes me also as a good place for a get together later in the season, a Bloggers Beano if you like!

Heroes and Villains

I once saw a particularly self congratulatory interview with Brian Wilson of The Beach Boys in which he claimed that his band had been involved in a tit for tat exchange of genius song writing between themselves and The Beatles. Wilson claimed that each time Lennon and McCartney would write a number one hit he and Mike Wood would immediately pen a better one.
Self praise of the highest order I'm sure you'll agree.

While it is obviously the case that The Beach Boys were a successful band in the mould of a barber's shop quartet, pretenders to the crown of the Beatles both in terms of creativity and charisma they were not.

In much the same way the traditional, mixed, fisheries of old remain superior (to my mind at least) to the modern carp biased, manufactured fisheries which have sprung up over the last twenty years or so. No matter how these places are marketed or what the modern fishery manager may say, nothing will replace the watercraft and skills needed to catch well on a natural water or, for that matter, the sense of achievement when a decent catch is compiled.

Blank sessions are and always have been part and parcel of the anglers lot and lessons are learnt by enduring them, struggling to avoid a blank or dry net as it used to be called makes the fisherman experiment and therefore learn. I've recently heard matchmen complain bitterly of only weighing in 30lb from the commercials in their latest contest, well they should try a natural venue on a hard day when a bite is seen as a minor success.

I believe that young anglers are affected most by the commercial fishery phenomenon, when, in the past youngsters would hone their skills on the local canal catching roach and perch the modern trend is to roll up at the nearest hole in the ground and pull out hand reared stockie carp all day.

Traditionally stillwater lakes support a natural fish population of 300 to 400lb an acre, modern commercial fisheries tend to be stocked at 1000lb to 1500lb an acre an unsustainable head of fish for the environment and as a consequence they are reliant on anglers bait to survive. Not surprising then that they are easily caught and that match catches are often over 200lb.

Although I'm not against well managed commercial fisheries and will gladly fish them, particularly during the hard parts of the year, I think they have questions to answer mostly regarding young anglers drifting away from the sport having found it too easy!

50lb of bream or tench or a big wild fish from a traditional fishery is a real achievement and should serve as a shining example as to what can be done having served an angling apprenticeship and worked hard to perfect watercraft and technique.

The fisheries of old, those with a natural level of wild stock, should be regarded as The Beatles, the wannabe commercials with their flash match weights represent The Beachboys and the mud puddle, hole in the ground fisheries with their stunted, hand size, mirror carp are like.... Oh I don't know....The Monkees ???

What have the Romans ever done for us?

When the Roman Empire and Europe converted to Christianity during the Roman occupation of the Britain (312AD) traditional pagan celebrations of motherhood along with the Roman's own Hilaria festival, which celebrated the Mother Goddess Cybele, became part of the liturgical calandar as Laetare Sunday, the fourth Sunday in Lent to honour the Virgin Mary and Mother Church.

By the sixteenth century anyone who visited their mother church on Laetare Sunday was said to have gone "a-mothering" and this is the likely forbear of the term Mothering Sunday. Later still Mothering Sunday was a day when domestic servants were given the day off to visit their parents.

During the 1920s the tradition of Mothering Sunday had lapsed both here and throughout Europe but was revived during World War 2 by American and Canadian servicemen who celebrated Mother's Day on the second Sunday in May. Mother's Day here reverted to the traditional fourth Sunday in Lent and was celebrated with renewed vigour.

As a direct result of all this, instead of enjoying the early Spring sunshine on the banks of the Warwickshire Avon, I was at home spending the day with my family on the final Sunday of the river season.

As is often the case conditions came right just in time for the season's climax with just a shower or two of rain during the week and a couple of warmer nights leading into the weekend. I expect to hear shortly, through the angling press and the blog's of others, of bumper catches from the rivers over the past weekend.

I propose that in future we move Mother's Day celebrations to the second Sunday in May in order to fall into line with the USA (and let's face it we always do!).
Fathers Day (Brainchild of Sonora Smart Dodd in 1910), on the other hand, is a marvellous tradition and takes place on June 20th.

The Sun is in the Sky, Oh Why Oh Why Would I Wanna be Anywhere Else?

At long last I have been able to say good morning to people with some real conviction, the awful Winter we have all endured seemingly loosening its icy grip, flowering bluebells and snowdrops adorn the countryside with the Daffodils sure to follow suit soon and the earliest lambs are in the fields. While it may be premature to suggest that Spring has sprung it is certainly in the process of springing.

Fields of white greeted me when I drew back the curtains on Sunday morning, a real disappointment given that we had dodged a frost the previous night, and hopes of giant barbel evaporated immediately while the likelihood of catching anything seemed slim.

Phil picked me up at noon and pointed his van in the direction of the river Avon where we knew Denny was already fishing. On arrival Phil set up at the weir to fish meat and lobworms some thirty yards above Denny who had two meat rods, below him I was tackling up to fish a float with maggots on the big deep bend.


Overnight temperatures of a reported minus six meant for little initial action, Denny moved into the weir peg, Phil moved downstream to fish a long shallow glide and I put my float rod aside in order to fish a feeder in the nearside slack water.


At almost exactly 3pm (with the day at it's warmest) it was as if someone had thrown a switch, having missed a good pull the cast before I suddenly found myself attached to a deep bodied chub which fought well having got into the fast water before succumbing to the net. At more or less the same time Phil was landing a chub of about a pound and Denny missed a wrap round on meat.


From this point on I was getting a bite of some sort on each cast and was fishing three maggots on the hook in an attempt to sort out the bigger fish, soon I was into another hard fighting fish which, happily, turned out to be a perch. It has been too long since I last encountered a decent perch they are extremely handsome fish.

Super Job !

I weighed and photographed the two fish while we still had some sunlight the chub went three and a half and the perch was one and a half, then I got back to the fishing and was soon rewarded with a bream of about two and a half pounds which would have made a nice addition to the photo had it put in an appearance sooner.

As darkness started to descend the off switch was apparently thrown as the bites ceased as suddenly as they had begun and we packed with the air quickly becoming icy cold again. Phil had to make do with the one fish although he did get a few bites late on when changing to maggot and Denny had missed a further two bites on meat.

Footnote: Having finally shown my fishing camera a bit of tlc and treated it to a set of new batteries I am once again able to adorn these pages with a selection of badly taken photographs.