Flushing Meadows Silvers Go Mad For Punch

A warm welcome to this week’s blog update and we now have officially moved silently into the closed river season so we now have 3 months of purely pond, pit and lake fishing ahead and as always I aim to fish as many new venues in this period as possible but for the first few weeks it will be all about easing ourselves back into the slow more relaxed world of still waters.  I touched last week on my aims for reintroducing some more fun into my fishing and that started this week in earnest with a roach fishing trip to Flushing meadows with only some liquidised bread and some sweetcorn with a backup plan of a pint of white maggots as bait.

The baiting up for carp has been on hold for last week and a half as the sub-zero temperatures saw the venue capped with a nice solid helmet of ice, spring keeps on threatening to take over and although the mornings are still freezing there are definite signs during the day that spring is taking a slow hold, most noticeable is that the sun has a warmth to it that it has lacked the past months and of course the wildlife gives us our biggest clue with the local magpies to where I work busy rebuilding their nest from last year, not that I spend my days gazing out of the window of course hehe J

An update on the licence front and good news is we have there or there about decided on what we are doing for the coming year I would say we are about 90% certain now to keep the Warrington Anglers Card although we will not be purchasing it till next month which fits in nicely as it will give us a chance to see what mighty plans this club has for the coming year when the AGM is held this week and who knows they may shock us all and decide to invest a penny or two in the river arm of the club but I will not be holding my breath on it.  I also wonder if we will get any information on the rumours going around that Warrington Anglers have put a bid in to purchase Brookside Fisheries.

 We have also all but decided on purchasing another card with a club not so local but it is a club that does seem to invest in its Rivers as much as its still waters, it is a club that only recently purchased a decent stretch of river with very good access to a really large stretch of river that when I read up on it generally fishes all year round and also is a river that offers me some diversity as I can target a species I have only sparred with on the River Dee and that species is the prince of the river the Barbel.

The barbel is slowly becoming more established on the river dee with reports coming in regular of captures of this species from places they were not being caught from before so they are certainly starting to populate this river all along its course but it will be a long time before the Dee is known as a barbel river as opposed to the river on this new card we are looking at which is known for its barbel and of course chub.  It is a card that if I am truly honest fills me with excitement when I think about exploring its waters, not only its rivers but some of its still waters look beautiful as well.  I will go more into this card in a future update but suffice to say if we do get it I feel there will be some incredible adventures awaiting us.

A final point I would like to mention before we go into this week’s update is the incredible milestone the blog’s twitter reached on Monday evening when it passed 1,000 followers, thank you too all the people that have arrived on this blog from Twitter and to all the people I have met on there who have helped me out at one time or another with Re-tweets and just being genuine decent people to speak too, there is no need to publically name these people, they know who they are because they regularly fill my personal feed with their feedback and re-tweets, thank you to you all.  Incidentally if you are interested in following the blog on twitter you can use the link on the right hand side bar of the blog or you can simply follow @SATONMYPERCH on Twitter.

On to this weeks fishing

Flushing Meadows Silvers Go Mad For Punch

   Week one of the closed season had arrived and with no club card under our belt our fishing venue choices were severely limited indeed, in fact it came down to just two venues in flushing meadows or a local pond we knew held a few beautifully marked carp and a good head of silvers.

We chose to go with flushing meadows as the whole week before we had some severe frosts that had seen the local waterways freeze over.  My uncle popped in on the small pond on Thursday and found it to be froze and with a rise in temperatures due overnight on Friday it only meant one thing and that was the ice would thaw and we all know there is no tougher conditions tp fish a natural pond than just after a thaw.

We decided to go with flushing meadows fishery in the end and the balance was tipped by the sheer stocking density of this venue it holds so many fish that it adheres to none of the basic rules of fishing we know and have learned through our angling career, no matter where you fish you are almost guaranteed to have large density of fish in front of you.   These type of highly stocked fisheries are great in my eyes for getting youngsters into fishing by keeping that float going under and also for the more experienced angler they offer an easier days fishing where you can practice new techniques and have a bit of fun trying tactics and baits you would not normally try out.

I firmly believe you could crack the ice on this venue and still have a bite a chuck on maggot it is that hungry of a venue.  The only thing that I feel lets it down is the fact you are not allowed to use a keep net as I always feel a session is missing something when you can’t look back at the end of the session at your net.

Bait for the session would be a whole loaf of cheap as chips ASDA bread liquidised, a few slices of bread for hook baits, some frozen sweetcorn and around half a pint of maggots as a cushion to fall back on should the other baits not produce.

Arriving at the bank I added some water to the liquidised bread and sprinkled in some corn into the mix which I left on the stiff side as I wanted it to go to the bottom and then break up.  if you look closely at the picture below you will notice I left the crusts on the bread and it is also a lot more roughly liquidised than you would do for a pond of canal session and this was on purpose as there is also a large population of carp in these pools and if I could spark a few of these into life I wanted something substantial to hold them in the swim for longer.

I used the largest punch I had in my box which I actually think was a meat punch given as a freebie on the front of the Angling Times a few weeks ago, with so many small mouths to feed in this venue I wanted to try and cut the really really small silver fry out of the equation and just try and catch the better quality fish in the swim.  My chosen method was to fish the pole just down the inside ledge where I hoped to find the fish given the cold conditions we were fishing in.

My plan was simple, feed the swim little and often and see what came along throughout the session.  First put in and as predicted the fish where there waiting and at first I thought I had got it completely wrong as small roach after small roach took the bait as soon as the final shot registered on the float.  I upped the feed rate slightly and continued to persevere with the method and slowly but surely the better silver fish began to show including this nice roach below.

The more the swim built the better the quality of the fish and both me and my uncle quickly lost count at just how many fish we had caught but we both knew had we had a keep net in it would have dwarfed any of our river weights this year.  I have found on this venue the fishing can die as time moves on and I have learnt that if you deepen up and move further down the slope you again find the fish again and it can be a depth change as small as an inch that can see bites coming thick and fast again.  This change in depth saw me picking up skimmer bream  rather than the roach and rudd I had been catching.

The skmmers where obviously feeding hard in the swim as one after another they fell for the irresistible fluffy bread punch and eventually one or two of the better bream moved into the swim, nothing in the league of the bream from last year on here but certainly a more than visitor to my peg.

As the afternoon moved on I was joined by a really nice fella who it turned out regularly reads my angling blog and actually knew my uncle from fishing in years gone by, his love of angling was clear from the outset and I have to say it was a real pleasure to spend some time speaking to someone as passionate as he was about his fishing.  He knew most of the venues we fished and also gave us information on ones we planned too fish and if you are reading this update thank you so much for all your help and taking the time from your fishing to come over and chew the fat with me.

As the session moved on it became apparent that the carp where not going to make an appearance and just as I had resided to this fact I heard my uncles drag screaming next to me as he connected with what was almost certainly a carp it took line and was already on the other side of the pool when I looked over in my uncles direction and in that instance the hook pulled, this was the only fish either of us connected with in the whole session which in reality when I look out of the window right now at the snow blanketing the front of my house is understandable why these fish are still quite dormant.

All in all the trip to this venue served a purpose it got us back into the swing of pole fishing and served as a confidence builder for the tougher sessions ahead on the natural venues where our tactics will have to be more refined to catch.  The bites came thick and fast all day and I that float kept on going under which is what we pay our money for.

Looking forward to this weekend I feel we may have a weekend off from fishing it looks awful outside and although we are game to pursue our sport in any conditions it is never worth risk in the conditions currently outside my window, for one I don’t actually think I could get out of my street never mind negotiate the steep streets leading down to my uncles house.  We have already both decided we won’t be on the bank tomorrow but have not ruled out a afternoon session on Sunday and I would think in these conditions we will be heading again to flushing meadows and think I might fish a method I have not tried in some time now, the waggler.

Till next week I wish you all

Tight lines

Danny