Put Some Soul Into Ya Fishin' Man......
This week i decided to go back to my roots and become a member of Lymm Anglers. I have not joined the full club but taken up their offer of a Bridgewater Canal Licence for £23.50. I often travel along the canal where i grew up fishing and where it all began for me with an air of happiness of fond memories of me and my dad sat fishing away every Saturday while mum went shopping. In those early days of my fishing life we would always fish bronze maggot, i think its banned now as the dye can kill you! and it was always Van Der Ende ground bait and it had to be mixed sloppy, this was always my job at the start of the sesSion while my dad set up. My early years was spent fishing the canal on a small whip or as we called it "the snatcher" and even this close in you would catch some nice bream and roach but like many kids my first fish was a perch.
My first Christmas after going fishing with my dad i awoke to my first fishing box and my own rod, i forget the name but the bot was black with a sponge red lid and the rod was a Shakespeare. I will always remember me saying i could not wait to get out fishing and from no where my dad brought out a box of maggots he had bought earlier and a promise to go fishing on Boxing day, i never slept a wink that night! Boxing day come and with a frost on the ground we headed to the canal, a journey we made so many times but never in such conditions, it was freezing. I think we lasted a hour before i shivering asked my dad "What time we going home dad? I'm cooold" we packed in there and then but i always remember coming in the house to a bowl of hot soup form my mum and my dad complaining that he had been fishing for 20 years and never once come home to soup!! As i said before happy memories and maybe i will share some more over time on here and they are the best memories of all as there are no pictures of any fish just all in my mind.
So its safe to say this canal holds some good memories for me so it will be good to see how it is fishing all these years on and maybe not now but next spring and summer i will retrace old footsteps, for now i am hoping to sneak in the odd pike session as i always remember pike being a visitor on many of our trips.
Finding Time For Bloggin....
As i mentioned in last weeks blog i am going to be on the bank a lot over the coming week and even now as i write this blog on Thursday i have so many trips to blog about there is no way i am going to get them into one blog so there will be certainly smaller updates coming over the next week or so, well i would say certainly and even now there is a trip planned tomorrow, normal river fishing on Saturday and a pike session on Sunday so time for blogging is short but hey ho will fit it in somewhere along the line just bear with me at this point as there will be a few updates out in short succession if i dont get Fridays update live, hectic times but certainly fun.
Developing As An Angler...
I have said many a time on this blog that angling is so much more than catching fish, it is in my opinion a journey and through your life you develop as an angler and week on week, season on season, you add a little bit more to your fishing till in the end i guess you reach a stage in your life where you want to pass this knowledge onto someone else. This thirst to progress with angling and develop my knowledge certainly drives me on and sometime it can mean taking a plunge into the unknown and failing dramatically, just look at my spring/summer exploits for carp in the carp quest. Some will see this as a failure but i learnt so much from them blanks that i will be using again next year in my fishing to hopefully crack it.
It also works the other way as shown with jumping in at the deep end with dead baiting for pike last January and with the help of some good friends and the dedication to get out there i am by no means the worlds best pike angler or anywhere near being half decent, but, what is different now is i am happily going to the bank with Confidence and that for me is a huge leap from January where i was going and waiting not knowing what i was doing to be honest. In short i guess i am saying if you want to try and achieve something the forums, Youtube and Blogs for that matter will only take you so far you need to get out there and do the hours on the bank to really learn anything in angling in my opinion and the sense of achievement when doing it like this is something else indeed.
With that lets get onto this weeks fishing and we start with Pike....
Friday 26th September - Only Got Eyes For My Pike Float....
Friday and as i recall it had been a stinker of a day in work where every case i had dealt with had been a labyrinth of errors and queries. My head was battered and with the blog already wrote and pictures just needing to be added i decided to give my eyes a rest from the artificial glow of a computer screen and let them relax to the gentle motion of a pike float lying lazily at the side of a reed bed for a few hours, sometimes you just need to get out.
It was only going to be a short session but i knew what little time i had was being spent at the right time of the day as just as the suns going down and the shadows lengthen you can imagine those pike leaving their day time lairs to go on the feed.. I always go piking with the target of one fish, this is a comment you will hear a lot this year as it will be said a lot with my piking, so with one fish or even one chance/run in my sights i cast into the oily murky depths.
A good hour went by before i noticed my right hand rod tremble slightly before the float laid flat on the top as the pike lifted the egg sinker off the bottom before moving off with the bait and cocking the float, my heart skipped a beat with the excitement, quickly i come to my senses and reeled the other rod in and grabbed the rod and watched as the float slowly slid away under the water and with that i struck.......Disaster....I had set the rod up the previous evening and when doing so i had loosened the drag and not set it proper so when i struck there was no power to set the hook and line slid of the reed giving the fish loads of slack! This slack line was soon put to good use by the pike as it threw the hooks, i was gutted.
I don't mind losing fish to hook pulls or striking and the hooks not being in a position to hook the fish as this is part of piking but i knew i had made a school boy error and missed a chance, was that my chance gone?
I decided to work my way back along the stretch and thank fully on a known little hot spot the float began to dance its pikey dance although i have to say before even striking in knew it was a small jack as the jagged movement across the water without enough power to sink the float is normally a sure sign of a jack. Heading on its merry way i gave it a few seconds before striking and i have to say on my 2.75tc rod it was more of a case of reeling it in that playing the fish but i was happy to have got the one fish i set out for. Driving back home in the memory of the sesison was more of what could have been more than what i caught.
BIG Perch saves drab session on the River....
That evening i set about publishing the blog and getting my gear ready for a days trotting the next day and having my gear split is becoming a real head ache for me, more on that in the next update, eventually i was all set for a trip to the River Dane the next day.
Arriving on the banks we set up in swims we had fished once or twice before and had caught steady 10lb plus nets of fish from so we were confident of a few bites as we unloaded the car and walked to the river. In the morning light the river was going through steadily and was painfully low but in these conditions it looked ideal for roach and possibly some big bream to make an appearance and we were full of excitement as we set up.
Rivers are some of the most fantastic places on earth but on others they can be an absolute killer as the first two hours of the session passed with a few small perch and a small roach and the bites where painfully spread apart, it was like the river was dead. My uncle visited my peg a few time sin this time, always a sign of a hard session, he was in the same predicament going a hour without a knock. It was during this time i had another visitor to my peg and it was great to put a face to name on a forum i post on and i thoroughly enjoyed a chin wag before he headed off for his breakfast, great to meet you, you little tinka tinka :-)
It was just before this visit i had struck into on of the nice perch that call this river their home and although i am sure its a recapture it was more than welcome on this session and at 2lb 8oz you can never ever complain and was a sight for sore eyes on the day.
In these scenarios decision time is never too far always and as the days shorten it becomes even more important to be quick and decisive about moving and when you look at the net below you can see why by 11am we were on the road heading for the river weaver.
There was match on most of the lengths but we found a few spots to sneak into and in hindsight we should have just kept on driving home as nothing came to my float fished dead baits or on the pole line, to either of us. All in all we can not complain about these two sessions having experienced quite a fantastic run of fishing in the past months and if we where honest we were due a bad one.
till next time,
tight lines
DAnny
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