River Mersey Seal and Silver on Bread Punch...

A warm welcome to this weeks blog update i hope i find you all well and you nets wet.  This week has seen me book a weeks leave for the first time in a long while.  With the view to hopefully getting out and finding some pike during this week i have to say i am excited.  I just hope the cold snap stays around as any warm sustained weather could see my week off being a disaster if they decide to spawn.  A week on the river is not such a bad back up though.

Moving on to this weeks update i talk a little on my thoughts on the seal that has found its way into the mersey system and also a look at my plans for the coming weeks towards the end of the river season.  The fishing sees us

on to the update

River Mersey Seal of Approval..

Well the secret is finally out there that a seal has set up home on the mersey so i thought i might as well cover it on the blog.  The seal no doubt took advantage of the extraordinary high water levels to get above the weir in Warrington.  If it is anything like the ones on the river dee system it has no doubt followed up a run of salmon who will have also taken advantage of the high water.

The problem with this one on the Mersey is the area it is situated.  The seal is now trapped between  two big weirs and the only good news is the fact the chances of it going any further upstream is limited by the huge woolston weir, i think.  This leaves Warrignton Anglers with a apex predator trapped on its waters and with a fresh run of tidal saltwater coming up daily i imagine the water will be brackish enough for it to be comfortable.  The seal has already been seen with large pike in its paws so damage is already being done.

The seal on the Severn is still there as far as i am aware a good year at least on so actually moving the seal is really difficult and this will only become worse as the seal gains popularity with the public.  The mersey in reality holds no where near the prestige of the severn so a feeling of "it can not be moved from the severn how can it be moved from the mersey".

The other end of the story is how remote the mersey is.  On other rivers like the River Wyre the seal has mysteriously appeared dead on a sandbank with suspicious wounds to the carcass so there is the chance this seal could meet the same fate.

We do need to remember here though that this is no fault of the seal the animal is just following a food source and is now trapped.  Action does need to be taken though.  The mersey area it is in has come on leaps and bounds over the passed few years with match weights showing the increase in fish,  This is still at this stage a very fragile ecosystem with fish stock now at their full potential.  I do hope this situation is dealt with the severity it deserves and the seal is some how moved over the weir.  Fingers crossed!

Not long left now....

So we are fast approaching the month of February and the end of the pike season and the river season looms large.  I am sure this will see then usual petitions for doing away with the closed season appearing on social media and in the angling press.  This year for the rivers has been a complete wipe out so looking solely at the rivers first my hope is to get out and wet a line for dace on the river dee and hopefully some sessions for silvers and chub on the dane.

The other branch of my angling right now is pike fishing and the rising temperature has got me thinking the end of this season might come sooner than we think.  It is always wrong to set targets with fishing but my focus with this is to end the season with a nice pike either a mid or upper double.  I have a week booked of next week and i will be going all out to try and find a pike to close the season out on.  There will of course be some fabulous socials during that week and im hoping to also sneak in a river session.

This week sadly also marks that dreaded week for any angler.  The dreaded MOT on the car week.  There is no way I'm getting away with it this year i just hope the car is done in time for my week off work.

So fingers crossed for a nice croc and as i have always said i will never fail in angling through lack of effort.  I will put the time in and if after next week i end it with a few pike on the bank instead of the double I'm after i will be happy knowing i had caught a few pike and i had done all i could, that's all you can do.

On to this weeks fishing

It finally felt like the nightmare with the rivers was coming to and last week as all the rivers where dropping nicely.  Monday through to Wednesday all was fantastic as the levels plummeted and it even looked like the mighty Dee might get to a level where fishing was considered sane.  Waking up on Thursday morning the rain was bouncing down and my heart sank, how long had this been coming down for?   I checked the EA chart and there was no sign of this water hitting the rivers.

Thursday afternoons level also showed nothing of this rain and a excited angler called his uncle making plans for the Saturday on the River Dane.  A few pints of maggots purchased i headed home from work on Friday and was a happy camper till i noticed the Dee had stopped rising and the Dane showed a slight rise.  0.60 is about the limit for stick float fishing on here and the level showed 0.58m, i hoped the next morning would bring a chart that showed a drop overnight.

I knew the river would be up and slightly high but rather than being down beat about it i decided to be positive and really attack the river.  Three pints of maggot, a pint of hemp and a full load liquidised i was ready to attack this river and really go for it hoping for a positive outcome.

Waking up on the Saturday morning i put the kettle on and followed my morning routine before fishing getting the gear ready.  A quick check of the EA levels and a reading of 0.75m!!! A disaster she had gone even higher over night.  We decided to give her a go any way and heading off in the car we kind of both knew the river would be a mess but with the seasons end fast approaching we where desperate to have a decent session on the river.

Arriving on the banks she had a good colour considering but she was belting through.  We both set up on pegs with a slack on our inside and both felt unusually confident.  On any other river you would bag up with that clarity and a huge slack on the inside of a river belting through.  The dane is unlike and other river though and despite my uncles sole dace we both completed a two hour stint in our swims without a knock or anything that resembled a bite.

Admitting defeat we dropped back on a still water with the hope of catching a few silvers on the pole.  I started off feeding maggot to the side of some reeds and i also fed a ball of liquidised bread to a swim a few yards to my left in a similar depth of water.  The fishing on the maggot was slow to say the least and my temper tested by having to set up from scratch twice.

That was it for me with the maggot line it was slow to say the least and having got stuck on the reeds and snapped off twice i was in no mood for playing any more reed roulette.  What happened next shocked me.  I went in over my bread line on punch and under the float zoomed!  A small roach my reward but it was a start.

Next put in and a few taps on the bread resulted in a hard strike and another small roach.  The next few put ins saw me striking at little knocks on the float and i was quite frankly shocked how a float as dotted down as mine was could not go under but could be teased to the point of going under, was madness.

I began to get to terms with the bites and in time i picked up that striking as soon as the float moved up down left or right was the key.  Getting the bread shipped out presented a whole new set of challenges and also taught me next time to spend time preparing the punch bread.

I got to grips with it and bites came every put in and as soon as they stopped i fed with another small nugget of feed and the bites came back.  I would say in total i was fishing bread for around a hour to hour and half and put together a respectable net of fish considering its a bait i do not really fish much and it certainly has given me confidence have another go.

well that concludes another angling blog i hope the weather is kind to you and your nets are wet over the coming week

danny

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