The Flying Tench

Why not just take a camera with flash and a torch?

How can you tell that the pics are Northern Pike and not Muskies? Am I right that the big Northern Pike are found in the colder parts of USA? Is it the same with Muskies?

Ah! Our local angling club lakes are open this close season for the first time, and I was thinking of having a crack at the pike. I read an article saying that spring was a good time for lure fishing. But you've made me think. When is the period you wouldn't fish for pike? Maybe the month of March?

An amazing story! What was going on in that pike's head? Sounds as daft as my dog!

Certainly is - I've had 3 PB's in the last 6 weeks! C. AHEM! Yes, Monsieur Plumb, I have been watching your results on Elton's Blog site, and if I may say so they have been INDECENT! If this was golf it would unquestionably have cost you a few rounds of drinks in the clubhouse. Count yourself lucky it's not practicable to send drinks to 1,500 anglers! (Though maybe someone has some suggestions on that score?) Well done, of course!

Leon, re the last comment in your article about throwing bricks into the water, you ask if anyone has tried it. I heard a talk by a matchman (forget his name) where he had an angling match with a friend on a London canal. His supposed handicap was to throw a few bricks in at the start. Predictably he won the match, and believed that the bricks helped because the fish so associated the noise with balls of groundbait.

This is a topic on which there seems to be contradictory evidence, and I wonder whether pike are different from the other species? In a recent post by Andy MacFarlane he recommends using a Mepps Number 1 for big perch, in a particular lake context, to avoid spooking them (with the splashing of a bigger lure). But Peter Waller, recently, mentioned a shallow stretch of water where he sometimes needs to thrash it with a lure for half an hour before the pike show an interest! I've had a little experience of both. There's a bridge on the Kennet where I used to cast out a floating diver plug (or wobbled deadbait), let it float down with the current under the bridge, and retrieve. It was a good hotspot, where I often caught something in the first couple of casts, but after a quarter of an hour, if I'd had nothing, I never cauught - even though there was a a fair bit of water to explore under the bridge. In this case I don't think the splashing was a problem - it was either that they were spooked by a suspicious lure being retrieved a few times, or maybe they saw me as the water was quite shallow - though I doubt that was a problem for the further parts of the water. For evidence the other way I went pike fishing with a friend to a very clear pool yesterday where we could see a reasonable pike lying in the water only 20feet from where we were. My friend had a float tackle with Lamprey section from fishing a different pool, and kept trying to cast it so it would trot right next to the pike, but kept getting it a bit out, partly because of the funny current. It kept landing with a great splash only a few feet from the pike (in 2 feet of water), but the beast ignored it entirely. It was as if it was completely asleep. Maybe it would have been different if it had been a wobbled fish? It certainly wasn't spooked. In the end it landed in the right place and trotted just a few inches from the pike's nose, and it followed it, took the bait - and got off, not being hooked properly! Are pike less easily spooked than other predators? Or is it a question of the different states of mind they happen to be in at different times? And what spooks them most? A suspicious lure, plus maybe the line going by? The splashing on the surface? Or the sight of the angler?

Typo by me. I meant to say 1.5lb perch - but you got my message fine, Andy. Interesting point about whether perch can run down a small roach on the basis of speed alone. There's a weirpool near me where the perch's main diet seems to be dace and gudgeon. Actually, that's assumption by me. There are a lot of small dace and gudgeon, which coincides with big perch - and there's little weed for ambushes. I can't imagine the gudgeon are very fast, but the dace are. I should have fished on after catching the perch last week. It would have been interesting to see if the roach bites stopped after the perch arrived.

IMHO I'd start with maggot, preferably on a river. You get less bites in winter, so for a first session to build confidence that there are fish around you want a bite-producer, that any fish will take - and that means maggot. I'm not saying it's always the best bait - obviously that will vary from water to water - but, if in doubt start with maggot.

Andy, it was helpfull to give the figure of 15 - 25 feet between the shoal and the big perch. Thinking about the waters in my area, though, where small roach and gudgeon are likely to be a bigger part of the big perch's diet than small perch, I wondered if the same phenomenon would apply to shoals of roach. For example, I was into a shoal of small roach ledgering on the river last week on maggot. I did end up picking up a 1.5lb roach, but I wonder if I'd tried casting 20feet downstream of the shoal if that would have been where more biggies were lurking?

I've been thinking a bit more about the way you locate the perch shoals with a worm rather than maggot, presumably with no loose feed. The gravel pits in Newbury where I am have a reasonable perch population, but I don't think it's exceptional - probably fairly typical for gravel pits. They've all got carp in, which means there's a degree of colour in the water. If I wandered round with a worm it would take an age to find the shoal. I've much more confidence it would work spraying maggot. Even on the canal or river I've a feeling I'd find them better with maggot, and I can imagine finding the edge of the shoal quite well that way, and then using spinning (or worm?) for the bigguns. Even if they started getting too enthusiastic to the extent of spooking the bigger fish, surely, if I stopped loose feeding, wouldn't that handle it?

Kind of you Chris. I like asking questions all the time. Annoyed the teachers at school, and makes me a highly irritating person in normal life i do assure you!

What do you mean by that? Do you just mean you choose your swim carefully? Or do you keep moving till you find a shoal?

Does this also apply in gravel pits where there might not be such features? And does it suggest that, when fishing in winter, our approach shouldn't be to sit at a peg and loose feed in the hope of attracting the fish, but should be a more roving approach till we find the shoal?

Just to say there's a very interesting article on spinning for perch by Andy Mcfarlane under the size of fish in a shoal thread. Thought I'd flag it up so lure anglers don't miss it.

Fascinating stuff, Andy, but a few questions: Big perch are loners? I'm surprised, as you hear of bags of 2lb+ fish, and I read an article recently suggesting they'd all crowd under one bush together in winter. But that was about rivers. Is your article more about lakes? Size 1 Mepps. This sounds incredibly small. I find even a size 3 can attract quite small fish. Also a size one has little weight for casting. Can you comment more on this. Doing away with snap-link swivels - makes a lot of sense what you say, but I'm surprised not to hear it from other lure anglers. Do others agree? Despite my queries I found this a fascinating article. I've done OK spinning for perch on canals, but I've been hopeless in gravel pits. This gives me impetus to have a crack at my local gravel pits. Thanks!

Is it on A.N. Andy? Had a quick look and couldn't find it.

Thanks, Leon. But come summer what happens? Presumably the fish split up into their year groups again? And when you groundbait an area, presumably you sometimes attract more than one shoal, which is when you get more variety in size of fish?

Peter, presumably you are mobile when lure fishing, so how do you introduce the ultrabite?

Interesting. But how do the bigger fish get in the shoal in the first place? Do the shoals combine? On the question of 'shoaling up' I read in an article on perch recently that, in the winter the fish shoal up so some areas of river have no fish at all as they'll be concentrated under (eg) a particular bush. Doesn't that imply a joining up of shoals? Or maybe the shoal was just split up in the summer?

I'm ordering some Abu Atoms from Denmark for Budgie and me, as they're no longer available in UK. There's a £40 minimum order, but then they don't charge postage, so anyone wanting a few might find this an opportunity. For details of what the company stock click the Grejonline link on Steve Burke's post of 16 Dec in the Pike and Soft Plastic Lures thread (last post 2nd Jan). Let me know any requirements by the weekend, please.

Do you really need such light line and small hooks for grayling? Wouldn't a 16 hook and 2 or 3 maggots on 3 or 4lb line be OK? I'm no expert on this. What do others think?

I get the impression that many shoals contain fish of roughly the same size, although perch shoals seem to have more variation than roach shoals. But in a fishing session an angler may well get a bag of fish with quite a size variation, eg roach or perch from a couple of ounces to a pound or even two. Why is this? Does the groundbait etc attract several distinct shoals which separate afterwards? Do shoals join up at certain times of the year? People talk about fish 'shoaling up' in January and February, but surely they are in shoals throughout the year. Does 'shoaling up' refer to small shoals combining?

I used a telescopic at one stage for spinning. Mine was too floppy for casting big Lures, but it was certainly useful when I wanted to visit a few different hotspots to be able to put it in the boot of the car made up.