davidP

Big

Don't think that because the bed of the lake is gravel that it's a gravel pit. Many lakes have naturally occuring gravel whilst many gravel pits don't (because the gravel was dug out). To be honest I think the gravel pit term is a bit pointless these days - it's just a manmade lake. [ 15. June 2003, 12:03 PM: Message edited by: davidP ]

Personally I tried Vanish in 12lb & 15lb and would never use it again, and I believe others have found the same. There are plenty of other flurocarbons to try though.

Yummy - breakfast

Micro-pellets should work as it'll get the fish grubbing round in the mud to find them and so they'll last longer

Funny you should mention that one - I read it just last week. The whole series are very good.

It's even better if you select zoom from the shockwave menu and then run it!

I thought the PC recharged the battery while it was turned on. Anyway, if it's losing time while it's turned on then I doubt it's the battery as the battery is only there to maintain the clock whilst it's turned off. My best guess is that when you go online your PC is synching itself to an online clock somewhere. Check out your ISP/homepage to see if they have that option and then you should be able to work out how to stop it (or get them to reset their clock). [ 14. June 2003, 09:23 AM: Message edited by: davidP ]

Yes, but when was the last time anybody paid rrp for fishing tackle. Most companies seem to calculate the cost then double it for the rrp so that tackle shops can sell them seemingly with a huge discount yet still make a profit. It also appears that many pole makers don't think they'll get taken seriously if they don't have a top-of-the-range product costing thousands. Wonder how many they actually sell?

Posted yesterday on the BBC News site: http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/sci/tech/2987682.stm quote: The UK Fisheries Minister, Elliot Morley, said: "The fishing industry have to recognise that there's a problem, and they're simply not doing that at the moment. Elliot dear boy, you have the power to start the solution at a stroke. You just don't have the guts or political bottle to do it! quote: "It's disappointing there's no upturn in stocks. If the advice suggests it's as bad as this, we cannot ignore it." Just how many more warnings do they need? Did anybody really think the measures they'd put in place would make a difference? Wanna bet that they cannot ignore it?

Didn't think I'd better put this on themain board, but it's too good not to share

You see John the public figure. He's making TV programs & writing books & articles. They're about him fishing. Difficult not to be the centre of attention really. I've been fortunate to fish with him a few times around the world and I've got to say that he's an extremely nice chap and one of the best anglers you will ever meet. His work rate whilst fishing is absolutely phenomenal - that's why he puts fish on the bank more than most. He has his opinions, and he's not slow to put them forward (particularly when he's had a drink), but that's no different to many other people. He just happens to be a bit famous and so they get noticed more. [ 11. June 2003, 11:23 PM: Message edited by: davidP ]

Shatterford Lakes & Country Park has a Wildlife park, farm animals and the like for kids as well as good fishing (both coarse & trout). It's just north of Kidderminster on the Bridgenorth road (A442)

Damn - that's my evening lost! Hope they're not counting!

That's exactly how we found Big Momma - heron got scared by the Wife coming home and dropped the fish in it's attempted to get out fast. Sadly she was too far gone by that point to survive (the fish not the Wife).

That's a very good point Newt. I sometimes lose sight of that as I tend to be dealing with DBs that are at the larger end (currently working on a 500+ table Oracle DB that doesn't look like a desgner ever got near it - the perils of design driven by project budgets rather than a unified approach!)

Sorry DG, couldn't let this one pass without comment. The vast majority of clubs are run entirely correctly and above board. Most committee members put far more into the club then they get out and for very little thanks at the end of the day - normally just abuse. Never forget that the committee are elected by the members to run the club on their behalf. It is down the the members themselves to decide and vote on how much 'control' they give the committee and how much the committee must come back to the membership to make decisions. In my experience you have to trust the committee to do the day to day running without getting every decision rubber-stamped. If you insist on everything going back to a member meeting nothing ever gets done. The problems come because there are always one or two members who know better than everybody else how to run the club but rather than stand for election they just spend their time sniping and criticising from the safety of the floor. There are sadly far more of these than there are 'Little Hitlers' on committees. As for financial reports, you have to remember that these are normally being produced by enthusiastic amateurs. This is because to get it done properly would cost you several hundreds of pounds and your chances of getting that kind of bill passed the membership are remote. I was fortunate to have some experience doing accounts for my own company and to have the assistance of a qualified accountant and auditor who would do a legally binding annual report for the AGM for the price of membership card. Yet every year the same faces at the AGM would query every last detail working on the assumption that they knew better than the accountant! Running an angling club is a thankless task, You'd be hard pressed to find an unpaid post in which you will be endlessly criticised, moaned at and castigated more than by a bunch of anglers worried where their £20 has gone. Some anglers seem to believe that because they've paid their £20 for a ticket this entitles them to be extremely abusive to people who do a job that they wouldn't dream of doing themselves and when more often than not they only know part of the story. And God help you if you claim any expenses from the club - to some members that makes you litte more than a thief. Quite why anybody ever takes the job on I'll never know - I did it for 5 years (personally costing me several thousand pounds over the period in lost income, mileage etc), but in the end the constant sniping, criticism and 'I know best' attitude of a small percentage of the membership drove me out and I won't be doing it again.

Yes they do (pharyngeal), some of them quite ferocious (NEVER put you finger down a chubs throat!). But they are throat teeth i.e. they're right at the back of the mouth. This means to use them the fish has to manoeuver whatever it's trying to eat right to the back of it's mouth, so unless it will fit in it's mouth it can't use them.

Agree entirely about the tigerfish - they take a chunk out and then finish off the prey at their leisure. Much the same for piranha, but in the UK we simply don't have fish with that find of dentistry. I seriously doubt that any UK freshwater fish could do much damage to a recently dead large fish - they'd simply have to wait for it to decompose a bit. I suppose they may be able to have a go at the fins, but what would they get hold of on the rest of the fish to get any kind of leverage to break bits off. Possibly the only one with a chance would be the eel as they have small teeth, but even those are grippers rather than cutters.

Gaffer I'm not a DB designer, but I test a lot of DB based systems and so tend to see the results of poor design a lot. Where many people go wrong with DB design I think is they leap in and try and make it do everything they can ever think of rather then ensuring that it does the 5 or 6 things they really want well. You need to sit down and look at your data and decide exactly how you want it. Which are the key fields that you may want to search or sort on regularly? How much space do you need for each field? Do you want large text fields or do you want them broken down into smaller lumps etc etc. Getting this right before you start will potentially save you a huge amount of time later on. Then you could look at setting up some of the fields with drop-down lists ie aircraft model, airfield etc. This may not be important to start with, but as it grows it will really help if you can impose rules up front that will keep the data consistant, remove mispellings etc. I had a quick look at the data you quoted and came up with the following fields: Crash date Crash time Crash site Latitude Longditude Aircraft Model Registration Unit Airfield Operation Crash description Aircrew - Surname - Forename - Rank - Serial No. - Crew position (ie captain, navigator, gunner etc) - Date of birth - Date of death - Where buried - Father - Mother - Notes You could also add a further section giving details of any digs/recoveries that were done, retrieved artifacts etc. Not sure if you're into that bit or not. [ 08. June 2003, 06:43 PM: Message edited by: davidP ]

Simple answer I think is no - they don't have cutting teeth with which to bite out lumps. I would suspect that until it has broken down a bit and the various insects and the like have started to break it up then they won't be able to deal with it. Once it's started to decompose then they can start to break bits off by sucking, shaking, bumping etc.

I'd have thought that if you're fishing in open water with few snags and the fish don't go much about 12lb or so you'd be OK. 5lb or 6lb hook length however is perhaps a little bit light for a 2.5lb rod, so if you've got snags or a good chance of a bigger fish then a heavier hooklength & mainline may be in order. Personally I've seldom fished with less than 12lb mainline on a 2.5b rod.

If you're new to the pole then I'd suggest fairly long as it'll be easier to control - 4 to 6 feet perhaps. Any shorter and you'll risk tangles when shipping or struggle to keep the float in place particularly when windy. A lot of anglers seem to think that short line is what you need to do, but I always perferred a longer line, particularly on clear water. It really depends on two things though - how deep is the water and how many pole sections you intend to land the fish on (ie how many sections are you using when you physically land the fish). The key is to make your whole rig just slightly shorter that the length of the top sections. If you're intending to land the fish on the top 3 then make the rig that length, if it's the top two then make it that length etc etc. This is so that you can swing the fish to hand comfortably, or land then using the landing net without struggling to get or keep the fish in range because the line is too short or too long. It's this that will then determine the distance between pole tip and float. If your rig is 9 feet and the water is 6 feet then you'll have 3 feet between tip and float, if it's 3 feet deep you'll have 6 feet etc etc. Don't be afraid to add an extra section to the playing length just to give yourself more line. Hope that all made sense

So if the average German can do it (on mostly two lane motorways) why can't we? As I understand it the number of unrestricted motorways left in Germany is being slowly reduced. Why can the Germans do it when we can't? Simple answer I'd guess is that they're used to it and maintain lane discipline. After a couple of times pulling out in front of a Merc doing 120mph I'd guess that both drivers would have it reinforced that lane discipline was important. In the UK, where all 3 lanes are often travelling at fairly similar speeds, people simply can't be bothered to maintain lane discipline. If they can see a slower vehicle inside them, even if it's on the horizon, then it's far too much effort to pull in and then pull out again when they reach it - they might after all lose their spot in the traffic queue and have to go to the effort of indicating and looking in their mirrors! There also isn't the potential differetial in speeds because even on empty motorways the number of cars that want to do more than 90 is not actualy that great, so you're unlikely to hit the 50+mph differential that's possible on an autobahn and acts as a tremendous reason to keep in the correct lane. As a result of this lack of discipline many UK motorways are effectively turned into dual carriageways simply because the middle lane drivers effectively block off the inside lane. This means the overtaking lane is restricted to the speed of the slowest car, and if the middle lane is doing 70 then that probably means 75 and hence all the bunching and sudden jams that occur in the outside lane as the faster cars have to slow down.

Access is a good tool for this, and it shouldn't be that difficult to set up a basic searchable database. There are some very good MS Access guide books available - may be worth a trip down the library or local bookshop/Amazon to see what's available.