Pangolin

I have Adaware and Spybot but my PC is plagued by popups, probably because of sites the kids have been visiting. I need a good, reliable and free download, sharp-ish, please!

Part of the fun of fishing, to outwit a wild creature and capture it.... Hmmm, but where are fish on the evolutionary scale? Not a very equal sort of competition really! Is it the romantic ideal of Hemingway's 'Old man and the sea'? Or are there really fishermen who credit these lowly creatures with having an intelligence to match their own? Give me a few tales of fish that show intelligence: I could still be convinced! I'd rather believe I had outwitted a pescatorial mastermind, honestly.....

Don't despair, Rob! I came back to coarse fishing after 30 years without wetting a line. Its not changed that much and its not very expensive either. I started off using my old rods but I just couldn't believe the contrast when I held a 13' carbon-fibre match rod at my local tackle-shop. You can pick up a half-decent match rod for about thirty quid and a carp rod for about the same. Those two rods will allow you to have a go at catching most coarse fish in the UK; yes, as you fish more, you will want to specialise more, but you don't have to buy all the kit to make a start. I resisted going the pole-route: I had some prejudice from my early fishing days when pole-fishing used to be seen as the way the continentals used to win international matches with netfuls of fingerlings. I still can't see why anyone would want to use a pole to catch any sort of specimen fish. Modern reels are no better than reels were thirty years ago, although the baitrunner switch is useful on a reel used to present static baits to big fish. I still use my ABU 505 for all of my floatfishing. The two biggest changes are knotless nets (landing and keep-nets), and not using lead shot. I actually think that, relatively speaking, tackle is very cheap these days. There is a lot of very cheap rubbish about, but that was always the case. A good tackle dealer is a good friend and source of advice on what to bother buying. Tight lines!

They do raise expectations in a very unrealistic way. When I was young, carp were revered as one of the hardest fish to catch and Richard Walker was an iconic figure. My first carp came from a commercial fishery and I thought Wow! I've caught my first ever carp! A trip to that same fishery, these days, can result in 15-20 carp in a single day. Its not very satisfying: as I play a fish in, I'm generally thinking Hmm, this one feels a bit smaller than the last one... But when I go to a wild lake, I find it difficult to sit and wait through blank days. I also find catching smaller fish much less of a pleasure than I used to. The way I've rediscovered thrill-fishing is to go after river barbel and, of course, pike. I can cope with the blanks when I'm after either of those.

Do we want a Fishing Show? I'd say yes Telling other people not to go won't help.... I was there, today, and I was disappointed in how much smaller the show was than the last time I visited. To me, the show didn't justify the ticket price and the (outrageous) parking charge. The blame has to be levelled at the NEC, themselves, for putting the show beyond reasonable pricing. I went to the first ever (I believe) show, at 'Gerry's of Wimbledon' in the 1970s: great memories! We just need a better venue for next year's show, a ticket price of a fiver and free car-parking. I bought a couple of new bite-alarms and a rig-holder today. Had I been in the market for a rod, I'd certainly have found one. Seat boxes seemed to be going for good prices too. I met John Wilson and Martin Bowler. Overall, it was a good, but pricey, day out.

I won't get back there before March 14th. How good is the fishing in the summer?

Well, I didn't buy the tench rod. I bought a Daiwa waggler rod and caught several tench. My confidence in the 'carp match' rod was misplaced. It was a Ron Thompson and it is a rod that does nothing well. I used to miss half of the bites I got, but changeing the rod cured that problem.

I know there are pike and carp in there. All three reservoirs are on John Bailey's favourite fisheries list. I chose Marsworth because it has some features. How would you advise fishing somewhere like Wilstone, where you are sat several feet up from water level, faced with acres of flat, featureless water? Would you just belt out a deadbait as far as you can and use a bite-alarm?

THe Pike Fishery at Eaton Bray is the moat you remember. Its still a very good pike fishery. Not sure why its closed, although there was a lot of ice there on Sunday.

My last couple of outings have been to Marsworth Reservoir, after pike. I've caught nothing, but that doesn't surprise me, because its a water that's new to me. I didn't see anybody else catch anything when I was there: most of the other pike anglers were fishing Startops. I was surprised to find people fishing for carp there in February. Has anyone had any success recently with carp or pike at any of the reservoirs? If so, would you share a few tips with a new visitor? My favoured pike fishery, Eaton Bray, is closed until March.

I put my first post on this forum, several years ago now, because I was having trouble unhooking pike that had completely swallowed my deadbaits. I had plenty of good advice from Peter Waller and others, about how to hold the pike and, if necessary, tackle the unhooking problem through the gill cover. Argyll sent me some fantastic back-to-back double hooks, with a small babed hook for the bait, mated to a larger barbless hook for the fish. I used these and never had any trouble unhooking pike. But this year, I lost the last of those hooks. Not wishing to give up on pike-fishing, I went to my tackle shop and bought some standard barbless snap-tackles. I felt confident that I was pretty good with pike, these days. Last outing, I had a run on a float-legered smelt at dusk. When I tightened the line, I realised it was around the rod-rest and, in the fading light, it took me about thirty seconds to get it free and take up the slack line. The pike, weighing about four pounds, had swallowed the bait so deep that, pulling gently on the trace as I had been advised to do, I could only just see the top of the top treble. I tried everything I knew, but with the fish out of water for too long already, I gave up and cut the trace. It might have been kinder to kill the fish. Anyway, so I'm back to where I was, several years ago. I'm not going fishing for pike again until I can feel confident that a fish death won't be the outcome. Argyll is, sadly, no longer with us. I need to find somebody who can get hold of, or make, back-to back double hooks for me. Snap tackles just seem barbaric. Can anybody help?

Do the numbers beside the processes show which ones are currently running? If so, the 'system idle' process is the only one which is doing much...

Steve, its been a couple of years since I went to your fish-in, but I'd love to go again. The date seems promising and if I get it onto the calendar early enough, I might manage it this year. Save me a provisional place please.

There's lots of processes running! How do I decide which I want and which I don't want? iTunes, for example, which I use very rarely....

Let us know how it goes, Jim! That part of the world is where I used to fish as a teenager: Longham, Throop and Sturminster Marshal, mainly. I'll never forget piking at Sturminster with lures and landing a 12lb salmon.

Each time I switch on my PC, everything seems to happen more slowly. I had been blaming Norton, with their 'live update', but having looked at the memory space occupied by my daughter's SIMS 2 game, I wonder if its that? She typically assembles some house and populates it with a family, saving her efforts after each go. Could this be my problem? I'm talking about, for example, the time between my desktop appearing on the screen and being able to click on any of the icons...

Thanks! All I have to do now is discipline myself not to open the old account

I'm checking the prices of going wireless. I'm on Orange for my broadband and I've been told that the Belkin modem router works well with this network. PC world gave me a quote of £195: Comet said it would cost £70 plus whatever adaptors I needed for the computers. Orange offer a device called 'livebox', which they supply and which apparently gives wireless broadband to six computers, for £20 per month. I currently pay about £18 per month, so its easy maths to say the livebox makes financial sense. I've yet to find somebody who uses one though...

Well, I've taken Jim's advice and opened my Googlemail account. It looks good so far and I've managed to switch addresses for my important websites too. One question to the Googlemail regulars: Where is the addressbook?

I'm a regular contributor to Proboards: the mistake you're making is to put www. before the address! All Proboards are http://nameofboard.proboards...com

I'm really glad I posted the topic now: what a fascinating reply! From the pictures, it looks as though the trees used to grow a lot closer to the water than today. It now looks more like a landing-strip for seaplanes. Budgie, which stretch is the free-fishing part of the river? I might feel a bit less 'on show' there...

Good pike fishing to be had at the Park Farm Fishery, Eaton Bray, in Bedfordshire. Its a nice, small horseshoe lake, with an excellent tackle shop on site.

I was there with the family, a couple of weekends ago, and I was surprised to see that it's possible to fish that long straight strip of water in the grounds I wonder what might be in there? Has anyone fished it? I'm just curious because, even if its a good fishing water, I doubt I could be the miserable old git fishing while tourists from all over the world strolled by taking pics of the fantastic scenery!

I'm no expert on either the region or on the type of fishing, but I would recommend the Moccas Fishery at Bredwardine as particularly beautiful. People were catching chub and barbel on the days I was there, even though I blanked. The Red Lion Hotel, which issues the day-tickets, is well worth a visit too.

Hi Budgie, I had a hard time with this messageboard refusing to recognise me for a while, so I gave up on it, temporarily. Now I've sorted my login problems, its good to see some of the old hands, such as yourself and Peter are still churning out the replies! I've become a bit set in my ways, catching carp on floating bread all summer and pike on float-legered smelt all winter. I recently visited the Moccas fishery on the river Wye, for a complete change, trying to catch barbel. It wasn't successful but there can be few more beautiful places on Earth.