Steve Walker

Heh, *these* are tench. Well, perhaps the occasional carp noses in on the scene, judging by the amount of disturbance created, although the tench are known to run almost to double figures, so maybe not. We're talking large dense patches of tiny bubbles, slowly wandering.

I've had similar problems with tench this season. The water has been gin clear, and although I've had masses of bubblers, bites have been harder to come by. I've been float fishing 5lb line straight through to a size 8 with two or three medium sized worms; not lobs. Feeding red maggot and hemp and some brown crumb. What I've found is that I get finicky bites which are hard to hit until the light starts to fade, when they become much more confident. Switching to double maggot on light tackle gets hittable bites very quickly, but the fish are mostly 5.5 to 6.5 pounds in heavy weed, and you just can't stop them weeding you on that gear. Bunches of maggots on the heavy gear work no better than worms. It would appear that either they are tackle shy because of the clear water, or else they are so preoccupied with the particles that anything else is ignored or treated with suspicion. I've seen this happen under clear-water conditions before, and along with the improvement as light levels fall, that makes me suspect that it's the tackle. I suppose hair-rigging might work, or trying some of these new fangled high-tech hooklength materials. I'm just hoping for a bit more colour in the water.

I can think of two waters I used to fish where you could get the fish 'boiling' like this; one was a club lake where you could fish caster on a short pole to hand for perch and roach, the other a park lake where hemp and tares did the trick at about 9-10m on a short line. The advantage with the short line was that the takes were usually self-hookers. It was on the club lake where I released a perch, flicked the bait out again, and watched the perch swim out and immediately grab the same bait. Not the brightest of fish!

I caught my first ever carp on floating crust, on a family holiday to Devon. Fantastic! It's still my favourite way of catching carp.

I think I might print the replies to this topic off, and pin it up where my wife can see it

Interesting you should say that. The problem started with a duff battery, and I assumed that it was just insufficient power to retract the lens. When I put new ones in, I expected it to work properly again, but it didn't. I've tried toggling between the landscape and macro functions to no avail. It looks OK on the LCD display, but the images are too small to see that they're blurred. They look sharp enough if I scale them down to 100px wide...

Exactly: http://www.thamesweb.com/page.php?page_id=...&topic_id=8

Exactly. There was a snag-free reservoir I used to fish where it was very common to get double figure carp in on light match tackle, so long as you had enough line; no snags, if it wants to run, let it.

Or, as I did the other night, butcher some tubular catapult elastic. Funny, I'm sure I've always had loads of unused silicon tube knocking around my tacklebox, the one time I want some...

My instinct is to take it apart myself, but I should probably take it to a camera shop.

Yes, a lot of us still do! In general it seems that those of us who come from a light line background are more inclined to backwind. Many of us find that the inertia in getting the clutch to start slipping is a particular problem with light lines, there being little margin for error here. That's about right. I use the clutch on heavy gear, for light fishing I backwind. Most of my light fishing is done with an old Daiwa closed face reel, and if something takes off too fast to backwind I can release the handle and brake the reel by applying pressure to the (screwed down tight) clutch knob opposite the handle. Probably hard to see what I mean if you haven't used that design of CF.

Seemed to work OK the other night. The orange ones are quite dim, mind. Bright enough to see easily, but they vanish when submerged. Had an enormous lift bite from a skimmer and got the effect of the light appearing to double as it was separated from its reflection.

I tried using a large orange starlight on a float the other evening, and it worked pretty well. Better than the smaller, brighter, green ones.

Mini-starlights fit, you just need to apply a little brute force and ignorance.

It's Kodak DX4900. The lens has extruded itself to its full extent, and won't retract, as if you have tried to zoom in on something as far as it will go. When you turn the camera off, it should retract back into the body and a cover should flip over it, but it doesn't even do that. It just makes a quiet whirring noise and gives up.

I feel as if I have; last night, and heavily. Didn't touch a drop. Banging headache, sweating and shivering. Summer cold, I expect. I wish they wouldn't put the warning about Weil's disease so prominently in the clubcard, it's giving me hypochondria.

My beginner mate caught his first ever freshwater fish last night, a nice tench. He now has a full understanding of the function of a reel's clutch. I think in future, if I'm showing someone how to fish, I'll explain how to play a fish *before* the situation arises Unfortunately, the optical zoom on my digicam has given up the ghost, and the photos are, well, take a look: Lake 63 Iain's tench (not weighed, somewhere between 4 and 5lb) My tench (5 3/4lb) Gutted. They looked OK on the camera.

I used to have a pike, and it would spend hours motionless, with only the gills and the eyes moving. Ambush predator, innit.

If I had to fish in the middle of the day, I'd go for the river every time. They seem to suffer less from "afternoon swim death".

Mine too. Must take steps to remedy that this season.

Common sense to the rescue!

If I remember correctly, the mutation was noticed and cultivated in Germany (hence the japanese 'doitsu' for a mirror-scaled koi). I wonder how often it occurs spontaneously, though, and whether all mirror / leather scaled carp are descended from that German strain. If you're right that the N gene carries some kind of fitness penalty (and it clearly does, in that NN is lethal, taking out a quarter of the offspring of an Nn x Nn cross), you would expect it to be selected out in wild populations. I would guess that it continues to exist either because the heterozygote confers some advantage (as in sickle cell anaemia, where the heterozygote gets some resistance to malaria) or else it occurs spontaneously reasonably often.

Oh yes, forgot the beachcaster, most recent purchase, too! It's a 13' Daiwa SuperCast. Best fished with an 8oz grip lead and a hair-rigged boilie Well, that's what it sounds like the carp boys are using, anyway...

I'm just trying to remember what rods I've got. Not many, these days. An 11' JW Avon/quiver which I reckon accounts for at least 80% of my fishing. A 13' Browning match rod which accounts for most of the other 20%. An 11m Browning pole, which I haven't used for about two years. A 9'/6' Silstar quivertip which has seldom been used since I bought the JW. A spinning rod which gets occasional use for perch/chub/pike on the river. A lovely but ridiculously fragile 11' Harrison canal rod. It weighs 4 1/8 oz and has a very delicate spliced tip. There's a design flaw in that the blank is too thin where the tip is spliced. The first tip was replaced under warranty, the second I repaired myself and cocked up; it droops very slightly. Still fishes OK though. I reckon I've used the rod maybe 10 or 15 times in 15 years.

I once went to a conference in Finland on the ecology of percid fishes. A friend was presenting a paper on the impact of zander on cyprinid populations in the Birmingham canals. The non-UK delegates thought the whole concept was weird, because they were all coming at it from the "managing the zander fishery" point of view, and fretting about worthless inedible bait fish seemed perverse.