Steve Walker

Wickwater, on the South Cerney ticket. Main lake, not the carp puddles. http://www.scac.org.uk/Galleries/wickmain.asp [ 27. June 2005, 05:31 PM: Message edited by: Steve Walker ]

I'm tempted to go back tonight after work. Not sure SWMBO will be impressed, though, I think she might be hoping for a trip to the cinema...

Ken, you're right, and maybe the only way to get people to pay for such a body is by compulsion. I think we'd get better value, though, putting the money into our own organisations to give them the clout to fight our corner.

I've got some fantastic places to fish now, living in Wiltshire, but I grew up around Manchester. We did find places where we could stalk fish, though; there was a disused stretch of gin clear canal where you could see big shoals of good sized roach (which only one of us ever caught one of. I met up with a childhood fishing mate last year, and we both agreed that the lad who claimed it found it dying...) There were also big shoals of gudgeon visible, which we did catch. The two other waters where we caught fish we could see, I should probably be ashamed of... One was a duck pond in a park which was full of enormous bread-fed roach. We used to take turns with one rod and then scarper when the parkie turned up. The other was a club water we tried to poach We got caught and chucked off, but the sight of the fish in the clear water prompted us to go to the next meeting and join up. Shortly afterwards the pillock of a chairman decided to rip out all of the waterlillies, and within a few weeks the water was green. Point is, fishing is what you make it.

Had my first tench session of the season today. When I arrived, I immediately noticed something odd about my favourite swim. Something familiar was missing. Suddenly, it came to me; no bivvies! Thanking the ghost of Izaak I parked up, grabbed the swim and tackled up. It was still late afternoon, a bit early for tench, but there were a few promising bubbles. The water was gin clear, which worried me, but warm. Not much weed growth yet either. The thing I like about the swim is that there's about 8 feet of water under the rod tip, perfect for float fishing the margins. I suspect the thing the carp lads like about it is that it's wide and flat, ideal for camping, and they can park ten feet from the water, because they usually sit there belting leads out into the middle of the lake. Feeding hemp and maggots and fishing two worms on a size 8, I soon started to get puzzing bites. The float would disappear at speed, pulling the line to the rod tip, but each time I struck at nothing. After a few of these, I decided it was probably small perch grabbing the end of the worm, and that perhaps they should be taught a lesson. Out came the match rod, 2lb line, barbless 16 and two maggots. First cast, the float slipped under, I struck, and... Well, you can probably guess. I was taught a lesson by a large tench which charged unstoppably around the swim before shedding the hook. Back to the heavy gear and as the evening came the bubbling became more and more violent. Eventually the float twitched a couple of times and sunk, and the strike met something solid. A 5lb 12oz tench, three quarters of a pound over my best. As I contemplated how a round six would have somehow been more satisfying I hit another. This fought like a demon and pulled the scales round to 6lb 4oz. Two PBs in an evening! Finally tally when fading light stopped play was three tench between 5lb 6oz and 5lb 12oz and two of 6lb 4oz. For the first session of the season, that will do me. I wonder, though, whether there are many 7lbers in there?

Herbal something, anyway.

I can't find concrete figures for the enforcement costs of licenses, but a government document examining the possibility of introducing them in Scotland quotes 20%-25% on an income of about 18 million. So somewhere in the region of 4 million pounds. Total EA spending on fisheries for 2004 was about 29 million pounds, with 18 million of that coming from license sales, 10 million coming from direct government aid and the source of the remaining 1 million unclear. It was lumped in with the licensing receipts, and I'm not sure where they get it from. Those sound like big numbers. Let's put them in context. The Arts Council for England has been allocated a budget of 410 million pounds for 2005/6. That's just a single source of arts funding. In 1996, total public grants to the performing arts alone were estimated at over 450 million pounds. Over the past four years the government has given 60 million pounds to the Football Foundation to fund grass roots football. I could spend more time fishing for other figures, but you get the idea, and I'm shortly off to fish for tench instead. Bottom line is that we're getting a raw deal. Our sport is a net contributor to government spending, when other interests are net recipients. That's why I think that licenses are cheeky. [ 26. June 2005, 03:17 PM: Message edited by: Steve Walker ]

Hmm. I still think the whole concept is cheeky. The recreational fishery doesn't *need* managing, it needs leaving alone. It strikes me that expecting anglers to pay for the regulation of the commercial sector is like expecting birdwatchers to pay for the policing of the laws on egg collecting. Environmental protection (which includes managing sea fisheries sustainably) is a core responsibility of government which should be paid for out of general taxation. Attempting to recover from anglers the cost of protecting a natural resource from commercial exploitation is just plain wrong. Having said that I'm opposed to it in principle, I would support it in practice if I thought it would actually work. I suspect that it won't, it will just be another tax, and not a particularly cheap or efficient one to enforce.

What problems do we have which could be solved by the government spending some more money?

They don't. They want to eat them. It's just a loophole.

The trick is to set it overdepth. As the tackle settles, the float lies flat or half-cocked. You then tighten up until the float is set how you want it. You don't have to be at all accurate about the depth.

I'm not convinced that introducing a mandatory sea fishing tax would actually benefit us. I wonder how much of the EA rod licence fee is actually spent on improving the lot of anglers, once you've taken into account the cost of administering and policing it. I don't see that I get anything much for my coarse licence which is not anyway a core responsibility of government. We're entitled to expect that polluters will be brought to book, irrespective of whether we fish or not. I don't think that taxing us would get us any more say in policy making, either. Motorists pay a lot of tax, and it doesn't mean they get their own way on how it is spent or on transport policy. You can't buy influence by paying taxes. If we want to put something into our sport financially, our money would be more effectively spent on our pressure groups. Look at how much influence Transport 2000 has on transport policy compared to the millions of individual motorists. We need to put the money into lobbying MPs, blagging our way onto committees and quangos, high profile advertising campaigns and publicity stunts. We need people getting onto political television and radio programmes. We need to manage our media profile. In short, we need to hold our noses and be as cynical and self-interested as every other pressure group. It isn't democratic, but that's how single issue politics works in this country. It would certainly be more effective than handing over some more cash to the treasury.

That hurts; I was walking across a field on a little piece of the R.Mimram I used to rent and felt a pain on my inner thigh, it was enough to make me drop my keks right there in the middle of the field to investigate........and that was just one red ant that bit me.

You should be fine. There are places where it really matters, where you need to keep the feed as tight as possible and cast onto it, but most places a little bit of spread won't do any harm, IMO.

You can scale it down. I used to use it to fish tiny cubes of luncheon meat with a 2BB Drennan Dart shotted with one No.4 either side of the float and two No.4s a couple of inches from the hook. Doesn't cast very well, but this was a rod length out in about 10' of water. Used to get tench, carp, bream, stillwater chub and some very nice roach that way. The lift method generally doesn't work very well if the bottom isn't clean, in my experiance. I've given up with it on my favourite tench water because there's canadian pondweed on the bottom and I've found that the lift shot sinks the bait into it. Fishing slightly overdepth to the top of the weed (which is underdepth if you believe the plummet) with a more conventional shotting pattern works better, with the tell-tale shot just above the weed and the bait resting on top of it.

Also on a JW Avon. Neither of them huge, but it handles tench and barbel of that sort of size with plenty in reserve.

Casting accuracy isn't really the issue, though. It's no good being able to land a lead in a washing up bowl at 50 yards if you don't know where the bowl is! The point of marking the line is that you have a distance. With a land mark on the far bank you have a distance and an angle, and thus a point. When I've used a marker on the line, I've usually found that I'm more or less hitting it anyway, but that isn't accuracy, that's just casting a consistent distance in the same direction. I'm not convinced that I wouldn't otherwise gradually drift away from the original spot. It's only really a problem fishing with a feeder at distance on large featureless waters, IMO. If you're using a straight lead over groundbait the worst that will happen is that you won't be in quit the best spot. With a feeder, you're spreading feed over a wide area. When I used to do a lot of this kind of fishing, I sometimes used a carp rod with a marker float.

Nothing more annoying than thinking you've hit a decent tench, and it turning out to be a dirty carp...

And if you do leave the trebles on, crush the barbs flat.

You'd be surprised where you can find fish in those canals. Some years back I was involved in some survey netting of canals in the Birmingham area. A colleague was doing some research on the impact of zander on coarse fish, and muggins here agreed to help and ended up stood in a canal in February with a leaky dry suit. Anyway, what really surprised me was that the most impressive fish came from a really scruffy and relatively featureless bit of canal next to a flyover. Dog sh*t all over the banks and bikes and shopping trolleys in the water. Also big roach and bream, and plenty of them. Funny things, fish.

i am i but seeing the big chub got the better of me. I need to renew my club card, that gets me access to the river further downstream where there's more of it. And some cracking tench waters too, which might distract me from barbel hunting

For jungle swim chubbing, I keep it as simple as possible. Tie a hook to the end of the line. Attach another length of line as if I were creating a sliding stop knot, but only trim one end of it, leaving the other at about six inches to form the link. Pinch shots onto the link, done. I don't actually see that the running version using a swivel and a stop gives any real advantage, and it's just something else to snag. If I'm not seeing bites, or hooking deep, I slide the knot closer to the hook. I can clearly see the knocks from minnows worrying the bread, though. I think deep hooking with chub is more to do with the size of their gobs and the way they feed. They don't usually mouth a bait, it's devour and turn. Maybe some kind of bolt rig would be worth trying?

Grabbed a couple of hours on the upper Thames at Cricklade. One small chub of a couple of pounds on link legered breadflake. Not a sniff on my "special" cheese paste experiment, but then flake tends to outfish most things there. I've got plans to try to find barbel this Summer, but looking at the river I'm not confident. Not much depth, not much current, basically not much river. I've caught good barbel in rivers no wider, but they've had good flow and a bit of depth. Much of this is < 2 feet deep. Still, that's the landing net wetted.

My old marine biology lecturer told me they were fantastic sauteed in a bit of olive oil. This was in the minibus on the way back from a field trip, where we'd caught loads of them. He could have mentioned it earlier...

Southend Pier? Sure it wasn't the outflow at Sellafield? It hasn't done too badly for itself, mind.