ColinW

I think you'll find worms don't like being chucked in a bucket of sawdust whether there are maggots in it or not!

I've eaten freshwater fish from Lake District waters and Scottish lochs. In these places, where the water is clean enough to consider eating the fish, coarse fish are simply not valued. In fact they are often regarded as vermin. The Freshwater Biological Association netted and trapped perch and pike in Windermere by the thousands for decades without seriously affecting their numbers, so anglers taking the odd one for the pan are unlikely to do much to stocks in this type of water.

I'm not saying that this method CAN'T be done reasonably safely, even though I'd never do it. What worries me is that kids see it done successfully and try to copy it without giving it any thought. They see a picture like the one further up, peg a big pike bung on their line, tie a big lead on the end, add a dropper hooklength and away they go!

Carrying a knife with a blade longer than three inches WITHOUT GOOD REASON can lead to a prison term up to four years. British police have no more common sense than any other police when it comes to accepting what constitutes a "good reason", so play safe and carry a smaller one! It's ironic that a friend of mine who worked in a casualty department said that some of the worst injuries he saw were caused by short bladed modelling knives. The delightful kids who used them wedged a piece of matchstick between two blades because the resulting parallel cuts were impossible to stitch up without bad scarring.

It's not what the fish gets left with that is the problem, it's what gets left in the water i.e. a float, a length of line and a big lead.

Just look at all the floats bobbing around near lily pads, reedbeds, trees and whatever waiting to anchor some passing duck and it becomes pretty obvious why it's banned! If I'm playing a carp I don't want six feet of line and a dirty great weight being dragged around the bottom behind the fish, it's almost asking to get snagged up.

Boats that have been standing in one place for a long time always look bad. Get it out on the water and when the sun and spray start hitting it from different angles most of the horrible black stuff just dissappears.

If you read that article it is quite clear that the commercial fishermen are not really concerned about "endangered" stocks, that's why they refer to them as "valuable" stocks. By this they mean valuable TO THEM personally, not as a national asset of some sort. Their real concern is that every fish taken by a charter boat is a fish they could have caught and sold. As always they regard fish as THEIR property, hence their absolute hatred of the "stakeholders" concept! They are also upset because all those charter boats drifting around over the banks simply get in their way. Even if the charter boats were catching nothing, the trawlers wouldn't want them there. Maybe commercial fishing is something best done without witnesses?

The result pleased sea fisheries officer Roger Sendall, who was at the hearing. ‘It sends a message out that we are serious about protecting our waters and anyone caught fishing without a licence will be brought before the court.’ Scuttle his boat to make an artificial reef. That might send a clearer message!

I wouldn't bother greasing the ball itself. Just make sure the catch mechanism is greased. What is important is to grease the wheel bearings. You'll have to buy a grease gun to pump it into them.

I have noticed that the food fashion gurus (TV chefs) now tend to use cuts from bigger bass, rather than whole small fish, so maybe the message is finally getting through. On the subject of supermarket meat, what really annoys me is the way they inject even raw meat with water. It was bad enough injecting ham and bacon with brine and calling it "wet curing" (try telling a Spaniard that the rubbish we get is ham!) but injecting beef, pork and even chicken is just downright criminal. It has nothing to do with improving the product and everything to do with selling us water. It's not just meat either. Buy a bag of frozen prawns from the supermarket and let them thaw out without opening the bag. You'll end up with more water than prawns.

Did you see the video posted on the Sea Fishing section last summer? I seriously doubt whether you could maintain that level of "pull" for that length of time sitting on a kayak. You could end up in hospital! Sit on your yak in the back garden and see if you can hold a half sack of cement off the ground for an hour, hanging of the end of a broomstick. That should tell you! (You might also need a second yak for the anchor rope) Good luck anyway, can't wait to see the photos.

Join the People's Front for the Liberation of Lobsters! The only people we hate more than lobster fishermen are the f*****g Lobster Liberation Front.

This datasheet might be of interest. http://www.farnell.com/datasheets/26929.pdf The most important graph is probably the one showing "depth of discharge" (DOD) cycles, basically their useful lifetime. If you run them down to 100% DOD the number of discharge-recharge cycles is almost a factor of ten lower than if you only discharge them by 30%. (Also bear in mind that this data sheet is for batteries DESIGNED for deep cycling. Car or motor bike batteries, which are designed to be permanently almost fully charged will be much worse.)

Google the following "Atlantic Dawn" subsidy and you'll see just how much money a man can make given a government which is truly enthusiastic about bleeding the taxpayers! (The boat might be Irish but the money came out of OUR pockets).

Some great pictures on that kayakfishingstuff link, talk about everything but the kitchen sink! The one I like best though is this one Seems to have forgotten something.

I've never tried it but it seems to me you could probably just plug your battery into the cigarette lighter socket in your car (make sure you get the polarity right!). Probably be charged up by the time you got home.

Nature decided bass should grow to double figures for a good reason. I don't pretend to know what that reason is. The scientists reckon that one reason the cod have never reappeared on the Grand Banks off Nova Scotia, despite ten years without commercial fishing, is because without big cod to eat them, other smaller species that eat cod eggs and fry have flourished. Even though there are a few breeding sized cod about, not enough fry survive to replenish the stocks. There is also the fact that spawning success rates vary hugely. If there is only one good year every ten years, then fish have to live at least that long to ensure reproduction. You could also argue that putting the biggest fish back is good for the species. They might not be big just because they are old. Some fish just grow very quickly. I had a Koi that grew to more than double the size of others I bought at the same size on the same day. The more of the quick growing "freaks" that get to breed the better.

Well its new owner reckons this one is red! What do you think?

Chris, the hyperlink you've set up is http://"http//www.wirralseafishing.co.uk%22 A few extra characters methinks!

Every beach is different. You need to get someone local who knows how to do it to show you. One tip, if it's seriously hard work you are probably doing it wrong or at least using the wrong equipment! My preferred method is to start about three inches in front of the cast and then work back towards the blow hole taking slices of about an inch and following the hole down to the worm. You need a narrow bladed spade to do this (less sand, less work) and the worms have to be a decent size to be worth digging individually. On other beaches it's easier to trench them with a potato fork. The pumps were designed to get yabbies, a kind of prawn found on Ozzie beaches but they are good for getting black lug (species that live out near low water, no blow holes). They can also be used to get blow lug if the bed has an inch or so of water over it, a completely different technique where you basically use it as a water jet to blast the sand away from the worm's tunnel. The most important thing is to be able to visualize where the worm is lying down there. They haven't got anywhere to go (they can only move down their tunnel, they aren't fast enough to out dig you!) so as long as you are careful you should be able to get them.

All the politicians are interested in is not causing too many waves and upsetting their leaders. What they are proposing this year breaks THEIR OWN regulations. Under the "Recovery Plan" Regulation (EC) 423/2004 Article 6 says that ".....The TACs shall not exceed a level of catches which a scientific evaluation has indicated will result in an increase of 30% in the numbers of mature fish in the sea at the end of the year of their application, compared to the numbers estimated to be in the sea at the start of that year...." There is no scientific evaluation stating a 30% increase in stock over the year, because stocks are so low the scientists can't even estimate them by their usual sampling methods!

Oops, that should have said kg. Mind you if you can make quotes from reports 18000 years in the future I can make typos too

This is being blamed on global warming because the conservationists are more interested in that than fish stocks. Anyone with any sense could have predicted that you can't take 750 million tons of protein out of an ecosystem year after year without causing serious damage.

Unfortunately, "Old mother nature" has a bit of a struggle repairing this kind of damage Photos of a part of the seabed near Australia, one where trawling is prohibited, the other where it is allowed. Obviously the North Sea never had any coral but the damage to whatever used to be there to protect and feed the fish is undoubtedly the same. If a farmer rounded up his spring lambs with a bulldozer, how long would his fields produce?