ColinW

So he's beaten you twice by catching a decent sized bream at the death? Maybe he's not so much "fodder" as you reckoned!

I read once that the easiest way to hold one while pulling its skin off is to nail its head to the back gate. The sight of a back gate full of skulls in various states of decay is also a deterrent to burglars.

From what I've read, the hardest part of setting up a coldwater marine tank is keeping it cold enough. I don't think the heater/stat on my freshwater tropical tank ever switches on, because the heat from the light, the pump and from the room is enough to keep it warm. Keeping water at 50 degrees in a room at 70 degrees requires some sort of chiller.

Castrol have started selling "old fashioned" monograde oils http://www.castrolclassicoils.co.uk/xl30det.htm Hell of a price though for the amount you need (£16.99 a gallon). I'd have to be very sure there was a good reason NOT to use the bog standard multigrade from ASDA!

You'd think that with the whole sea to fish in they wouldn't need to do it right under our noses. Maybe they do it just to hack us off. Is it too much for us to ask that they, at the very least, stop fishing INSIDE the river estuaries. I am sick of seeing them trawling in the Mersey and the Dee.

Personally, and I have no evidence whatsoever to back this up, I've always imagined that a pike takes a fish into it's stomach, digests the soft material over a couple of weeks and then regurgitates the head, skeleton, spines and whatever is left, a bit like an owl does. I can see no benefit to the pike letting that hard (and often sharp) material pass through its gut and don't believe millions of years of evolution would let that happen. If I'm right, then it doesn't really matter how you float your baits. Maybe someone who has kept a jack in a tank could tell us what they have observed.

If you've got a car go to Loch Lomond. Balmaha is a good place to fish, perch from near the boatyard, roach off the nearest island and dace from the mouth of the Endrick. Obviously you'll need a boat for some places and if you rent one it's quite expensive but you'll never fish anywhere nicer.

MJB, it's a fish. It hasn't got (should say didn't have) any guile and cunning. It had a lot of luck and it just ran out!

Don't get angry with the young lad for killing the one that reached full size, get angry with the netsmen who killed all the ones that didn't.

I was fishing a place in the Lakes when a guy came chatting with a little lakeland terrier. When he'd got back in his nice new Range Rover and drove off I realised the little sod had wolfed down two big mackerel I'd just got out to do a bait change with. I wouldn't have liked to be in that car when they came back up!

Unless the pond is sitting in a situation where you might expect to see a waterfall, ie. not in a flat suburban garden, then whatever you do can look a bit naff. If the surroundings do suit it then like Steve says it's better to make one from a flexible liner and a lot of rock. If you don't have a waterfall then make sure that the water from the filter return splashes back in, don't put it underwater, because a biological filter removes oxygen and it needs to be replaced.

You can bet that the people complaining about noise, smells or whatever near their holiday homes are the same money grabbing bar stewards who wake me up driving to work at ungodly hours of the morning! Why do these prats choose to live two hours from where they work? (Bear in mind I am talking about NW England here, it's not exactly crowded!)

Superbly conditioned fish, even the rainbow has got a full tail!

When the netters are stopped and the salmon DO return, then we can use it in our arguments for them to stop netting everything else to extinction. They won't be able to blame seals, climate change, charter boats, the CFP, old uncle Tom Cobbly and all, because we'll know for sure who is responsible for the digraceful lack of decent sized fish around this country.

It converts carbon dioxide and water to sugar by a process called photosynthesis. Something like 6H2O + 6CO2 -> C6H12O6+ 6O2 this enables it to feed lambs who then feed me.

It's OK for them to be slightly damp after you've floated off any floaters but if you keep them in water they will just drown and then start to stink. Keep them in a sealed plastic bag in the fridge.

No one would be that barbaric would they? Photo from DEFRA website.

It's hard to see how killing 300 tope a week could NOT make a significant dent in their numbers, bloodywell wipe them out more likely. Research does NOT need to be done, because if the answers don't suit the fishermen they'll ignore it anyway. Just to clarify what they intend to do. They will string mile long lines of hundreds of baited hooks all over the tope grounds. They will pull in the lines, unhook the tope, cut its fins off, chuck the fins in a bucket and chuck the fish back in the sea to die.

It's a perch. When they run out to sea they take on that silver colour because it's better camouflage, a bit like sea trout.

Incidentally, since this thread has gone a bit "off topic", at no time did I say that the southern english fishermen are using these massive pair trawls. I said that they are using purse seine nets. I know this for a fact, because I watched a guy from Newlyn using this method to catch sardines on TV about two weeks ago on the "Coast" programme.

Well I finally found someone describing the size of pair trawls. Since it was a submission to parliament I hope it doesn't rate as "rumour and inaccuracy". http://www.publications.parliament.uk/pa/c.../88/3120306.htm As for me grouping all commercial fishermen as "lawbreakers and pariahs" (your words not mine) well as it happens that IS how I see them, an opinion formed by watching their behaviour in my local area and reading about what they get up to elsewhere in the media (court appearances etc NOT rumours). I have read on here that it is impossible to make a living legally out of fishing and yet they DO make a living. From that I can only draw one conclusion.

I haven't missed the point and I do understand how a pair trawl is fished. It's very difficult to find any figures on the net (no pun intended) apart from on sites by greenpeace and the like which you would presumably just dismiss. I have seen a net manufacturer describing a demersal pair trawl with a 250' headline and a 275' ground rope and I understand that mid water trawls can be even bigger. I think that last sentence about "how big a boat" is a nonsense. I'm sure you know perfectly well that the early part of the net is a large mesh designed to "shepherd" fish towards the proper net and that part would pack down relatively small. I have to admit I am having a little difficulty understanding why someone on an angling website is defending commercial fishermen. Absolutely nothing that they do to destroy our fish stocks would surprise me and the more I read about their "activities" the more disgusted I get.

Sorry big_cod, I'm new here! No offence intended. Brian, a jumbo jet has a wingspan of just under 200 feet. I don't believe that would be an excessive estimate for the size of the nets midwater pair trawlers use. I thought the whole point of a pair trawl is to eliminate otter boards so the two boats can use all their power to pull the net through the water. There wouldn't be any need to have two boats to do this unless the net was pretty damned big.

big_cod, I think you are confusing pair trawling, which the Scots and the French do to annihilate the spawning bass shoals, with the purse seine net I'm talking about. These are completely different techniques. A purse seine can be operated from one, fairly small, boat. They find a shoal (macks or sardines) on the hi-tec electronics, drive around it dropping a "wall" of net and then close the bottom of the net to trap the whole shoal at the side of the boat. Then they either pump or hand net the fish out. There are southern English boats fishing like this as well as the continentals. A pair trawl is a huge net towed between two boats on parallel tracks. These things are big enough take in a jumbo jet!

At the end of the day, however many of them are at it, they are only going to take 10% (if that) of any shoal that swims past within casting distance. Two men (probably English) in a trawler can track a shoal using their fishfinding sonar, encircle it with a purse seine and pump every last fish in the shoal into the fish hold. It makes what the Eastern Europeans do seem like a sustainable fishing method. Once you accept that they are not doing it for fun it actually seems a pretty harmless way to fish commercially.