No eels

When this blog goes quiet it means one of three things: I'm catching loads but don't want to give away any clues; I'm fishing lots and catching little; I'm not fishing much. This latest silence is down to the third reason brought about by the second. Eels have been frustrating me this summer for a brand new reason. They aren't playing.

It's gone from a few twitchy takes down to the unheard of no takes at all on one recent session. I have no answer for it. Worms on or off the bottom have always been an eel magnet everywhere I've fished when the light begins to fade. Not this summer on this water. I'm now regretting starting late. The idea is to hold back from eel fishing until July so I don't get burnt out before the usual peak of activity in August and the hope of a big eel as late as September. These best laid plans have indeed 'gang a-gley'.

With the dismal returns to the pike rods over the last two or three winters I'm not looking forward to more waterside inactivity. I suppose I should have a change and try for something else during the autumn. Get myself on a river somewhere perhaps, or look for some perch fishing not too far from home. Maybe have another try for that sturgeon if it's still around. If only I could get myself motivated...

My mater Nige phoned me the other week to ask if I had any pictures of his brace of thirty pound pike in my files. This prompted me to drag my slides out and root through them. Inevitably it became a descent into nostalgic memories and I ended up scanning a load of pictures of other fish and scenes. Those golden days came flooding back. Travelling all over the place at daft hours of the day and night. Long walks, boat trips in precarious little boats, weather fair and foul. And what looked like pike galore.

Something struck me from a photographic angle. The quality of the scanned pictures was often pretty dire. At least when compared to what I expect to see from a modern digital camera. This reflects what the late James Holgate told me about how digital cameras had improved the quality of pictures submitted to accompany articles in Pike and Predators. Film shots had often been dodgy in the extreme. My slides being more than acceptable at the time makes it obvious how bad the bad pictures were! Compact digital cameras not only made taking pictures easier, the technology was better than in cheap film cameras, but even the jpeg files were more easily corrected/improved for publication.

Judging by the photos I see on fishing forums these days, however, things have gone full circle. Most anglers appear to be using their phones to take fishing pictures now. While the results look great on a phone screen, when blown up (either on a larger screen or for print) they can look worse than pictures from film. Strangely enough Nige said that he was looking for a new camera as the one he has is getting on a bit. The reason he wants a camera is that it makes better prints than his phone.

Here are some of the photos I scanned. I might scan some more during the long winter nights.

 

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The price of 'fame'

A front cover shot and four page spread in a national fishing weekly. At what price?

Plenty of local anglers will despise you for publicising a stretch and a known fish and the place will get hammered. Those are not guesses, they are facts after the event. The chances are litter will increase and the very worst scenario is dead barbel floating out to sea.

Pathetic. Sad. A sign of the times. I blame reality TV.

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Sunny afternoon

Mucho worko catching up with my backlog meant I needed a little R&R this afternoon. So I popped back to the dragonfly pond. And aptly named it is on a warm sunny afternoon in June. There were dragonflies and damsels flitting about all over the pond and in the vegetation around it. This made it difficult to photograph them as they were constantly on the move. One four spotted chaser did behave and took to posing for long periods allowing me to get close too. Even so it's a whole new skill-set I'm needing to acquire to get nice sharp photos with the flash and ambient light well balanced for a natural look. I'm in deperate need of a flash diffuser too - I have one on order.

Working from a RAW file meant I could balance out the exposure on the shot above, but the shot below was beyond redemption.

While I was at the pond I had an interesting chat with one of the park rangers. Apparently they had tried electro-fishing the pond to remove all the nasty fish that have the temerity to eat the dragonfly larvae. He seemed to be of the opinion that fish were of little use - so I said they were quite useful in a pond for fishing in. I'm not sure he was too impressed. Although he was pleasant and informed, I got the impression he may have been a bit of a conservation zealot.

With rush hour approaching I thought I'd go looking for dragonflies and damsels at the warbler pit, after looking in on some nearby woodland. There were young tits noisily following their parents through the trees, and chiffchaffs singing their repetitive song. A couple of butterflies were also seen - a red admiral and a speckled wood.

At the warbler pit I was saddened to see a dead female mallard floating in the marginal weed, out of reach from the bank. An equally appalled carp angler appeared, and proceeded to tell me that there had been two 'anglers' in the swim last night shooting anything that moved. He reckoned they had shot and cooked another duck and there were dead starlings found this morning when they had left. The place is uncontrolled for the fishing, and while there are some who respect the palce and take their, and other's,  litter home there is a faction who treat it like a tip. It's a great shame because the place abounds with wildlife.

Leaving the car parking area I wandered off through the meadow. I'm useless on flower identification, although I did note orchids of some sort among the varied blooms. Into the reeds and my ears were immediately assailed by the songs (if you can call them that) of sedge and reed warblers. The birds were soon spotted. They were gathering food for their better hidden young, as were a few reed buntings. I spent quite a while watching the birds, including a chiffchaff, among the reeds and surrounding willow scrub. Back in the car I saw, too late to get a chance for a photo, a kestrel hovering unusually low over the landward edge of a small heavily reeded pool.

It's a surprisingly wild place, but the easy access means that it's frequented by what one tries not to refer to as 'lowlife scum'. But when you have read that two men set a lurcher on a pregnant roe in the area it's hard not to make such rabid generalisations. There seems to me to be a need to make something more of the largely untended land. But then there'd be a danger of it becoming rather too well groomed, like the park the dragonfly pond is in.

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When I hear the word culture...

I was checking out PurePiscator, which verges on romantic and pretentious tw@t territory at times but generally manages to pull back from the brink, when I saw news of an angling book and a link to a site I had visited before - and left screaming.

For me, Caught by the River represents all that is bad about the self-conscious, clever-cleverness of arty types. Worse still this lot think they have something to do with angling and the natural world too. Fishing bums they are not.

Back to the book in question - Powerlines. The title must be a play on fishing and written lines with an implication of quality in the 'power' bit. How clever...

I am wary of literature that sells itself as being "exceptional writing, which just happens to have fishing in it, on it, of it; for readers who crave good contemporary writing of any kind." "In it, on it, of it"? Pass the AK47 - and I don't mean the carp rod.

Does the editor really hope to be taken seriously with the world knowing he "lives in a caravan in Normandy, surviving on organic permaculture, mushroom hunting, rainwater, foraging winter fuel and old birds' nests to decorate the wattle sides of his dry toilet"?

We must resist this insidiously romantic trend at all costs. Grab a copy of Waterlog and a box of matches. To the barricades!!!

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