More tackle talk

For a few years now I've been using leger stems for my eel fishing. I know full well that when the line is tightened they don't stand upright, but once the line is out of the clip they do, which might help the line flow more freely. The way I've been making them is quite simple and so far has withstood casting using two ounce leads. I've tried pulling them apart with my hands and failed so I tested one to destruction using a spring balance which had stretched to eleven pounds when one swivel parted company with the stem.

All they take are a couple of large eye swivels, a rig clip, a length of stiff boom choosing, a buoyant body of some sort and some glue-filled shrink tube.

 

Squash the small eye on a swivel and the large eye on the other. Clip the lead clip to the now small eyed swivel. Slip a piece of shrink on to the boom tube, fit the squashed eye of a swivel into the end of the boom tube, slide the shrink over the swivel body and heat with a heat gun. Push the boom tube through the buoyant body and repeat the swivel attachment at the open end. Push the buoyant body up and the job's done.

Eel fishing is a frustrating pastime and it always gets me thinking. My first tackle modification spurred on by an eeling problem was brought about by my ineptitude at getting the wriggling buggers in the landing net at the first attempt in the dark. I can never see where the net cord is and far too many times I've lifted the net before an eel has been right over it. Give them an inch of tail over the cord and they back out!

I should have thought of the obvious answer years ago. Paint the last eighteen inches or so of the landing net arms white. For good measure I put a wrap of reflective tape at each end of the paint, then applied epoxy rod varnish over it all for protection. So far I haven't had to make any second or third netting attempts.

My second tackle development was to solve the rig storage issue. Coiling hooklinks in grip-seal bags is OK with wire which springs straight, but the hard mono links I use with worm baits takes on a curve. I had been putting a few in a stiff plastic hook packet. They had a tendency to tangle and I thought there must be a neater way. 

Being old I dredged up a memory of an article in a 1970s about using a cigar tube to store hooklinks by putting the hook over the open end and tucking the other end under a rubber band. I found some plastic tube and gave it a try. It was OK but the rubber band was a fiddle to use and the swivel or loop ends flapped about if they weren't all the same length.

Lateral thinking came to my rescue and I tried a piece of scrap Duplon rod handle material and may pins as used on many a flat rig board. The Rick Stick was born!

 

 

 I could just about squeeze 20 hooklinks onto the 'stick'. While I considered putting it in a tube for protection it fits neatly enough in my tackle box without.

 

 

Finding it awkward using my lightweight bobbins (see here) by attaching them to the uprights of the rod pod my current venues force me to use, as the swims are not bankstick friendly, I wanted to adapt the pod so the bobbins were attached directly below the rear rest heads.

I didn't like the price of the commercially available fittings intended for this which attach between the rest head and the buzzer bar. They didn't look very long either. No matter where I rummaged there was nothing to be found that I thought could be adapted for the purpose. Staring at the pod one night hoping for an indicator to move it struck me that the bobbins didn't have to be attached to an upright. A cross bar would do just as well.

I have lots of old banksticks in various stages of decay. One was cut to a suitable length and temporarily fitted to the pod using a couple of hair bands. In practice the hair bands weren't up to much but they let me prove the concept worked. Which it did.

I tidied up the cross bar by wrapping black insulation tape around it and fitting a plastic cap to each end. A couple of Terry (tool) clips were attached using self-tapping screws so the bar can be moved up and down and removed altogether when not required. I would have used nuts and bolts but I had none suitably long. If the screws fail I'll have to get some.

In practice the set up works well. An unexpected bonus is that by turning the clips that the bobbins are attached to round the cross bar I can finely tune the indicators without having to fiddle with the reels. Neat. It's also occurred to me that by attaching the cross bar to the front of the pod I can use the indicators on a drop of almost twice the length of the cords should I want to.

The final (?) mod to the bobbin set up was to acquire some better cord. Entering '1.5mm braided cord' into Google soon tracked some down and had 5m winging its way to me. A big knot in one end to stop it pulling through the hole in the Terry clip and a piece of the magic glue-filled shrink at the other to form a loop to take a clip and everything was complete. The bobbins did their job again, dropping off and the eels taking line freely. As usual my conversion rate was pitiful!

I wonder what I'll be tinkering with next?

Retail therapy

At the moment I'm having a lot of fun snatching short sessions of a couple of hours on the Railway Pond - and less successfully on other places. Saturday was a case in point when I got the daft carp up on floaters again and might have caught some if my controller hadn't broken. Admittedly the swivel has been in danger of snapping ever since I bought the thing some time in the 1990s! I've affected a repair, and cut the weight down a bit so it sits a bit higher in the water. But I think buying a spare might be wise. A handful of suicidal pasties fell for a 10mm boilie fished in the margin to save me from a complete blank.

With these short sessions in mind I wanted to put together a bag that would contain everything I needed. Just a few bits and bats to cover unexpected losses like broken floats. I had the bag, a Korum Bait and Bits bag that will hold a bucket of mixers or pellets, tubs of bait, camera, bottle of pop, weighsling scales and sundry other stuff. Rather than keep swapping the major stuff from bag to rucksack -with the inevitable memory lapse resulting in a longer session being undertaken without a weighsling or some other essential - I decided to double up on stuff.

I have a set of scales, Super Samson spring balance, lying idle but no suitable sling. As I'm still using an original ET weigh sling for bigger fish I popped onto Ted's website and ordered one of the latest versions in the not-too-big size. It's not quite as deep as my original but it's going to be fine for anything I'm likely to put in it. Best of all it comes in a carry bag. As a rule I leave carry bags in the garage but this one will take my scales and a pair of forceps, and even the small tackle boxes I've put the rig bits in.

Rummaging in my tackle cupboard I'd found a box that  was big enough to hold a spool of hooklink material, scissors, hook packets and some back leads. I still needed something to put the smaller rig bits in. A visit to a tackle shop to buy two shortish banksticks (not carp angler short) found me that box when I wasn't looking for it. A neat little clamshell job. It looked like there had been equal quantities of black and green boxes on the shelf, with more green ones left. Black might be hip, but I know from past experience it's hard to see black swivels and so on in a black box, so I bought a green one.

It's always a good idea to carry a cigarette lighter or two in the tackle bag. So when I spotted some with fish motifs on them in the same shop I went for one with a picture of a pike. The carp ones, unsurprisingly, had sold out.

While I was on the ET website I spotted some small boxes that looked really useful. I like really useful boxes so ordered a couple. As yet I haven't found a use for them. But they will be really useful one day, I'm sure! They look more robust than the clamshell box.

Despite all this planning and organising I took my rucksack with me yesterday for an evening session. And a brolly with the forecast being for rain arriving at nine and leaving at eleven. As it turned out the rain came and went half an hour earlier. Which was good as I got away in the dry.

This was to be my last session with carp rods for a while. My intention being to use tench rods for tench somewhere carp won't be such a possibility. Quite when that will be remains to be seen.

I wasn't sure where to fish when I arrived, but seeing a dark pointy fin break surface in the swim I'd dumped my tackle in before going for a wander made my mind up. I'd be happy catching anything. So it was that a fish scarer got lowered in teh margin, a pop-up cast out with a bag of pellets to another margin swim, and Lucky the Pellet cast to where the bream had rolled.

The wind was from the west for a change, warm and not very strong. It was quite muggy too. The trees are almost in full leaf and the hawthorn in bloom - hence me wanting to concentrate on tench until they spawn. It felt like a fishy evening.

It wasn't long before I had what seemed like a liner to the fish scarer. Then another. A longer gap and another liner. I was beginning to wonder if a bream had hung itself on the three ounce lead. Eventually one of these liners pulled the tip round and my suspicions were confirmed. I think the bream had been hooked for some time! You can tell I'm not a carp angler because I netted the bream, put it on my mat, weighed it - and took a photo of it's tubercle covered head.

Even though I sat it out until eleven, still confident, nothing else happened of interest on the fish front. A barn owl made a brief appearance in the gloom of dusk, but it didn't hang around. The resident grebes continued to squabble. There'll soon be young ones which might make the adults even more quarrelsome. Judging by the small fish topping they'll all be well fed.

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