I must be lucky

A slight change of tactics was forced on me from yesterday's roach session as the tackle shop had none of my usual micro trout pellets in stock. I don't like the 2mm size for roach as I reckon they are too filling for the little fishies! They don't come out of a blockend feeder as easily either. Not that I was going to be using blockends as I've found the cage feeder filled with hemp and pellet mush, plus some crumb, has been more successful. This might change when the fish start feeding harder. Besides, I was running low on maggots. The smallest pellets available were the Sonu 1mm feed pellets. So I bought some along with a tin of hemp. In small quantities tinned hemp works out about the same as uncooked seeds,  saves the hassle of cooking and can be left indefinitely in the car for emergency baiting.

There was a stiff wind blowing yet again from the west, but only one car in the car park on the warm and sunny afternoon. A chiffchaff was singing away in one of the trees and I did away with my fleece for the walk to the swim. The same swim as last time on the basis that there had been at least one fish in the area on Friday.

I had the wind blowing slightly off my left shoulder but was still a bit chilled by it as I set up. Then I sat down and started casting feeders out with unbaited hooks. There was plenty of time and that way I could get some feed out quickly and recast less frequently when I started fishing. After bumping the only fish of the last session off I changed two of the hooklinks to shorter ones. One was a lot shorter. The third had a larger hook attached to fish a worm.

Settled in and baited up I cast out two rigs baited with single red maggots and one with a dendrobena and sat back with a brew. It was only a few minutes before the middle alarm bleeped at four o'clock. I felt confident it was a bite. That was the cue for the other angler to appear dragging his trolley behind him.

Apparently my early bite was more than he'd had since lunch time, and another bloke had been on all morning fishing two rods without a touch. Then the drivel started. The reason he'd blanked was that all the fish had been netted out. I told him I had caught fish before. He said I must have been lucky. I said it hadn't been easy, and that there had been cormorants on the lake. He reckoned they couldn't remove enough fish to spoil the fishing. I bit my lip and wished he'd bugger off. Eventually he did, saying he wouldn't be coming back. The lake is maybe a couple of acres, no deeper than 18 feet and the water goes clear. Undisturbed half a dozen cormorants could make serious inroads into the fish stocks. The bloke was clearly an old school, pie eating, idiot.

An hour later I had a bite to the worm rod. Just a jiggle, but definitely a bite. As usual I was expecting the action to come towards dusk, so it was a surprise when I got a positive indication on the left hand maggot rod just before half past six with the sky still bright and blue. This felt like a roach and a decent one at that. Sure enough it was. Unlike all the fish I had caught during the winter this one looked battered when I netted it. Inspecting it while removing the hook it was in a sorry state, showing what I take to be signs of cormorant damage on both flanks.

Half an hour after slipping that fish into the keepnet the worm road roared into life. Alarm screaming, baitrunner spinning and the rod arcing round. I knew what the culprit was before I picked the rod up. A trout as intelligent as my earlier visitor. I wondered if it was the same idiot fish I had caught twice in a day earlier in the year, but it was a fair bit bigger. It went back.


While unhooking the trout I had managed to cut the hook off the hooklink,and not wanting to catch another I left the rod propped up against the brolly I had erected to keep the wind off me. I'd had to move the brolly round a bit as the wind was swinging to the south. This suited me as it was blowing more directly off my back.

Five minutes later I had a bite to the left hand rod and landed a mint conditioned roach of maybe ten or twelve ounces. No sooner had I netted this fish than I had a run to the remaining rod. Not a trouty screamer, but a more gentle affair. This was caused by a hybrid picking up the maggot. If it had been a roach it would probably have been a PB, but I didn't bother weighing it.

Both rods were rebaited and recast and a short hooklink with a size 18 attached to the former worm rig. If the fish were feeding I might as well milk it! Ten minutes later I had another gentle run which resulted in another pound plus roach. Like the other one and the hybrid it showed signs of a cormorant attack.

The feeding frenzy didn't continue into dark. Half an hour after the roach another hybrid was hooked. One which kited over my middle line. One advantage of The Rig is that the line can be cut without messing the rig up, making retackling a simple case of retying one knot. So that was what I did. The other rod was wound in and recast, the cut line retied, and I was back in business with minimal fuss.

The sky had clouded over and dusk came early. The barn owl hunted the far bank as the street lights came on. A rain shower blew in and when it passed I packed up. I couldn't believe how lucky I had been to catch all those fish from an empty lake.

The walk back to the car got me sweating  in the sheltered warm air. The air temperature had been 17 on arrival and was still 13 when I set off for home. The lake had warmed up to over nine degrees too.

The cormorant damage is a worry. The larger fish that I am after must be too big for the vile birds, but they will be thinning out the smaller fish. With the daylight hours increasing they will have more time on the lake to feed before the majority (of the few fishing the place) turn up around nine or ten o'clock. At least during the winter months the cormorants have less time to feed. With a nearby nature reserve hosting a roost of over 60 of the fish eating fiends local fisheries are going to come under more and more avian predation once the birds have cleared out the waters on the reserve.

Undeterred I shall continue chasing these roach for a while longer. Although they seem to be topping out around the pound and a half mark there might just be one or two larger ones swimming around. That's if I'm lucky.

Typical

Spring finally seemed to be springing yesterday. The frog spawn in my pond had largely survived the frosts and a multitude of tiny tadpoles were doing their best basking impression in the relative warmth on the gravel shallows. Although I had bought half a pint of maggots and a tub of dendrobenas at the tackle shop I wasn't planning on using them until the weekend. The day was so nice when the sun came out after lunch that I changed my mind and set off for what turned out to be a deserted Goat Lake.

With well over four hours of daylight left I took my time setting up at the shallower end with a couple of cage feeders and a blockend. Two rods went out to the markers on my lines - casting out then winding quickly back so the orange braid was at the tip ring before allowing the rig to settle and tighten up. The third rod went out to the right and fished a worm. This one was left for longer periods between recasts than the other two which were wound in every fifteen minutes or so. My thermometer said the water was over seven degrees, almost eight, and the air temperature was in double figures. The westerly was causing a bit of wind chill though.

As I'd walked onto the bank I had spotted my first swallow of the year swooping down towards me. Although this apparently lonely bird wasn't going to make a summer it certainly lifted my spirits. Sitting by the rods numbers of them could be seen feeding high in the air and skimming the water. It was starting to feel a lot like spring. The whole place seemed different to how it had during the winter even though there was little in the way of new greenery. Something in the quality of light with the sun higher in the sky, perhaps.

Apart from a couple of single bleeps which would have been caused by drifting weed nothing disturbed me. Not only was the water warmer it was considerably clearer than on my last visit. Past experience suggested that this would mean last knockings could be the time for action.

When the sun began to set, the distant street lights began to glow, and a couple of bats emerged to fly around my swim the wind died down turning the evening warm and inviting me to dust down the bivvy. It was that kind of time when I would have enjoyed watching day turn to night proper while lying on my bedchair with the kettle on the stove expecting an LED on one of the alarms to light up at any minute. That'll have to happen elsewhere though.

While there was still light in the sky the middle LED did indeed light up. The bobbin did nothing though. There wasn't enough wind to have caused the indication so I put it down to a liner. The maggot was untouched when I recast. Half an hour or so later the same alarm signalled a bite. The bobbin lifted, then jiggled down lower and lower. I picked up the rod and felt something roachy. Not heavy, but roachy. I brought it in a few yards than reached down for the net to position it in readiness.  That was when the fish fell off...

I gave it another ten minutes before starting to pack up. By which time there were sparse rain drops glistening in the light from my head torch as I tramped back, defeated once more, to the car. The rain wasn't much and had cleared by the time I got home. Next time, if the day is bright, I'll be leaving it later before starting. It's that last hour that seems to be the one.

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Old school vs new school

A friend of mine had to pick up some rods I'd done some work on for him and we decided that a session trying to track down the mythical canal perch might be in order. This would give me a chance to get an idea about the Texas rig and drop-shot techniques he has scored with elsewhere. There's nothing to beat watching someone using a technique when it comes to understanding how it's done. Knowing Steve's ability for catching big fish I was also expecting to get my arse spanked as he caught huge perch after huge perch with a flukey double figure pike or two for good measure!

Steve set up his drop-shot rig with a tiny little bit of soft plastic on the hook while I clipped on my trusty silver Mepps and away we went. In my first swim it wasn't long before my first retrieve along the reeds was met with that familiar jagging take of a perch. Not a big fish but an encouraging start for both of us.

It was a bit of a dismal day. Overcast with a steady heavy drizzle and a cold wind blowing, thankfully on our backs. The canal had cleared from my last trip and had pretty much the exact level of clarity I like for lure fishing there. My hopes of more fish were pretty high.

We worked along the stretch fishing gaps in reeds and to far bank cover. Steve switched to a Texas rigged worm while I sneakily swapped to a small Mann's crankbait. In the second swim with the crankbait a cast to the far bank didn't reach the central channel before I felt head shaking and a heavier weight than the first fish had. Then the fight changed and I realised I wasn't connected to a monster perch but a small pike. The plug had been engulfed by the fish, which might have made a pound and a half, but was easily removed. I don't think the fish was hooked, but had the lure wedged in its mouth!

The rain eased and eventually stopped completely as we covered more water before retracing our steps. All to no avail.

I'm not going to draw any conclusions from this session regarding the merits of the different lures. We both thought that the spinner and crankbait are good for searching for fish, while the soft baits might be better suited for careful presentations when you know for sure perch are present in a swim. I can definitely see how the tiny bait on the drop-shot rig would tempt perch, and the value of the Texas rigged worm for fishing amongst debris strewn swims. So much so I am almost tempted to invest in the necessary kit. Almost!

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Nothing of interest

Call me soft, I don't care, I'm waiting for the cold easterlies to abate before venturing out again. With a bit of luck that'll be soon and I can have another try with lures for the perch on the canal. Someone seems to be getting amongst them at the moment. I reckon the rod needs a few more rings on it though...

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Better fishing photos - 3

Telling a story

When there's nothing happening anglers often get their camera out and start taking snaps of their rods. I know I do. The trouble is there's only so much that you can do to make pictures of rods even vaguely interesting! One is to incorporate the rods in a photo that is more a landscape picture. In the example below it was the sunset which was more worth photographing that the rods.

Given a situation like this it is worth using flash (as described in Part 1) so that the sky is well exposed but the foreground isn't a dark mess with no detail.

Even so it is worth learning a bit about using software to enhance your photographs. I'm no expert in this department, but so long as you work on a copy of the original image you can do no harm by messing about. It really can give your pictures more impact.

Nice enough as this picture is there's not much going on in it. Being human we respond more strongly to pictures containing people. As nothing was happening on the day this photo was taken I messed around taking some staged self portraits. Again I used flash as the sky behind me was bright.

The equipment for taking self portraits is described elsewhere on this blog, a wireless remote to fire the shutter helps for the sort of pictures that follow, but a bulb release can be used if the tube is concealed or kept out of the frame. I must admit that a camera with a flip out screen makes the process a lot easier, but a bit of trial and error will work okay. It just takes longer. The following photos were all taken without being able to see the screen.

This is a reasonable enough pic but it's a bit boring and doesn't include enough information. The groundbait bowl is hardly visible, there are no alarms in shot and the overall composition is dull. There is also some nasty lens flare (the bright green bar by my knee) caused buy the sun being just about in the frame. Some lenses are more prone to flare than others, and this one is particularly bad.

Here the lower camera angle and slight, albeit unintentional, tilt to the camera coupled with my leaning forward pose adds a sense of movement to the picture. I am trying to pretend a bite is about to be struck! The alarms are in the shot along with the groundbait bowl and maggot tub. These all help to tell the story of how I am fishing. In all these pictures the clouds and sun add atmosphere and the clothing and dry reeds hint at the time of year and weather conditions.

There is even more flare in this shot, including a small blob in the sky. That blob can easily be cloned out, but the coloured flare is more difficult to remove. One simple way to make flare like this less obvious is to convert the picture to black and white.

Flare isn't always a bad thing. It can make an image look lively, but only when it isn't intrusive. There is some flare in the next picture, but there is so much else that works well it doesn't bother me. My pose could have been a little more animated, and my hand a little higher over the rod, but the story telling details are included, and the composition comes together well with the lucky break of the rays radiating from the sun and the shapes of the clouds. If you want to deliberately induce sunstars you have to stop the lens's aperture right down, to something like f18 or f22, the smaller the better. Even so, not all lenses will make a good job of it. There is a technical reason for that, but I'm blowed if I can remember what it is...

While I had to use myself as the model for these photos the same ideas about composition and details can be applied to photographing your fishing buddies. Either in staged scenarios like these or when they are actually doing things like striking, playing fish or whatever.

You can also get in closer for more of a portrait feel to such pictures. Don't be afraid to crop off bits of someone's body to make the picture work. There's no need to get everything in the frame. That often leads to wasted space. The same can go for trophy shots, but in that case it's wise to get all of the fish in the frame even if you slice the top of the captors hat off! Unless you are going for a detailed close up of it's head, say.

I apologise for the gormless expression, but I'm sure you get the idea!

For the technically minded the set up was pretty simple. The lens used was a wide angle zoom because the swim was cramped and such lenses exaggerate perspective to produce dramatic images. They also have a large depth of focus which can help in this sort of situation.

The cameras settings were dead simple. It was in Programme mode and set to chose its own focus point. With the the bright light making a small aperture inevitable and lens's depth of focus that meant that the camera would focus on the closest thing and pretty much everything else would be sharp enough to appear detailed.

The only technicalities were to override the Programme metering to underexpose by about 1/3 of a stop for some shots. This was to make the sky expose well and not burn out to white and lose all the cloud detail. The flash (I used a flash gun, but the camera's built in flash would have done almost as good a job) was set to work things out for itself too, but again with a slight nudge to boost output. Then I stuck the camera on the tripod, pointed it in roughly the right direction and started taking photos.

Take one frame then check it out for composition and exposure. Make any corrections and try again. Repeat until bored. It's something to do when the fishing is slow!

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Dry nets again

Despite the continuing wintry spell if you can get out of the wind when the sun shines  you could believe spring is here. Not that there are many green shoots to make it look like spring. Still, the days are lengthening noticeably now and there's time to get a decent length session in after lunch. With that period likely to see the water at its warmest while the overnight frosts persist I planned to resume my roach fishing this week with the purchase of a opint of maggots.

There was one pole angler on the lake when I arrived, sensibly fishing with the wind off his back and the sun in his face. It felt positively balmy as I stood chatting to him. he hadn't had a bite in teh couple of hours he'd been there, but he'd put his fishfinder out (I guess a Smartcast) and reckoned there were fish in front of him, tight to the bottom and some big ones. Knowing fishfinders as I do I humoured him.

In my typical fashion I headed to the other end of the lake where the wind was blowing into me at a slight angle, and the sun was heading towards the horizon over my other shoulder. If I'd gone on the other bank I'd haev had the wind coming over my back at and angle and the warming rays of the sun in my face. D'oh! Not to worry I had a cosy swim to fish from.

It's hardly worth detailing my approach as it was almost identical to that which I've used for a number of sessions. I did make one change. To swap one of the cage feeders to a blockend. I'd also added some brown crumb to my hemp and crushed pellet feed. I have the feeling that while pellets are attractive, they might be filling. Especially the larger particles. Crumb might hold the fish longer. If they ever find the feed that is.

Although the wind was cutting it wasn't strong enough to blow the feeders off course during the cast, so accuracy was fairly easy to achieve when casting to the three far bank markers I'd picked out. There was one fly in the ointment, however. While the water was reasonably clear there was a tinge to it reminiscent of snow melt. My big mistake was throwing the thermometer in the lake. True enough it was warmer than the last time I fished the lake, a month a go. It had risen by a whole 0.3°C to a boiling 3.9°C! The air temperature was pretending to be over 8 - but that was in the sun, out of the wind. When the sun went behind clouds as dusk drew near the thermometer told the truth - 4.2°.

As far as fish go I have nothing to report. One alarm gave out a single weary bleep as the light began to fade, but my hopes had already faded completely. My intention had been to fish until dark, which is coming after seven now, but the bitter wind made me advance that to six o'clock. When the wind dropped and it felt warmer I decided to linger longer. Six thirty came and went before I began a slow pack up. At twenty to seven I wound the rods in.

Despite being a dismal failure on the fish catching front it was good to be out again. The willows are making the best effort at brightening the world up. Close to the leaves are curling out of the buds and from afar there's a gentle shading of green to their branches. Pretty much all the other leaves are still in hibernation though.

Grebes were a-courting. Well one pair was while another patrolled the lake together. A lonely fifth grebe kept me company by holding station in the wind some twenty yards out allowing me to inspect it's plumage through my binoculars. It's amazing how waterbirds can tuck their heads away as if in sleep while paddling to avoid being blown from their position by the wind. Also in evidence were two pairs of teal alternatively swimming and flying round the lake in a group. As the sun set two kestrel began calling to each other while oystercatcher arrived for the night.

The sky was bright and blue, but with fluffy white clouds (remember that annoying song?) making it quite photogenic. And the sunset was far more dramatic than I was able to make it appear with my camera. As I wasn't recasting as frequently as I do in warmer conditions and bites were non-existent I spent a few minutes taking self portraits to relieve the tedium and postpone the inevitable task of putting the dry nets away. I'll put another post about the process together to occupy my Bank Holiday weekend. I'm sure as hell not going out for a repeat of today's disaster!

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