Bloggers Challenge Run-in

Onset of April marks the start of the final month of the Bloggers Challenge 2017/18.

One or two anglers have been able to put some good points on the scales since the New Year but most of us have struggled. However, today is the turning point in the weather with temperatures set to rise over the next fortnight to fifteen centigrade in the day but more importantly five degrees plus overnight, enabling the stillwaters and canals to boost the possibilities of some late 'summer fish'

Brian had a tremendous burst of quality fish toward the end of the river season which cemented his place in third for the time being, a hundred points behind my dear old self, sat 200 behind runaway leader James.

Scorecard

So, in the knowledge that 100 points is just three cracking fish for Brian to overtake me, I've set myself the challenge within a challenge of adding as many points in the next four weeks as I can glean and really give it a go; almost as if it had only just commenced.

It can be a fizzling last few weeks of the competition and so the prospect of some excitement in it is not to be sniffed at.

Scouring the potential identified a few species that slipped through the gaping holes in the ramshackle landing net, some of which (say it quietly) should be quite easy to catch. Others not so.

This past weekend The Canon took me to a pond known to contain ide. Thinking of it as a day-ticket fishery it still appeared to be one as I arrived, if a little full to overflowing across the path in places. On closer inspection however it was clear that under that increased water level sat platforms seemingly inches apart; a sure sign that this was a commercial fishery.

I immediately felt quite queasy but found putting my fingers in my ears and repeating, "La la la la", helped, as I stemmed the flow of blood, quite neatly actually, with sticks of pop-up foam in each nostril.

Now I had never seen an ide and had to Google it so that I could recognise one and apparently it's just a naturally coloured orfe. If a zander is a 'pike-perch' (it isn't) then an ide is a chub-roach.

A bit more research suggested the most likely method, keeping it simple, would be float fishing on the drop with regular maggot feed. I knew it could rain all morning and so rod and line was preferred to the pole.

The Canon left me to it and wandered off to find a suitable bread punch swim peg (commercial after all) less affected by the high water having advised the water was 18"-2' up on normal...and it was coloured. Well, I knew such fisheries were often coloured due simply to the action of their inhabitants and, looking at it, I felt if it had been a river I would be rubbing my hands. I set sail therefore with some self-promoted confidence.

At this point there was no one else there but, slowly, a trickle of vans bounced and splashed through the water-filled potholes just behind me and as the first one passed, a bite, a strike and the devil incarnate was hooked...a commercial carp.

Clearly there would be some risks taken here; I was after ide in a venue the population of which was generally unknown to me so I set up with a 16 hook to a 3.5lbs fluorocarbon hooklength and 4.4lbs reel line. A 4BB insert waggler with 3no.8's down the line would act as the middleman. This set-up would give me some chance of landing Satan should he bite without too much affecting the ide prospects, or so I thought.

So this carp is hooked but the hook pulls out soon thereafter. Minutes later the same event precisely. Then I hook one that doesn't seem to be in danger of coming-off and my light match rod suddenly seemed incredibly under-gunned making the fight long and, toward the end arm-achingly long-winded. Upon inspection of this 6lbs 8oz common carp the reason for the lost fish became evident. No lips. Let's call him "Marchello".

At this point a little flurry of estates and vans pass and pull-up 100 yards to my left, the occupants of which then disembark and proceed to shout to each other about the conditions.

"He's catching down there", floats down wind into the shell-like. Well, why wouldn't you? It's coloured and clearly stuffed with fish.

Soon after, a 7.4 version was dragged to the net like an unwieldy channel swimmer...with horns. This one, hooked on the outside of the orifice formerly known as a mouth, was never slipping the hook.

The maggots continued to be drizzled in. 10 at a time and constant, rather like scaled-up squatt fishing. In fact it took me back about 30 years.

So, here I am on my lightweight chair, under the gamp with my trusty centrepin offering encouragement to the blinkered pole fishing masses who decide to stay, unlike previous visitors who turned straight round and headed for breakfast.

I think there's five in this mass and they're having a 'match' albeit they seem to choose their pegs but I simply may have missed the drawer for numbers. They shout at each other while moving their gear.

"He's got another" accompanied the second fish as a water vole, yes a water vole, swam between banks. Apart from the ide the highlight of the morning.

On the drop - a smaller fish. It could be a roach, rudd, hybrid...or...the target. On the retieve it became roach or ide alternately two or three times before I swung it to hand and my first ide was banked at 8ozs. Unfortunately, in the rain and excitement, I forgot to photograph it and then dropped it back in anyway but thankfully the Challenge guys agreed the six points could count.

"You had a bite yet?"

"No mate"

"You on pellet?"

I hook and lose, after a long battle, a third sack of evil.

"You got one?"

"Yeah"

...."You lost it?"

"Yeah it's come off"

At which point the rest of the competitors shout and laugh at him. Inwardly I'm thinking, "Really?!.

The Grumpy Old Man in me is tempted to comment that, in my day, open matches started at thirty anglers and went up to 200 plus. On the odd occasion something went wrong and only a handful turned-up we'd go pleasure fishing. This wasn't a match, it was at best a knock-up and at worst a practice session. Let's face it, you'd only get Matchman of the Year points if there were a minimum of 60 competitors.

It gets harder now. I try chopped worm and hook a fourth of these dark satanic ills that again pulls-out.

The float rig gets an even more risky 18 hook in the hope of a further ide but the only other bite comes from a bream of 3.1

So I've had seventeen pounds odd of fish and lost (taking an average carp size as six pounds) 24lbs = circa 41lbs of fish due to the light tackle. The two matchmen in my 'section' are blanking.

I pack the stuff in the car and visit the Canon, who slips in that he has started catching bream...on bread punch. No pellets here either? How odd.

Approach the venue; assess the situation; fish to the conditions. It's not, as they say, rocket science, but then it's the match angler's job to know that, not mine.


With apologies to the memory of William Blake

A PREDATION SENSATION

Having just visited Mick Newey's always entertaining Piscatorial Quagswagging (http://calamitymn.blogspot.co.uk) (where did you discover that word Mick?!) to find a link to a 116 page document about the angling world-perceived problem of fish predation I feel compelled to write something

But what, what should I write?

My natural reaction is to side against any groundswell of angling opinion as it is all-but always driven by the sensationalist and self-preservative tendencies of the tabloid-esque angling press, desperate for a sale in an insular world they would have you believe is necessarily controlled by tackle companies and a single fish species

The fact that it is inevitable today for issues associated with carp to be high profile factors is again a turn-off due to the inextricable link to economics and ego. It is surely natural to question the supposed necessity to maintain waters for the benefit of a single species or any unnatural mix, the reasons I resist can surely be the only ones

Next there is the logical thought that fishery owners and managers shoot themselves and the sport in the foot and fin when they measure the importance of their, no doubt individually-named, stock in £'s not lbs.

I could go on

...and I will


For those who, like me, do not have the stomach for 116 pages of such information, 'Predation: An Ecological Disaster. The Big Picture' is a compilation of research documents, press clippings, commentary and opinion by scientists, supposedly high profile anglers, politicians, celebrities, etc., presented as being published for The Predation Action Group (PAG).

PAG it seems is the joint effort of various angling 'personalities' and others reporting back to the Angling Trust but sadly their website does them no favours (www.thepredationactiongroup.co.uk). If you were to click on the otter in the predators section and read the first sentence you will immediately get my drift

Anyway, the thrust of it is to convince those who may condone it that destruction of presupposed culprits is essential to maintain an artificial level of control over predators to the benefit of the quantity and size of fish available to be caught and ultimately, of course, to reward those who believe that fish exist to adorn them with gold and those whose heads grow fat upon their capture. No need to expand further on that

Thankfully blogworld is heavily populated by countryfolk who fully appreciate that a balanced ecological community is what we all desire of our favourite waters and that a healthy, naturally biodiverse countryside is a laudible aim we should all be able to enjoy for its, at the same time, magical, beautiful, weird and wonderful qualities

The fact that certain introductions would upset the balance was inevitable. Otters for instance have spread naturally into my part of the world following, and possibly directly because of, introductions elsewhere. It will now take time for a natural balance to descend on the watercourses they inhabit especially when combined with the fact that there are now coincidentally so many signal crayfish for them to forage on in some of those waters

New introductions of non-indigenous species, it would undoubtedly be fair to say, are never well advised

Alien species inevitably cause initial problems beyond prediction and the imagination before they settle back to a natural level in the newly adjusted ecosystem, often at a cost to a pre-existing species (mink/water vole being the obvious example)

Reintroductions are another matter, what are we (they) trying to achieve? If we allow ourselves to be sentimental for a second then, yes, it is nice to be able to see the majesty of red kites close to home but I still and always will see them as a slightly false 'tick', just as I do with white-tailed eagles on the annual Highlands excursion, monstrously impressive though they are. These species have been lost for whatever reason in the past and their presence now does nothing to reinstate the then extant balance of fauna at the time they last graced these isles. So what is the point of all that?

I could go on and on, page after page, on this subject of course

The fact of the matter is that we have what we have at any one point in time. If it were down to me, and it isn't as thankfully I am nobody in the scheme of things, there would be no introductions, no reintroductions and heavy protection and conservation of what we already have with emphasis on the relinking and enlarging of the widest possible variety of valuable habitat as part of a nationwide strategy. This should be the fundamental thrust of conservation - to maximise the chances for the broadest range of biodiversity to survive, strengthened not weakened, in the interests of maintaining Gaia to the benefit of all species, ourselves included. This should be the predominant national policy above all other or our, perhaps immediate, children may live to regret the actions of ourselves, their predecessors

So how does that leave us with the PAG document?

Well, do we not simply have to wait and make of situations of change what we can? My local waters had been hard venues from which to catch fish, certainly since the 1960's, but in 2013 the canal fished so well I actually got bored and stopped going, and yet simultaneously there was, and is, otter spraint under every suitable bridge and signal crayfish everywhere...oh! and, yes, it is riddled with zander too. This example is the antithesis of the PAG argument; a venue that was incredibly difficult to winkle a few small fish out of thirty years ago but that last year produced numerous double figure bags of quality fish with the additional benefit in the interim of otter, signal crayfish, zander and, at times undoubtedly, cormorants and, to my definite knowledge, goosander too. Similarly a syndicate I belong to has a water which for the first time in living memory is alive with small fish and yet this has occurred at a time when cormorant numbers have been increasing. 'For every action there is an equal and opposite reaction', 'remember those words from school physics?

So what does that prove?

Well nothing of course, other than nothing is clear and it's all guesswork, all round. Nobody understands whats going on and every time it gets tampered with it it goes wrong and becomes ever more complicated

It's quite simple - leave what species remain alone, protect them - and embrace the constant change; 'twas ever thus and always will be so

The Combined End of the Beginning

A weekend struck-through by a third bout of man'flu this winter set me thinking more widely than the usual particularly narrow field of view...

So many memories from the old days. So many days when luck was on my side and yet plenty when it wasn't, memories that mysteriously emerge heavily rioting from a fog like a ponderous bream from murky water as I attempt to draw them out for recollection

There have been days when one's fortune seemed overwhelmingly unjust to others and others that are simply forgotten, and for justifiable reason

I have been lucky to have found the outdoors, or maybe it is the other way round, but then that is no doubt the mantra of anyone who enjoys thoroughly an enthralling pursuit away from their work which is more than just sport or a hobby but a way of life, a state of mind

This for me is how I view being anywhere in fresh air but particularly imbibing the sights and being stimulated of the senses in the countryside, even though there is nothing natural about it if one takes the view that man's influence renders things 'unnatural'. There is not a single plant or organism outside the influence of man, without doubt, and the great outdoors is only great within those limits and set against that context. The range of our everyday lives is wholly subject to the influence of ourselves and our ancestors

50 years I have wandered where the feeling took me and at every turn there is regret, occasionally at my own stupidity, but more often over the actions of others

As a teenager, and maybe before, it was fundamentally obvious that unendingly and obsessionally tampering with what I will call 'life' was a means to a gloomy end. Even at that formative time of life it was beyond being unquestionable that there was no need for any car to be capable of less than even 40mpg; there was no logic in straightening watercourses and literally destroying the food chain and webs supported by them to such an extent that, even when the error is identifed, it can never be corrected as the true loss is just a faded memory; there was a noticeable decline in what is now termed biodiversity (yes, give it a name and we can all live with it, "My child is out of control!, He has attention problems", well have you considered that feeding him a diet of blue smarties, coke and electronic games might not be natural?); development goes ahead paying lip service to biodiversity because national planning guidance says it must, and for that reason alone; agriculture rapes every last inch of land and can only be diverted from its destructive combine by subsidy

It is no risk as far as I am concerned to state here that it is possible that in ours or our childrens' lifetimes the world as we know it may come to an end. I do not consider this the miserable rambling of one obsessed by 'doom and gloom' but just a calculated statement of fact

To my mind it has long since been questionable that the earth behaves as a single organism and that it can't be that long, in terms of the time-line of life on earth, that it is about to change, as far as we are concerned, for the unfathomable worse

Highly likely is the possibility that the extinction of one too many organisms will act as a fairly sudden catalyst for massive change as we head for the inevitable restructuring of Gaia to the exclusion of life as we know and enjoy it

Today was a strange one, two of the family were ill with heavy colds and yet we needed to vacate the house as building work was underway which we wouldn't be able to live with. The day therefore became one of wanderings and, in that now somewhat old-fashioned way, we drove. We drove partly so that we didn't visit friends or relations and spread the bug to them and partly to revisit areas of countryside we hadn't seen for a while south of home and into the north of Oxfordshire

We drove about forty miles and, in all that way, through drift-crisped verges and scenes of wild desperation; through stiff easterly winds biting on exposed arable fields; under snow-laden branches of apparently lifeless trees we saw just four mammals, two pair of roe deer, and I remarked how odd it seemed to see them wandering the fields and yet not being owned by the landowners but, of course, we should be used to the presence of wild animals we should expect them to be there and not have to search for them with a metaphorical nit-comb in the flea-bitten wig of the outdoors

Yes, so many memories. Memories of water voles pushing tiny flared nostril-speared bow waves and diving at the last minute sight of my presence through their tiny glistening pin-head eyes pursued to the edge by released mink and hanging like a milk tooth on its last eye-wateringly painful thread of flesh; of myriad multi-coloured butterfly species now seemingly lost for ever in any number and maybe soon for good; of vast shoals of tiny gudgeon now quite simply devoured by the dim-witted alien attack of the zander; on catching the diminutive native freshwater crayfish in a minnow-trap, inspecting it with wonder, and returning it with care to the stony sun-sparkled and commensurately tiny River Swift; of hundreds of yellow wagtails falling in fields from migration brighter than custard such that it seemed the whole population of the country was descending on us at that very moment; of hoardes of chirping house sparrows attacking the breadcrumbs in the back yard of youth; and imagined memories that can only be gleaned of a balance of existence never fully experienced from an era, indeed another world, when otters and bitterns, water meadows and working mills, red-backed shrikes and adders, lush growth and a vast and wide array of lifeforms washed around in a delicately poised environment such as we will never see again nor appreciate to even the most infinitely miniscule degree as common-sense fades away hand-in-hand with the advancement of the modern world

How I wish that, just occasionally, time spent by the water might be punctuated by the 'plop' of the water vole, how fulfilled life would again be

"But we're alright, we're nice and warm here,
No one to hurt us except our friends"

References:
Gaia - James Lovelock/Oxford University Press 1979
The Combine - Paul Weller/Universal Music Publishing Group 1977