The Close Season Zander Quest Pt.119 – Cropsticks and Cundums’s

The working week come to an end, some contemplation, good music, a couple of fishing outings and a couple of large Kirk and Sweeney’s kept one’s mind from straying off the yellow brick road on to the uncertain. Now luckily for me those simple life’s pleasures can get ones mind back on track, and that is generally all that is needed without requiring the lockawayables.

Now the bit of news I enjoyed reading this week was that astronomers managed to take the first ever image of a black hole, which is located in a distant galaxy. Apparently it measures 40 billion km across, is three million times the size of the Earth and has been described by scientists as "a monster". The black hole is 500 million trillion km away and was photographed by a network of eight telescopes across the world.

Try and get your head round that !!!! shame it's not a bit closer to the Houses of Parliament.

Now on a slightly different scale, canal bridges and tunnels can often be inherently spooky places to begin with. Dark, claustrophobic, often damp, moldy, and old, there is a certain innate sense of foreboding and an unsettling atmosphere about these places that disturbs us on almost a primal level, and they make perfect locations for scary tales.

These are places where mysteries reign and where we feel somehow out of place and alone no matter who we may be with.

While wandering under these head covering features of the waterways,where you go from light to gloomy, or gloomy to pitch black may invoke images of ghosts and monsters, it was a tale given to me by a passing towpath cyclist and fellow angler (carper) who recalled a story of sometime massive surfacing and causing a wake of gargantuan proportions.

His finger pointed, area identified, the half empty 3ltr bottle of cider strapped to his rucksack in clear view !!!!

Now these structures, especially the big’uns may already seem unwelcoming and forbidding enough, there are on occasion reports that allow them to live up to their full potential of eeriness, and here I had an account that seemed to suggest something prowling about there in the inky black of these enclosed spaces, lurking and waiting there in the eternal gloom.

Now I thought carp to begin with, but I’ve not seen carp here such the locale, as it seems more suited to the fish with spikey fins and even sharper teeth.

Oddly though, this area hadn’t really jumped out at me as big Zed habitat, something I couldn’t quite put my finger on, so with the tough conditions as they are at the minute I wanted to fish not only within shade of the bridge, but also leapfrog a section of cover around 500 metres long I’d not fished in anger before.

My initial findings were not up to scratch, but when you clutching at those schoolie straws, as I am of late, I need to think outside of the box a little to try and invoke a bite from something bigger than I’ve been catching over the last few sessions. So for this morning session the usual armoury, 2 dead bait rods, overdepth floats, smelt and roach, you know the drill.

It was a very cold morning indeed, a frost on the windscreen I was probably on to a loser straight away. Water temperature down to 9 degrees but fishing for Zander in these tough conditions couldn't be simpler. You need to drop a bait right in from of a fishes noggin. Leapfrog swims and give ten minutes, or maybe twenty max in each.

I covered a good section of the cover and with only one small tentative pull in nearly 3 hours I was staring at a blank. Now right by a bridge was was a section of cover to my left and after 3 boats through in ten minutes I was nearly ready to pack up, but I decided to give a little more because it looked like a fish would be holding up there.

Sure enough the first proper bite and I had to be quick with winding in to the fish because it was heading under some thick cover.Not a huge fish but they are proper aggressive at this of year, so they are great sport when you do catch one.

Only a 3lber but a specimen for a shad chucker. So a blank saved. Now I had intended to get out in the morning as well, but some thick green gunk sat on my chest probably not a wise idea, feel a little run down also, so will try and cram a couple of sessions in next week after work.