Transient Towpath Trudging - Pt.56

A straight forward job or so I thought !!!

You see the bait fridge that served me well for so many years decided to give up the ghost recently and a replacement was sorted pretty quickly from Essential Appliances in Stratford-Upon-Avon . I didn't want to spend a huge amount on somewhere to chill ones maggots and Ian the owner had exactly what I wanted.

The freezer compartment on the old fridge was pretty pants if I'm honest and this one doesn't have a freezer section so more space to store whatever I wanted was a bonus. 

Anyway cash handed over, the fridge placed in the back of the Jimny and I headed back home to fit it. Hmmm the new one does look deeper and yeap when fitted in the same place as the old one, ie next to the door it stuck out an inch or so further in to the door opening.  

OH FFS !!!

You would have though being a design engineer this would have been the first things I'd check !!! anyway no amount of toing, froing and fudging got it anywhere near when I needed it to go. So only one thing for it I had to swap the tumble drier and the bait fridge around, job done !!!

Well not quite because the door still didn't open. Now the black cupboard you can see could be moved an inch or so which would help and that's exactly what I had to do. Eventually after an hour and a half of faffing I managed to get sorted and we are back up in business again thankfully.

Canal Time, now roach occasionally interbreed with other allied species which happen to be spawning in close proximity to the roach shoals. Hybridism is accidental, and arises from fishes on the fringes of the shoals intermingling, eggs from one species being fertilized by milt from the other. Hybridism of this kind arises rarely between roach and bleak, commonly between roach and rudd and between roach and bream

The roach/bleak and roach/rudd hybrids are unlikely to give rise to problems, though they are difficult to identify. In the case of the bream/roach hybrid, the resultant mixture often reaches specimen proportions. This can inspire false claims for record or specimen fish.

The bream/roach cross is often referred to as a pomeranian bream, and was once thought to be a separate species. It is now recognized for the hybrid it actually is. It is intermediate in appearance between roach and bream and may resemble either parent predominantly, having a strongly forked tail and a slimy body, and combining depth of body as found in bream with the roach's thickness of body. This means that it may weigh upwards of 2 lb.

Such fish can be recognized instantly and quite definitely by counting the number of branched rays in the anal fin. 

The true roach bears only nine to twelve such rays, the bream between twenty-three and twenty-nine. 

The hybrid bears between fifteen and nineteen and is, therefore, clearly neither roach nor bream, and cannot easily be mistaken for another species.

The 4lber I caught recently is by far the biggest I've had from this stretch but is there any bigger fish to be caught ? Only one way to find out I suppose. Bread seems to do the trick on the canal at the moment so I was back for some more transient towpath trudging to see what else I could catch down this quiet stretch.

A cold frosty start this one and Nic from Avon Angling was already bankside when I got to the parking spot. He'd gone left and I'd gone right though and the first WhatsApp message I'd got back when the rare mobile signal kicked in was, "It's dead here !!!"

And Nic wasn't wrong, an hour in my usual spot no signs of fish whatsoever. The water was clearer than normal with easily a foot of visibility and when you're only fishing in 2ft not exactly ideal. After twiddling my thumbs and crossing ones legs plenty of times I decided to bait a spot with ground bait and mashed bread and leave it settle for a while and go and fish another spot.

It certainly paid off because after blanking in that swim I returned where within 5 minutes I'd had a bite that I missed. The next underarm flick of the bread a bite not long after and a fish was on. A good fighter this one and that could mean yeap, a hybrid.

I'm still amazed how well they fight. A quick weigh this one 2lb on the nose and proudly showing some war wounds by the looks of it. Anyway I thought, right fish in the swim now, lets be having you. !!! but no, no more bites dead as a dodo.

As soon as a boat went through I decided I'd had enough and I was wasting my time so I decided to go and find Nic for a chinwag. He fished a few spots for nothing and then decided to end the session early but then change of heart dropped in to an oxygenated swim where he missed two "unmissable" bites.

The boat that disturbed my swim then proceeded to wreck Nic's swim and that was that. One of those sessions where you know you will be scratching around for bite or two, but the need to get out trumps the likely outcome.