Small Brook Fishing Pt.27 - Fiends and Fiddle-faddle

In fishing small running waters there is no room for the man who wants to perch himself on his basket for hours on end. It is mostly a moving pastime and one which calls for more versatility, combined with watercraft, than any other form of angling.

Once the technique is mastered the continual surprises in size, quantity and variety of catches cause one to wonder why we ever bother to fish in more popular waters, almost rubbing shoulders with our companions.

Millions of words have been written about freshwater fishing, in fact so many that it hardly seems possible that enough new information could be gathered together to produce yet another book. Despite this tremendous amount of literature it seems to me that one field (and a very special one) has not yet been covered, namely that of angling on small running waters.

With the ever increasing population of anglers, and the continual struggle for more waters, fishermen are beginning to turn their attention to waters which, a few years ago, they would have overlooked as not being worthwhile. 

Disused gravel pits, derelict canals and even farm ponds which were spurned as being not worth fishing, are being sought out and fished, and many surprises have been revealed both in the number and quality of the fish in many of these neglected places. On these waters some anglers prove more successful than others. Each water needs a different technique and the more adaptable angler is usually the more efficient. 

Amongst game fishermen there is an old saying that trout like the sun on their backs. There was never anything more true and the same maxim applies equally to coarse fish. In daylight hours during the summer months fish generally spend more time in shallow water, when they are not disturbed, than in the deeps. 

For one thing it is warmer there and usually the shallows are richer in both oxygen and plant life, the latter harbouring live food upon which the fish like to feed. They can be caught there provided the angler does nothing to alarm them.

Once the fish are located the first essential is not to scare them. This rule has been stressed time and time again by anglers far more experienced than myself, and yet from what I see each time I go fishing there is still plenty of room for repetition.

Particularly on small running waters, which are often both clear and shallow, the approach is the deciding factor between a good bag or no fish at all. A clumsy approach sends the fish in panic stricken flight, either upstream or down, and once thus alarmed they take quite a time to settle down and recommence feeding.

Now anglers often travel up to two hundred miles on a round trip for their day's sport and frequently return home shaking their heads, saying that fishing is not what it was and murmuring about pollution. We anglers are a strange race. 'We search the country wide for our fishing, but we are wont to overlook the abundance on our doorstep.'

I can only hope that this blog of mine encourages some of you to 'look around the corner' and try your hand on the small running waters on your doorstep. Anyway to the fishing, well a hard frost overnight I didn't think much would be biting on the bigger rivers so with a pint of maggots to the little stream it was.

I'd seen a couple of otters on here not long back so wanted to give it a go because the adjacent canal wasn't frozen as it was last time I set foot here. After retracing my steps to find the end of my drennan specialist landing net handle after the locking bush wouldn't lock, I finally got fishing.

I fished a handful of swims trotting maggots and only one swim produced any bites and they were dace thankfully where this one pictured was the biggest. Not a huge dace for this stretch but at least they can talk about the visit to their mates by the furry fiends.

I managed two more smaller dace and that was it. I'm sure the hard frost overnight didn't help as I suspect the fish might well be shoaled up somewhere. Oddly though the deeper swims didn't hold any fish, and the swim I caught the fish in was quite shallow and pacey, not what I expected anyway.