Canal Roach: Trapped in a Sisyphean Loop - Pt.12

Freeman’s down the road used to be the sort of butcher’s shop where the floor was permanently damp, the counter stained with thirty years of honest graft and somebody always seemed to be carrying half a cow through the doorway. 

It had character. Proper character. Sadly, character these days apparently means selling artisan chutney at the price of a small mortgage payment, so the whole place after the owners sold the land has transformed into a fashionable farm shop with reclaimed wood, hanging baskets and customers who discuss olives as if they’re trading fine wines.

I wandered round it carefully, frightened to touch anything in case it added twelve quid to the bill. 

One sausage roll looked like it ought to come with finance options. The café was packed with people paying the thick end of a tenner for a pork bap, which felt wrong on both a financial and spiritual level. 

I gave that a miss entirely and headed for safer ground at the butcher’s counter and cheese section, where sanity still just about survives.

To be fair, the Cumberland and Welsh Dragon sausages were absolute belters. They went down on the barbecue with the sort of sizzling confidence usually reserved for bank managers retiring early. Even the neighbours started sniffing the air hopefully. By the time they were done there was barely enough left for a photograph, never mind leftovers.

After that I sat sorting the tackle out for a dabble in the morning, pleasantly full and smelling faintly of smoke and sausage grease. Leads untangled, hooks checked, rigs inspected with all the seriousness of a bomb disposal unit. There’s something reassuring about preparing fishing gear at the end of the evening while the rest of the world worries about important things. Somewhere out there the fish were probably making similar preparations to avoid me.

Now there are two types of canal roach in this world: the honest countryside roach, lean as a tax inspector and twice as nervous… and the town roach, which resembles a silver dinner plate with fins and the confidence of a pigeon outside Greggs. You can keep your misty rural cuttings and your kingfisher postcards. Come November, the real canal aristocracy has already abandoned the hedgerows and relocated itself beneath the shopping precinct, directly opposite a vape shop and a kebab establishment called “Marmaris Mega Kebab & Continental Flooring.”

The average towpath rambler imagines fish crave tranquillity. Absolute nonsense. Roach adore civilisation. If they had hands, they’d queue for discounted pastries and complain about parking permits. Take water temperature for starters. In the countryside, winter arrives like an unpaid gas bill. The canal turns icy, bleak and about as welcoming as a magistrate. Out in the sticks, a roach has to flap about all day merely to remain alive.

Meanwhile, in town centres, the water enjoys the comforting warmth generated by buses, chip-fat extraction fans, concrete retaining walls, and eighteen thousand people panic-walking to Primark. The canal acquires the pleasant temperature of weak tea. Naturally the roach pile in by the thousand like shoppers at a Boxing Day sofa sale. Then there’s the food situation. Rural roach survive on the occasional bloodworm and whatever drifts past looking unfortunate. Urban roach, however, dine like minor royalty.

A single Saturday afternoon beside a town canal produces:

Half a baguette.
Three chips.
Two unidentified orange items.
One complete sausage roll.
And, mysteriously, a floating kiwi fruit.

You could trot maggots through there if you wished, but the fish are probably discussing focaccia.

Predators also present fewer concerns in town. A cormorant likes open water and solitude. It does not enjoy dodging mobility scooters beneath railway bridges while being shouted at by a man carrying lager before midday. Consequently, the roach feel perfectly secure. They wedge themselves beneath lock gates, under shopping trolleys, alongside abandoned bicycles and occasionally inside traffic cones. If architecture could produce scales, every municipal drainage pipe in Britain would qualify as a fish refuge.

The great joy for the angler is that winter shoals in urban canals become outrageously concentrated. You spend six fruitless hours on a picturesque rural stretch catching one perch the size of a cough sweet… then arrive in town and accidentally hook fifteen roach before you’ve unfolded your chair properly.

Of course, town-centre fishing possesses its own atmosphere.

There is always a elderly gentleman with nothing to do asking whether you’ve caught any.

There is always a terrier attempting suicide via keepnet.
And there is invariably a teenage scrote on an electric scooter who appears silently behind you like an ambush predator from the future.

Still, the fish remain gloriously unconcerned. The urban canal roach has evolved beyond stress. Sirens, buses, nightclub basslines, heated arguments over chicken shops none of it troubles them.

These fish have seen things.

So next time somebody tells you the “proper” canal experience lies among silent fields and romantic reed beds, smile politely and continue assembling your tackle beneath the ring road flyover. Because somewhere under that bridge, amid the flickering reflections of takeaway signs and the gentle aroma of battered cod, lives a shoal of roach so fat and content they probably pay council tax.

Anyway to the fishing, the cut was flatter than a pub pint left out overnight, not a ripple on it apart from the occasional suspicious swirl from something either fishy or gastrointestinal.

I’d dropped into the crane swim armed with optimism, a loaf of medium sliced, and approximately three teaspoons of actual confidence. 

Bread was the plan this morning. Sensible, reliable, traditional. Maggots sat in reserve like emergency rations in a war film, waiting for the inevitable collapse of morale.

A decent roach would’ve done me nicely. Nothing heroic. I wasn’t after one of those mythical canal perch that only exist in blurry photographs held by blokes named Kev who smell faintly of woodbines and resentment. 

Just a tidy red-finned roach to remind me I still vaguely knew what I was doing. Ever since that tench turned up last week completely uninvited, the canals have felt all wrong. It’s like the fishing equivalent of accidentally seeing your dentist in Tesco buying Wham Sourz's and Haribo Sparks. The whole balance of the universe goes a bit peculiar.

Truth be told, the canals aren’t doing it for me lately. No rhythm whatsoever. One session you can’t stop catching tiny gudgeon with ambition far beyond their station, then the next it’s deader than a vegan barbecue at a cattle market. Every peg looks perfect until you sit on it for three hours and begin questioning all your life choices. I spent twenty minutes staring at a single bubble trail convincing myself it was feeding fish when in reality it was probably a submerged bicycle quietly rusting to death.

Still, there’s always hope on an early Sunday morning. That magical window before the reprobates arrive. Before somebody starts power-washing a transit van nearby or a cyclist in fluorescent lycra screams “MORNING” directly into your soul at forty miles an hour. Canal dawn has a fragile beauty to it. Moorhens pottering about. Mist lifting off the water. The faint aroma of damp earth mixed with lager and urban regret.

Down on the old cut at Bankside, yours truly arrived at what can only be described as “an hour fit for sensible folk and milkmen.” The canal looked proper fishy too — you know the sort of look, a few dimples on the surface, a suspicious swirl under the far bank and just enough confidence to make a man ignore the fact he’d forgotten his flask. 

Naturally I went into full panic mode and got set-up quick sharpish like a contestant on a timed game show. Out went a bit of mashed bread mixed with groundbait, bread on the hook, float cocked perfectly and suddenly I was fishing. Proper fishing too, not just staring moodily at water pretending to understand nature.

Five minutes later a decent fish launched itself clear of the canal right beside the float like a hairy-arsed salmon auditioning for Countryfile. “Here we go,” I muttered confidently, already mentally photographing myself with a four-pound redfin and composing exaggerated Facebook captions. Naturally the float then sat there like a pensioner at a bus stop. Not a tremble. Not a dip. Absolute naff all. Thirty minutes later I finally had a bite and struck into something solid, only for it to come off after a few seconds. Buggeration of the highest order. The sort of moment where you stare accusingly at the hook as if it personally betrayed you.

Still, there were fish in the swim and that alone was enough to keep hope alive. Two more missed bites followed, each one delivered with all the precision timing of me trying to clap along at a concert after four pints. Then at last — wallop. I struck into a proper fish and the thing tore around the swim like it owed money to dangerous people. At first I thought I’d connected with some colossal canal roach, the sort old blokes lie about in tackle shops, but when it finally surfaced looking thoroughly offended with life it turned out to be a roach-bream hybrid. A lovely fish too, going 2lb 8oz on the scales. Not exactly British record territory, but after recent blanks it may as well have been a marlin from the Amazon.

The funny thing with hybrids is they fight with all the confusion of a fish that doesn’t entirely know what it wants to be. This one lunged about magnificently while I conducted my usual bankside ballet of stumbling backwards, muttering nonsense and praying the hook hold would stay put. Mercifully it did. Another three hybrids followed over the session, one even nudging 2lb 9oz and scrapping like an angry Staffie on espresso, and the next biggest 2lb 8oz which I thought was the same fish at first. Ridiculous fun on light gear and exactly the sort of fishing that keeps you coming back despite all evidence suggesting you should perhaps pursue quieter hobbies like gardening or tax accounting.

At one stage I swapped to maggots hoping for a bonus fish, but all I got was a succession of perch that looked like they’d been assembled from leftover parts. Nice enough little fish, but hardly the stamp of stripey warrior that gets the pulse racing. Still, bites are bites and canal anglers are not proud people. We celebrate almost everything short of catching old shopping trolleys, though admittedly even that sometimes earns a photograph if it’s particularly impressive.

The biggest battle of the morning, however, wasn’t with the fish. Oh no. It was with the tow, the wind and the endless parade of floating canal crud that insisted on dragging the float about like a drunken Labrador on a lead. Presenting bait cleanly became less an act of angling and more a test of emotional resilience with enough debris to start a compost heap. Bits of weed, leaves, mysterious slime and what may once have been somebody’s Greggs wrapper all joined forces against me.

Then, just as things were ticking along nicely, a boat came through at 9:20am with all the subtlety of the German navy entering Warsaw. The swim churned up, the tow increased and the fish disappeared quicker than free bacon sandwiches at a match lake open. Still, all in all it had been a cracking little session. A few proper fish, plenty of action, no blank and best of all — the bailiff never appeared to relieve me of my hard-earned pounds. That alone counts as a result these days.

I’ll definitely be back though. There’s something brewing down there amongst the bread mash, hybrids and canal chaos. Either that or I’m slowly losing my mind beside urban waterways, which admittedly is also very possible.

Transient Towpath Trudging - Pt.149 (Canal Zander)

It was one of those damp, drizzly afternoons on the Warwickshire canals that make a man's whiskers sag and his bait box feel heavier than a sack of spuds. Old Bert, a lock-keeper with more stories than teeth, swore blind this was how the first zander slipped into our sleepy network. Not by some stuffy scientist or bored angler with a bucket, mind. 

No, this was proper Piscatorial Quagswagging at its finest. Bert reckoned it all started when a narrowboat called The Flying Dutchman (though the captain was from Solihull and about as Dutch as a pork pie) came chugging through the Hatton flight one moonless night. 

The fella had been over in Holland, doing whatever it is narrowboaters do when they get ideas above their station. Brought back a couple of "exotic pike" in a big plastic tub, didn't he? Claimed they were for his cousin's garden pond. 

Garden pond my backside. Well, as luck and strong ale would have it, the boat got wedged solid in a lock. Tempers flared, language turned industrial, and in the ensuing kerfuffle the tub went arse-over-tit. Two dozen confused zander, all teeth and attitude, went sloshing straight into the cut with a splash that sounded suspiciously like laughter. 

The captain apparently just shrugged, lit his pipe, and carried on towards Birmingham, whistling as innocent as you like. By morning the zander had already started eyeing up the local perch like they were tomorrow's breakfast. 

Within weeks they were spreading through the Warwickshire ring faster than gossip at a match night. Proper canal pirates, they were. Slimey, stripey, and always hungry. Bert says if you sit quiet by the bank at dusk you can still hear the ghost of that Dutchman (or Solihullman) chuckling every time a big zander grabs a lure, or eats that deadbait. 

Anyway enough of that !! it was one of those damp Midlands evenings where the canal looked less like a place to fish and more like the sort of watery ditch a sensible person would throw shopping trolleys into and avoid altogether. 

The drizzle had settled in properly not proper rain mind you, just that miserable floating wetness that seeps into your cuffs, your sandwich bag and eventually your very soul. The sort of weather that makes moorhens look annoyed at life. Still, there I was, wobbling down the towpath after work with all the optimism of a man who has learned absolutely nothing from previous sessions.

Now canal zander are funny creatures. Funny peculiar, not funny ha-ha. One day you’d swear there were more zander than actual water in the canal. You could lower a lure in and practically bounce it off their foreheads. They’d be stacked up in the margins like stripy little nightclub bouncers waiting for trouble.

Then two days later?

Nothing.

Not a knock. Not a swirl. Not even the courtesy of a missed take. You start questioning whether fish ever existed in the first place or whether you’ve imagined the entire species after eating dodgy service station Cornish pasties. That’s the thing with canal zander. They’re transient. Wandering hooligans. Aquatic gypsies with bad attitudes and excellent eyesight. One minute they’re terrorising a stretch like tiny underwater gangsters and the next they’ve vanished entirely, probably halfway to Coventry chasing romance and roach fry.

And romance, I suspect, is usually to blame.

Because if there’s one thing more unpredictable than a male zander, it’s a female zander in breeding condition. The males follow them about with all the dignity of pub blokes outside a kebab shop at midnight. I imagine the big female zander leading them around the canal like some spikey dorsal-finned pied piper in a greyhound skirt, with half a dozen lovestruck males wobbling after her through the coloured water.

No wonder you can’t locate the beggars.

One minute your hotspot is alive with fish. The next it’s emptier than a politician’s promise.

This late afternoons trip was at least more convenient than last week’s expedition into deepest Warwickshire misery. Tonight’s chosen stretch sat only a few miles from home and crucially on the route back from work, meaning I could disappoint myself far more efficiently than usual. The hotspot itself is one of those classic canal areas that always looks fishy. Bit of depth. Bit of cover. Slightly murky water with enough shopping trolley architecture beneath the surface to shelter a medium-sized submarine. The kind of place where you fully expect either a double-figure zander or a stolen bicycle to grab your lure.

Hit and miss, mind.

Mostly miss.

But when they’re there, they are THERE.

I’ve seen sessions on this stretch where the canal seemed positively possessed. Zander slashing through fry. Perch scattering like panicked confetti. Tiny fish spraying out the water as though being pursued by underwater tax inspectors. Then other nights it resembles a decorative drainage feature outside an industrial estate.

Still, that’s canal fishing.

If certainty is what you want, buy a goldfish, so anyway, how did it go ?

The tow had a nasty pull on it from the off, the sort that drags hope downstream quicker than a forgotten landing net. Still, after spending half the day dodging showers and squinting at weather apps like a man trying to decipher ancient runes, I eventually hot-footed it to the cut with dreams of a canal zander rattling about in the old loaf. 

One rod carried a smelt, the other a modest little roach, and both looked full of promise beneath a stretch illuminated by a watery burst of sunshine. Trouble was, the canal itself resembled builder’s tea after a hard stir, heavily coloured and pushing through with enough tow to make presentation awkward at best. Add in the usual wind tunnelling down the cut and it became one of those sessions more about persistence than pleasure.

I leapfrogged several likely looking areas, with overdepth float rigs tight to cover and dropping baits where any self-respecting predator ought to have been sulking. 

Not a tremble. Not a flicker. The kind of silence that has you checking whether you’ve accidentally forgotten the hooks entirely. Yet anglers are funny creatures; we endure conditions sensible folk would avoid simply because somewhere deep down we need that fix of uncertainty and anticipation, even when the odds look about as favourable as dry socks in November.

In the end the answer came not from pressing onward, but from retracing old footsteps. I dropped back to an overhanging tangle (the banker) that had looked fishy from the start and slipped the smelt beneath the cover .Five minutes later the float jabbed and a spirited little schoolie tried burying itself straight into the thick stuff. Thankfully it was stopped in its tracks before matters became too agricultural, and after a brief but satisfying tussle the blank was avoided. 

With black clouds rolling in like unpaid bills and the first hints of fresh rain on the wind, discretion won the day. One fish, a damp walk home, and chaos waiting on the other side of the front door. 

Canal Roach: Trapped in a Sisyphean Loop - Pt.11

There comes a point in every angler’s life when he realises two things. Firstly, his knees now make the same noise as a keepnet pole being assembled in January, and secondly, the little lad he once carried down the towpath clutching a net bigger than himself is suddenly fifteen years old and asking if you’ve got Wi-Fi in the Jimny.

Fifteen!

I still remember taking Sam fishing for the very first time, eleven years ago, when he believed catching gudgeon was comparable to wrestling crocodiles on the Zambezi. Back then he’d sit there in oversized wellies, chucking maggots into the margins while asking questions every fourteen seconds. “Why do fish like worms?” “Do perch have ears?” “Can pike eat ducks?” “Would a shark survive in the canal?”

Now he just grunts at me like a teenage badger unless the conversation involves trainers that cost more than my centrepin reel collection. Mind you, there’s hope yet. He still loves the River Wye. 

Mention wading chest-deep after barbel or stalking summer chub with floating bread and suddenly the lad reappears from beneath the hormonal fog. 

There’s something reassuring about that. Rivers still beat Playstations. Nature still beats TikTok. Bread still beats £14.99 wonder-baits endorsed by a man called Darren wearing mirrored sunglasses indoors.

So with renewed optimism I stopped off at The Case is Altered on the way home from work.

Now there’s a pub.

Over four hundred years old and still stubbornly refusing to modernise itself into a gastropub called “The Rustic Spoon” selling deconstructed pies on roof tiles. No televisions. No neon lager signs. 

No artisan hummus. Just beams blackened by centuries of smoke, a proper pub, and enough atmosphere to make you expect a highwayman to emerge from the shadows asking if you’ve seen his horse. Use your mobile you’re fined a quid and it goes to charity, and I’m not joking. 

Apparently it was originally called “The Case” because the building was tiny, which is fair enough because if you swing a cat in there you’ll hit three pensioners and a packet of pork scratchings. Somewhere along the line when it was extended it became “The Case Is Altered,” which sounds less like a pub and more like something a medieval solicitor muttered before charging somebody six groats an hour.

Ben Jonson used the phrase. Shakespeare used it. Tudor playwrights used it. Nowadays it’s mostly used by anglers after dropping a net pole into deep water. Anyway, after a pint and a moment of deep reflection involving crisps, I decided against all available evidence and basic common sense to return to Tramp Alley.

Now most sane men, having previously endured a session involving missed bites, tangled rigs and enough incompetence to qualify for a government grant, would probably choose another peg. Not me. Oh no. I approached it with the confidence of a man who has watched three YouTube videos and now considers himself tactically elite. This time there would be changes. Serious changes. Tactical changes. The sort of changes football managers describe before losing 4–0 away at Rotherham.

Out went the lift method.

Out went the overcomplicated rig that looked like it had been designed by NASA during a power cut.

In came Sensas 3000 Gros Gardons groundbait with a suspiciously technical “nadger” of liquidised bread. Angling has become wonderfully scientific these days. Thirty years ago my grandad used bread mashed in an old ice-cream tub and occasionally caught fish so large they altered local geography. Now every bag of groundbait sounds like a Formula One component.

Then came the float.

The Dave Harrell SENSITIP WAGGLER.

A float so sensitive, according to the description and Nic from Avon Angling (who is on cloud 9 having caught a 4lb crucian recently), that fish merely thinking about the bait should register as a bite. Crosshead insert. Ultra-low resistance. Enhanced visibility. Adjustable tip. It sounded less like tackle and more like something used by heart surgeons. Naturally I spent twenty minutes adjusting it by microscopic amounts before eventually convincing myself that the red tip was psychologically intimidating the roach.

The rig itself was wonderfully simple. small float, centrepin reel, Maggots. Straight-through 2lb line. Proper old-school fishing. The sort of set-up that whispers, “I’ve stopped trying to impress everybody.”

Of course, simplicity in fishing lasts approximately four minutes before chaos resumes.

There are fishing sessions that fill a man with confidence, pride and dreams of becoming the next Richard Walker. Then there are sessions like this one, where you spend four hours staring at a float harder than a pensioner stares at a self-service checkout while questioning every life decision that led you to sitting next to a canal known locally as “Tramp Alley”.

The day started with optimism. Foolish optimism. The kind of optimism only anglers and people who buy scratchcards possess. Armed with the Angling Direct float rod, which has all the subtle finesse of a Victorian lamp post, I settled in convinced the roach would be queuing up to fling themselves at my maggots like drunk blokes outside a kebab shop at 2am.

After approximately three geological eras, the float finally buried and I struck into what felt like a decent fish. The rod reacted with all the sensitivity of a scaffold pole, the fish came off after a couple of seconds, and I was left staring into the middle distance muttering words that would have got me excommunicated in medieval times. Thankfully it didn’t feel massive because losing a proper lump this early in the session would probably have resulted in me throwing the centrepin directly into the canal and taking up bowls.

Naturally I assumed this first bite meant the swim had switched on. It had not. In fact the canal immediately died harder than Woolworths. There were the occasional signs of life: a tiny fish topping here and there, and at one point a skimmer launched itself completely clear of the water while being chased by something nasty underneath. It looked like a silver frisbee being hurled by Satan himself. This at least confirmed there was more life in the canal than there was in my swim.

It seemed like hours passed (it was 2). My backside had fused permanently to the chair then, just as I’d mentally started planning my next hobby, the float slid purposefully toward the reeds opposite. I struck and all hell broke loose. The fish bolted sideways like it had seen HMRC approaching. The centrepin screamed, my thumb instantly became an emergency braking system, and for a few moments I genuinely believed I’d hooked either a giant hybrid or an escaped Labrador.

The fight was glorious. Proper lunges, savage runs, the rod bent over magnificently despite possessing all the refinement of industrial plumbing equipment. Eventually the fish surfaced and I nearly fell off the chair.

A tench.

A BLOODY TENCH.

I honestly stared at it like I’d just hooked a crocodile in the South Stratford. Beautiful olive green flanks, little red eyes glaring at me as if annoyed I’d interrupted its afternoon. Turns out I’d actually caught one here years ago (2014) according to the blog archives, though I’d assumed Barry the Otter had long since converted the local tench population into compost. Suddenly the whole grim session felt worthwhile. Isn’t fishing ridiculous? You can spend 2 hours fishless and questioning your own sanity, then one surprise tinca turns up and suddenly you’re driving home grinning like an escaped lunatic.

Mind you, one thing did become painfully obvious while taking the photos in the gloom: the iPhone 11 front camera is now about as sharp as a mashed potato sandwich. Time for an upgrade I think. As for the roach… where have they all gone? Have they emigrated? Joined witness protection? Been entirely consumed by Barry and his extended family? Nobody knows. But one thing is certain: Tramp Alley can absolutely do one for a while.

Next trip, new venue.

Probably still disappointment.