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.

Transient Towpath Trudging - Pt.148 (Canal Zander)

There comes a point in every working man’s life when retirement stops being some distant fantasy involving garden centres, sensible cardigans and a mild interest in bird tables. It becomes something far more important. A target. A finish line. A desperate crawl toward freedom whilst sat in a design studio pretending that I'm enjoying working on rugged Indian SUV's. 

By half three my brain had liquified somewhere between a client email and a discussion about steering wheel ride-down conflict to the CAS surfaces, so naturally the only sensible course of action was to head for the canal and attempt to catch zander. Because if there’s one thing anglers excel at, it’s replacing one form of disappointment with another.

Now this particular stretch had been ridiculously good for zander over the last couple of years.  Of course, as happens with all good fishing spots, word spread quicker than a scandal in a village pub. You only have to casually mention “had a few zander” within earshot of another angler and suddenly there’s more blokes in camouflage hanging around than a surplus army warehouse. 

Nic from Avon Angling soon decided to get involved after hearing about my recent captures, only by then the fish had vanished into thin air. Typical canal zander behaviour. One day they’re stacked up in numbers like shoppers outside Aldi at Christmas, the next day the place resembles an abandoned bathtub. Poor Nic blanked completely, which is the fishing equivalent of turning up to a birthday party after everyone’s gone home and the balloons are being deflated.

Still, despite all available evidence suggesting otherwise, I fancied my chances this evening. Anglers possess the memory retention of goldfish when it comes to bad sessions. We conveniently remember the magical evenings whilst mentally deleting the six-hour blanks in sideways rain where we considered selling all our tackle and taking up bowls. 

Before reaching the canal I stopped off at Sainsbury’s Local for supplies and immediately experienced the modern British condition of laughing bitterly at the price of basic bread. Warburtons now sits on the shelf like some luxury artisan product for hedge fund managers and Premier League footballers. I picked up a loaf, checked the price and genuinely considered whether I’d need finance options.

Fortunately salvation appeared in the reduced section in the form of toastie loafs marked down to forty pence. Forty pence! I nearly applauded. At that price I considered buying the entire basket and opening a small independent bakery out the back of my car. Perfect for river season too because chub absolutely adore floating bread. 

Frankly, some of those river chub probably eat better than most families now. Somewhere under an overhanging willow there’s a six-pound fish refusing budget crusts like some sort of underwater food critic. “Hmm yes… disappointing texture… insufficient fermentation on the crumb…” Cheap bread in hand and optimism restored, I headed toward the canal feeling oddly victorious despite technically celebrating discounted carbohydrates.

Conditions looked absolutely spot on when I arrived. Slight tinge of colour in the water, warm evening, low light and that lovely stillness canals get where everything feels fishy even when it absolutely isn’t. The kind of atmosphere that convinces you every cast could produce a personal best or at the very least justify ignoring responsibilities at home. 

I started at the exact stretch where I’d caught before, already mentally rehearsing how I’d casually describe my captures later as though this sort of thing happened all the time. First cast, nothing. Second cast, nothing. Third cast resulted in snagging what I believe was either a submerged bicycle or the last remaining fragments of British manufacturing.

An hour later I’d worked every inch of that fifty-yard stretch with absolutely nothing to show for it. No follows, no knocks, not even a tiny perch stupid enough to save my dignity. You know things are getting desperate when you begin convincing yourself that random twitches in the line are bites. Every tiny tap suddenly becomes evidence the fish are “just being finicky tonight.”

No Mick, they aren’t being finicky. There simply aren’t any fish there. I stood staring into the canal trying to project confidence whilst internally unravelling like a pension fund during a market crash. Eventually boredom overcame stubbornness and I decided to move up toward the proper hotspot where the fish had been stacked previously.

Now this is where the dangerous optimism kicks back in. Every angler knows the feeling. The second you approach an area with previous form, your confidence returns despite overwhelming historical proof that fish operate entirely outside the laws of logic. I started fan-casting every likely feature. Lock mouths, reed lines, dark shadows beneath moored boats where shopping trolleys and human ambition go to die. Everything looked absolutely textbook. 

The sort of spots magazine articles point at with arrows and captions saying “prime predator holding area.” Yet once again, absolutely nothing happened. It was deader than a town centre on a Monday morning. Even the ducks looked bored.

Then a boat came through and churned the canal bottom up beautifully. Normally that’s prime time. Zander often switch on after disturbance and begin hunting in the coloured water, so naturally my confidence shot through the roof again for absolutely no reason whatsoever. I stood there clutching the rod with renewed anticipation, already imagining that float off at any moment. 

But no. Not a sniff. The only thing that came alive after the boat passed was my lower back and a sudden awareness that I’m no longer physically designed for standing on uneven towpaths for four consecutive hours. At one point I made a noise getting up off my tackle bag that sounded like somebody slowly crushing a packet of crisps.

Eventually I admitted defeat and decided to call it a day. Sometimes canal fishing feels less like a hobby and more like a prolonged psychological experiment designed to test how much rejection one human can tolerate before taking up gardening instead. 

Yet weirdly, despite the blank, despite the disappearing fish and despite the increasing certainty that retirement cannot come soon enough, I still enjoyed it. For a few hours I forgot about politics, taxes, inflation and the general depressing circus that modern life has become. I wasn’t thinking about energy bills, work emails or whether I can justify buying branded bread anymore. It was just me, the canal and several thousand pounds worth of fish completely ignoring my existence in peaceful silence.

And honestly, that’s probably why we keep going back. It isn’t entirely about catching fish, although obviously that helps enormously. It’s the escape from all the nonsense. The quiet wander along the towpath . The ridiculous optimism that maybe this session will be the night everything comes together again. Of course next time I’ll probably blank once more and spend the drive home muttering darkly about deadbaits and boat traffic like some unhinged conspiracy theorist. But I’ll still return. Because somewhere in that murky canal there’s a zander waiting to completely ruin my evening in exactly the right way.