Transient Towpath Trudging - Pt.28

So I was back with Sam to the same swim which 24 hours before produced quite a few bites from Mr and Mrs Slabby. This time though a sleeper Zander deadbait rod out and Sam would fish his whip whilst I'd chill out and watch. This area literally has acres of wild garlic and that pungency hangs around in the surrounding air, no vampires to be seen here, well apart from the Zander that is. 

Now Supercrush Green from Sonubaits was a key ingredient to the success I had yesterday I would say. Why ? Well sometimes confidence is the key in fishing and I've used this a few times now and there is no doubt it attracts fish in to the swim.

A blend of fishmeal and crushed koi pellets it certainly attracted the bream that's for certain but it also kept them grubbing around in the swim. I added a few small pellets in to the mix which helped I'm sure so would this session live up to the whip bending it produced yesterday ?
 

Now locating bream in canals is not always an easy mater. 

The shoals you see tend to roam up and down the boat-road in search of food and in my experience there will only be a few bream in any swim. 

If one bream is seen or caught, it is a practical certainly that there will be others in the vicinity.

Now after seeing a decent one roll here many moons ago when I was chasing canal Zander it is an obvious place where the roving angler would stop and set the gear down. 

You see from a rather lacklustre looking canal all of a sudden open country side and feature aplenty. 

Bait I'm sure goes in here more than any other area in a good walking distance. It's just one of those areas that screams fish and believe you me from often huge quantities of very featureless cutting all of a sudden you have plenty going on from reeds, overhanging trees and submerged roots. 

Now I'm not likely to visit a commercial venue anytime soon where spods of bait add to the fishes girth, but any leg up the ladder on these sort of forgotten venues is a must if you are to get a bite or two where often sections of canal can appear and often are devoid of fish.

And talking of devoid of fish, well Sam and I hot footed it to the same swim where bites were aplenty but there was a huge chop on the surface where the wind was making if difficult to see the float. 

After feeding the swim as before I thought it was only a mater of time before Sam's float would go under, but no, an hour went by with no action whatsoever. Those fish most likely vacated to another area of the canal.

Perseverance brought a bite though and at first I thought it was a hard fighting hybrid, but no it was another eel which do seem to have made a comeback on this canal. Now I'd have stuck it out in the swim but Sam wanted to move so we retraced our steps and set-up 40 yards away where the water was still which made the float easier to see.

The first culprit to hover in the maggots was a ruffe which was a welcome sight considering the predatory fish that live here too. Which reminds me throughout the 2 hour session the Zander rod fishing a roach deadbait didn't have anything pick it up whatsoever.  
 
24 hours is certainly a long time in fishing where canal fishing can often be bomb or bust. This was definitely a bust session compared to the last.

Another move with Sam now searching for sticks and stones to annoy his Dad, we only fed maggots this time and 15 minutes with the float in the water it buried and a lovely plump roach succumbed to Sam's whip.

And that was that, it was a scratching round for bites day where the bream were nowhere to be seen. What an odd session, we'll be back though, there is some nice fish here and to be honest, it was nice to catch a variety of species even though they were not the intended target. 

Transient Towpath Trudging - Pt.27

I didn't get far in to 'The Art of Canal Fishing - Billy Makins' which is on Amazon Video as when he started to talk about size 22 hooks and 14 ounce hooklengths it got a bit alien to me if I'm honest. 

The pioneer of non-bloodworm tactics by the use of maggots he amassed a huge bag full of fish after a quick fast forward (well ok, not quite 3lb) but he did get plenty of bites I might add. Now the most popular bait used by canal anglers must be maggots. Every known species of fish will take them, and some anglers use little else throughout the season. 

In years gone by the most |popular maggots are probably ‘gozzers’ (no not rozzers Sam !!! ) a strain carefully bred in the flesh of dead game birds and ‘annato’ maggots, which were bred in hearts impregnated with annato dye. ‘Squats’ and ‘pinkies’ are smaller maggots used almost solely for groundbaiting.

Breeding these maggots is a specialist’s job which should not be attempted by the amateur until he has acquainted himself with all the necessary related information. Laws exist regarding the breeding of maggots. If they are contravened, prosecution can result.

The normal colouring of maggots is white or pale yellow, but they can be dyed various colours. The most popular colours are red and bronze. Blue and green maggots can be obtained too. Coloured maggots look more attractive to the human eye, but whether or not fish find them so is a matter for conjecture. Experiments conducted by research workers indicate that fish have a wider range of visual achievement than is generally believed, so the appeal of coloured maggots cannot be altogether discounted. 

Nevertheless, the angler using maggots should concentrate on size and liveliness rather than colour. Fish are stimulated more by movement and size than they are by colour. A fat, soft and lively maggot will usually take more fish than a small, tough maggot, irrespective of its colour. Odour is important too, and if the maggots are sweaty and have an unpleasant smell. 

They should be cleaned several times in bran before use and then kept in a large tin with some maize flour to aid separation. Plenty of holes in the lid otherwise they could get like Keir Starmer awaiting the police report on curry and beergate. 

For this session you see it was out with the maggots and a little groundbait for attraction, I just fancied a bite or two you see and I'd earmarked a swim I walked past recently that had some nice reeds close in which could well offer sanctuary for some fish. There are some nice hybrids here but the plan was to start on the whip initially and see what turned up and then switch to a more suitable float rod if I was under gunned. 

Only a short session but with work becoming all-consuming (tooling releases immanent for the components I've been designing) just a couple of hours here and there really does work wonders for the mind. Just a little time away from the diary makers and timetable dictators gets me back on track again.  

One day mandatory in the office now where to be honest with the tunes on the CAD machine is bashed far more frequently WFH, still it's good to see people other than the wallet raiders. 

Anyway for some reason I'd missed a couple of 'unmissable' bites on the lift float set-up so I was hoping a more conventional approach would lead to more fish hooked and less bites missed. 

It could well have been smaller fish dislodging the 'trigger' shot without getting the hook anywhere near their mouths. (I was using gob stopping 30mm folded disks after all.

Anyway to the fishing, boy bream dreaming or what !!!

After plumbing the depth and fishing just up the slope I fed some groundbait and it it didn't take long for the first bite and then the bites kept on coming. All on maggot with the odd one on maggot and tiny worm combo. 

I missed a few bites as well but the whip did an admirable job apart from a hard hybrid that give me the middle finger and despite the whip bent double and me following it down the canal the size 16 hook pulled.

You do wonder why canals in this neck of the woods are hardly fish because 6 decent sized bream, two small eels, one foul hooked would have been heading towards a 20lb bag of fish all within a couple of hours.

The biggest wasn't this one, but one approaching 4lb or so I'd imagine, the sun washing the picture out completely. This is about the best I could muster up. Certainly an enjoyable session and I'm actually enjoying this canal fishing lark now when I'm just fishing for bites. I'll be back I think, next time with Sam in tow hopefully. 

Transient Towpath Trudging - Pt.26

I knew I should have gone home but glutton for punishment I suppose and I wanted to try and track down a canal carp. When I first started fishing this canal there were those carp holding spots that would be the same year on year, and if it wasn't for the canal Zander quest taking all my time, they would have been well worth targeting.

To be fair I did catch one and also lost two, the two that were lost were always tucked up in thick cover (now sadly thinned to an inch of its life) and when hooked despite fishing as tight as I'd dare, the initial run was far too violent and they always knew where they were going. 

Anyway on route to the first bit of cover early doors are jogger was heading towards me when out of nowhere a deer came from a field to my left, proceeded to jump straight in to the middle of the canal and they unlike some I've seen recently managed to get out without much issue. 

But that was a lively as it got as lift float and bread zilch, a sleeper bread bomb, naff all but there is one big issue here and that is that the thick cover the carp used to hold up here in their numbers, like lots of the local canal stretches for some reason has been removed in huge quantities.  

Cover provides sanctuary and safety for fish especially the larger fish and the reality is if it's not there anymore the fish have likely moved on.

How would you feel if the Canal and Rivers Trust turned up at your gaff, proceeded to remove your roof and then for good measure gave you a kidney punch and then with the overly engineered clippers gave you a no.1. 

Yeah you wouldn't like it either.....

Boat traffic was nonexistent for the duration of the session and yet even the bream, roach or hybrids didn't seem to be interested. 

So I decided to venture to the next bit of cover which had held carp in the past but the Zander seemed to have muscled them out over the years. Same story here nothing on either of the tactics leaving me thinking whether I should I brought my Zander gear. 

On route to the last area a 30 metre section of reeds was alive with Zander spawning the video below taken as I was leaving, at 7.45am there was splashing and fish properly breaking surface, this sadly only the post session cigarette, believe you me, they definitely looked like they were having fun. 

I left them to it and went to the last bit of cover where it went like this....

The first bite on the lift method bread rod missed !!!

The second bite exactly the same as the first, struck in to nothing despite a classic 4 inch lift !!!!

The third bite, YES, a fish on !!!! well for a couple of seconds anyway as it dropped off 😬

Hmmm great, not going well is it...

....to be fair there was one saving grace as a carp revealed its back clear of the water and at least raised my eyebrows. The problem was there no chance in hell getting a bait to it as it was beyond a tangled mess of branches. I positioned the bread bomb as close as I'd dared but it didn't budge at all and even some bread thrown to plop straight out in front of it were completely ignored. Not unusual with canal carp because in my limited experience you cannot provoke them in to feeding. 

So that was a wrap, a blank and hardly any bites sadly. There is much warmer weather on the way though so better for fish spotting as its amazing with strong sun over their heads they often dust off their sandals and head for the sun beds.