stevetheangler

Well, the replacement bite alarms (£32 all-inc from eBay) have now arrived via the Royal Mail this morning…

All worked well on testing – and the receiver also detects the old heads. So as the old set had green, red and (broken) blue LED heads, and this new set has yellow, red and blue LED ones it means (a) I’ve a spare red head and (b) all 4 colours are now operative! Academic really as I only use 2 rods at a time but it also means I can swap heads to suit lighting conditions for best operation. Cool!

And last week I was informed I’d won a ‘Hardy Marksmen Smuggler Carryall’ in a magazine competition.

And it was delivered yesterday. An excellent item – and something I really wanted! Normally £80 in the shops!

I’ve wanted a better bag than the current one I use for my early morning canal sessions – and this looks the absolute ideal item. As I’m planning a canal trip on Monday it will be field tested then. It seems just the right size for my needs with pockets to accomodate my camera and scales, etc as I would want to do. Flask and a few choccie bars along with bait and my few items of tackle will fit nicely too – and maybe get bait in there too but that’s not so important as I always take a bucket along too. Bucket acts as a carrier for baits and all kinds of odds and ends like catapults, spombs, etc and also as my fishing seat in conjunction with one of these type of seats …

… which I use closed/folded up and just lay over the bucket to sit on. When river fishing I sometimes do open the seat up and place it on the ground and take advantage of the back rest to gain a bit of comfort but with canals there is (a) not enough room to stretch out legs without encroaching on the tow path and getting in the way of bikers/ramblers and (b) canal banks are generally flat and so you have to stretch your legs out straight in front which make it difficult to stand up (esp with my age and flexibility it’s bad enough rising from a proper seat!) – but saying that, in the summer I have used the seat as it is meant to be used by rolling up trouser legs, removing shoes/sock and dangling feet in the canal! :)

Also, I bought from Lidl one of those small flexible tripods that wraps around branches, etc  for the camera (£5.99) – before I’ve used a bankstick/camera adaptor for the job but sometimes the ground is too hard to accomodate a bankstick, etc but this can be twisted onto the rod-pod or leg of my chair or to the branch of a convenient tree, etc…

…but that’s not my camera – mine’s a Kodak C142 compact type. Better than that Nikon for my purpose!! :D The reason – my Kodak’s self-timer has a 2-shot option – ie you can set the self timer so that it fires 10 seconds after clicking the button (which is what most cameras do) BUT the Kodak can also fire another shot another 8 seconds later which is great! Usually 10 seconds is a bit of a dash to get from pressing the camera shutter, back to the fish on unhooking mat, uncovering fish, lifting and then taking up the ‘pose’ and quite often the camera fires before you’re ready requiring the whole sequence to be gone through again… but the second firing allows that extra time to actually get everything right and often that’s it all done – very rarely is another try required – and if the first shot worked out ok then there’s 2 good pics. The camera’s also got a burst mode – fires a shot every second or something like that – but never used it as the 2-shot timer has worked fine and the burst would take far to many pics requiring deleting the one’s not wanted regularly.