stevetheangler

Tuesday, 1st July 2014, at 0730 and I arrived at our club’s tench pool on a glorious sunny morning and went to my chosen swim at peg 11 which is my usual swim these days with a patch of lily pads to my left, the end of the island with overhanging bushes and vegatation directly in front and to my right and a channel between lily pads and island – so a number of options of areas to fish.

As usual I fed up in front of me just off the island and also to my left in the channel and just off the lily pads with crumb, pellet, maggot and particles for my float rod – and to my right I baited with prawn and mussel for the leger rod.

I did notice that the water was unexpectedly murky given the dry weather we’d been having although we did have a fair bit of rain on the Friday of last week – and possibly with hard baked ground not soaking up the rain must have run straight into the pool – and also the pool is brook fed too, and the brook borders cow fields and so the run off may have been high in nutrients. Anyway, in colour it looked like a pre-used teabag had been re-used in a pint mug and a teaspoon of milk added – a sort of misty opalescence being apparent. Also noticeable throughout most of the day was the lack of fish ’action’ over the pool – fry dappling the surface, bow waves, fish rolling and jumping – it was all very eerily still….

So I fished with maggot and/or worm on the float rod fished in the various baited up areas to which frequent small numbers of catapulted maggots were added over the day –  and started with mussel on the leger rod which, after two hours without a touch, I switched to prawn.

Anyway, action, as you can detect from the title was very little and in my nine  hours of fishing I caught 2 tench (3lb 0oz and 2lb 9oz), had three hook pulls (but probably largest fish <1lb), and a few missed bites on the float rod and on the leger rod with prawn I had a few short pulls but nothing capable of being struck at. Fish were in the area though as my float indicated the line below being moved by fish passing and from tail wafting from time to time.

Plans ahead – well, Friday I’m back to the carp pool where I was last Friday with hopefully the weather a bit better. A friend has told me of an area where the tench are said to congregate so I’ll be fishing there and its an area I’ve not fished before so that will be interesting… also I’m hoping to meet up with same friend – who was also at the tench pool and we’d fished opposite sides of the pool and not realised it until we were loading and driving away!!

TACKLE TALK

Bobbin Rings!! I bet you’ve never heard of them although they’ve been in use since the 70’s when I ‘invented’ them. Well, I’ve certainly NEVER EVER seen anyone else with a bobbin ring equipped rod in my life.

What has brought them to mind is that I’ve just fitted my current leger rods with them. Easily done – just one rod ring required per rod, and mine are fitted on with just a few wraps of plastic insulation tape and so the installation takes literally two minutes at most – but the difference is SO good!

OK – a bit of physics first to explain the thought behind….

Imagine a simple 3’ piece of line just passing through your butt ring with a light weight attached to the end nearest to the reel so that it dangles down 18”… taking the loose end of line pull 12” of line towards the end of the butt… what happens? Well, the weight rises 12” obviously..

Ok, now take 6’ of line, pass it through the swivel of a small Arlesey bomb and fold back on itself so that you’ve 3’ of doubled line with the weight in the fold. Pass the loose ends through butt ring and let the weight dangle as before. So instead of a weight tied to a single piece of 3’ line, you’ve now a sliding weight in the middle of 3’ doubled line… now, holding one end of the loose line steady, pull 12” of line with the other end… What happens? Well, 12” of line has been pulled but due to the doubling of the line and the sliding weight, the 12” taken is made up of 6” of the line either side of the weight and so the lead actually only rises 6”….

NOW… this case is in fact a ‘best’ result… in that both sides of the line rising from the swivel are vertical. If we move the lines so that they angle away from each other – as would be the case of a bobbin attached to line running between to rod rings – to form a ‘V’ shape then the further away the tops of the ‘V’ are from each other then the less the bobbin will rise – and if the angle of the line measured at the bobbin is 90 degrees then the rise in response to a line pull will equate to ¼ of the line taken – in our 12” case the bobbin will rise only 3”. And as the rod rings increase in distance from each other and/or the drop measured from rod butt to the bobbin decreases so will the relative lift of the bobbin in response to line being taken and so therefore less visually apparent. Also as the angle decreases so does the force required to straighten the angle further and so an increasing resistance is being applied to the fishes taking of more line which can lead to the bait being dropped prematurely… I’m not going into the maths of that as its beyond the scope of this blog – but if you want to look it up then Google for ‘parallelogram of forces’.

Right, so what we want to do is increase sensitivity (ie get as much movement shown by the bobbin as possible) and decrease resistance…. and its all done with one rod ring of the same type and size as your current one and some whipping cotton – or plastic insulation tape. Total cost easily <£5….

OK – now prepare for the magic….

Take extra butt ring…. hold onto butt of rod about 2”-3” below and in line with the current butt ring… whip/tape on….. errrrrr, job done!!! J

The short distance between that double butt ringing then means that any bobbin placed on the line between those two rings will hang almost vertically thus maximising the line_taken:bobbin_rising ratio… and as the angle of the line at the bobbin decreases very slowly then there is (a) less resistance and (b) change of increasing resistance is very slow.