stevetheangler

Yesterday, 22nd July 2016, Liz and I set off for a club pool (WL2) in search of whatever came along on another hot and bright summer’s day… however our chosen spots ensured we were well shaded from the height of the heat for most of the day – my spot the sun fell on me from 1500 for a short time although I think Liz’s did become a morning sun trap for a while…

On arrival there was one carp-type angler there – well, I say angler but he seemed to spend a fair bit of time wandering round the pool and his mobile phone never seemed to leave his ear, sat or walking – who seemed set up to stay for 24+ hours with his bivvy set up. He did land 2 or 3 fish over the day that we saw but nothing of note really.

Any road up, we made first casts probably around 0830 with myself fishing a sliding 3AAA bodied waggler  on 6lb line, size 10 hook baited with worm/maggot which was my bait for 99% of the day – did try bread but that was nibbled away in minutes and meat which went untouched. Liz started off with an open-end cage swimfeeder with maggot, corn, meat but had only one very small perch in several hours before switching to the float and maggot and starting to catch perch.

We did discover one problem with Liz’s float rod – the tip ring is far too small. Due to the depth of the water a sliding float arrangement was needed – and the smallest size of  the Gardner float stops that we use barely passed through the ring and thus casting was difficult as the passage of line was ‘checked’ severely… in the end we settled to fish, on-the-drop’, with the deepest position that it could fall at about 3′-4′ above bottom… However, that didn’t seem to cause to much of a problem as Liz started catching faster than I was when using a full drop to the bottom…And, in fact, many times my bait ws being taken before even the top shot had sunk with the float ‘motor boating’ horizontally across the surface…

We also had a visit or two from the police helicopter – who it seems were searching for someone as they passed so low on one pass that the draught from the blades wafted the floats….

Anyway, we fished until 1700 and then packed up before heading to one of our local houses of hospitality (PUB!) for a couple of pints of liquid replenishment…. and a recommendation for the Titanic Brewery’s “Raspberry Wheat Beer” is fully in order… Often these flavoured beers are hit-or-miss but this is definitely a centre gold! And another ‘beer’ to look out for is ‘Polish Plum Beer’ – can’t remember the (Polish, obviously) brewer, and really as a beer (hence the quotes above) its totally crap BUT as a drink its the BEST thing you’ll ever drink in your life – like the results of an acre plum orchard compressed down into a pint glass basically – and SO more-ish… when Wetherspoon’s had it on tap in one of their beer festivals quite a few years ago we’d get through 6 pints or more in the lunchtime!! :) OH!!! you want to know just what did we catch? … Well, I had 46 small perch with biggest at about 12oz although only about 6 were >8oz … and Liz had 20+ small perch to 4oz or so.

SOMETHING ELSE:
Another local blogger (Stewart Bloor: https://theanglingrev.com) mentioned in one of his weekly logs that he leaves on a longer than usual tag to his hook knots … it acts as a ‘soft above hook barb’ that prevents wriggly baits like worms working their way off the hook . Anyway, I tried this but in that manner it didn’t work that well for me possibly because Stewart uses Maxima line which I find stiff and wirey and I use Diawa Hyper Sensor myself as its softer. So it seems the stiffness of the Maxima works to its advantage for this but I needed to produce a similar effect that could be used with my choice line – and so I did as follows…:)

Take a 6″ length of stiff line – I had in my bag some 6lb ‘feeder line’ that had been a front of magazine giveaway at some time and this was as least as, if not more, stiff as Maxima. Pass this stiff line halfway through the eye of the hook and fold so both ends are parallel with the mainline (1)…. hold tight to the mainline (so now you have the loose tag end of the mainline and the mainline and doubled stiff line  (2) …. tie 5-turn half blood with tuck knot (or use your own personally preferred knot) by wrapping loose mainlinetag around both mainline and the 2 stiffline tags and tighten, etc as per usual (3)…. and finally trim off the 2 stiff line ends to leave about 1/2″ or so sticking out to act as ‘barbs’ (4)… This worked perfectly for me yesterday and prevented the worms balling and masking the point when hooking the worm through the tail, then again at the ‘saddle’ (the lumpy bit towards the head) pulling the line and ‘barbs’ completely through and then hooking the worm head lightly onto the bend of the hook itself….