stevetheangler

OK … I’m going to start with the BLOOPER of all bloopers made in the last posting…. and to be honest it was THE major point of the posting…

Saturday evening I picked up my normal everyday phone –  as opposed to the (older) phone I take fishing with me as I’ve lost/dunked too many good phones over the years – and discovered something…

Firstly, I’ll set the scene by describing the Deeper Sonar applications for better understanding…

1. There is the phone application that communicates with the sonar when it is in use and this has several modes of gathering data, the one I mainly use is the ‘bathymetric scan’ which allows the sonar to transmit data regarding the depth plus its location, via its inbuilt GPS function, back to the application where it is stored as data that is then re-accessible to be shown as a map – so it displays a contour map of water’s bottom. It also records located fish….
2. The data collected can also be stored to the user’s personal account on a special server where it can be accessed by PC, tablet, etc via a web application called ‘LakeBook’… and so a water can be completely scanned over several sessions to create a full contour map … and the mappings of differing waters can be stored to create a library for future references…

So, as I said, I picked up my non-fishing phone and accessed my ’Lakebook’ page and the mapping taken on that last session … and I start playing the scan back …. and hundreds of sizeable (ie 1lb+, individual icons) fish are being shown … ‘that’s weird’, I think to myself…. and go and get my Android tablet with the same result …. Ummmm… whereupon I check the sonar app settings on my fishing phone – and discover that somehow I had inadvertently managed to turn off the ‘Show Fish Icons’ option – which was in a menu I didn’t actually know existed until I read the sonar’s manual … but previously the icons had been showing on all my scans so I don’t know what happened there.

SO…. the previous posting’s header wasn’t right at all as it appears that the fish were still there in the numbers as previously found. So missing fish weren’t the reason for lack of bites….

Anyway, now to the current session….

Monday 25th March, I headed off to a mixed species pool (AA-B) – which now contains carp having been previously carp free alongside the usual silvers, tench, perch, gudgeon, barbel, chub, etc… arriving around 0715 and found the pool deserted – and it remained so all day apart from myself – and that applied to the other adjoining pool too – so ‘millionaire’s fishing’ as we say.

I elected to fish one of my favourite swims – one that is adjacent to the end of a small island – and on arrival I immediately fed the two intended swim areas both just off the island, the main one in front with a few ‘pults full of dead maggot, hemp and corn and a secondary swim off to the right with the same plus a few small prawns.

The main swim I floatfished (lift bite method) with maggot (6lb line, size 16 hook), and the secondary swim was fished with a ledger rod (6lb line, size 6 hook) on an alarm and baited variously with prawn, bread and meat … and first cast with the ledger rod was made at 0800 .. first proper cast with the float rod around 15 minutes later…

So, let’s deal with the ledger rod – not a single touch all day long on any of the tried baits… done! LOL!

The float rod did fare better although first cast wasn’t the best as, due to the sun directly in my eyes as I cast, I overcast into the edge an island bush and lost end tackle and float and had to re-tackle… first bite on double maggot, missed, came at a little after 0900 … and at around 0945 came the first capture of the day, a perch of around 2oz…. followed by a tiny (<1oz) bream also on double maggot. I was getting a lot of float lifts and nudges that were unstrikeable or missed and so I decided to drop to a single maggot … and almost immediately had a better fish … a 4oz perch :) … followed by the best fish of the day, a 3lb 4oz mirror carp…

… and by the time I packed in at 1430 I also had two more perch of 2oz and 4oz. The bite/capture rate definitely improved when using a single maggot rather than 2-3 on the hook and the largest fish came to single maggot too.

It may seem not a great tally but this water can be moody at the best of times – referring to the days when I smoked we used to judge the day on the number of cigs smoked, the lesser the better the fishing had been as there had been no time to light up…. and on that system this pool would vary between 0 cigs to 3 packs … and this pool is also notoriously a warm weather pool not usually producing at its best until late May. So I’m happy with that result.

Also noted that this water would normally be fairly clear except after heavy rain but we’ve have no rain for a fair few days now but the water was quite murky – evidence of the introduced carp….

FISHSPY ECHO – FURTHER THOUGHTS:

I’ve had further thoughts about that new upcoming combined camera/sonar device – and don’t think its for me.

I was thinking it would just be a matter of clicking a menu item in an app on the phone to instantaneously switch from sonar->camera->sonar … and think that would be the case IF you wanted to film from the surface downwards BUT to use the camera underwater would require weighting to sink it … and the sonar needs to be weightless (ie to float) which means that weights would need to be clipped on/off to suit the desired purpose. A surface floating camera is basically useless you’re filming in a swimming pool type environment otherwise you can’t see anything above 3’ or so away – and even then it usually requires plenty of video editing to get a reasonable image of anything in that range. So, if you need to clip on/off weights then you may as well clip on/off (swap) camera for sonar? And as I’m very happy with both my WaterWolf camera (which is more versatile than a FishSpy camera anyway) and the Deeper Sonar then I don’t really see that this FishSpy Echo beats, or even matches, my current equipment.

WATER TEMPS:

9.0’C rising to 10.9’C over the day…