It ain’t ‘alf hot

Another spell of fine, dry weather has settled over Ireland, making life hard for game fishers but presenting coarse anglers with long days and potentially good catches. I set the alarm for a ridiculously early hour and retired for a good night’s sleep with another trip to the midlands planned for the morrow. The heat made sleep impossible and I did little more than doze for an hour before rising in the semi darkness. Despite years of working in hot climates I still struggle when the mercury rises and I’ve never understood the joy people get from sweltering in dangerous sunshine. Give me cold weather any day of the week!

After watching a mate drop shotting last week I decided to try it out for myself. While in Athlone the other day I mooched around the tackle shop, flexing some nice looking jigging and LRF rods. I could not justify the expense of a new rod so instead I have decided to use an old ABU rod of mine for jigging. This one casts 2 – 10 grams and while it is both heavy and too soft I think it will just about do the job for me. Maybe if I get into this light stuff I’ll open my wallet and but the proper gear, but for now I’ll press this old gal into service. There was a 2000 size reel kicking around with a spare spool, so I loaded it with some skinny braid and knotted a bit of ten pound fluorocarbon on the end. The plan was to feeder and float fish mostly but give the drop-shot a try at some point in the session. I have to say that indecision crept in when picking which feeder rod to take with me. Trying to balance bite detection, casting range/accuracy and fish fighting ability got me all confused and in the end I loaded not, not two, but three different feeder/leger rods into the car the night before.

Back when I was working a lot of my assignments were in troubleshooting roles. I used to employ very structured approaches when problem solving and one mantra was always at the forefront of my thinking – only make one change at a time. The logic of this is simple, make multiple changes and you will be unable to figure out which one of them has worked. Now, here I am with problems feeder fishing and I have only gone and made a host of changes all at once. After too many disappointing days feeder fishing and on the back of some helpful suggestions by readers of this blog (thanks guys, you know who you are), I switched from my near universal use of a maggot feeders to a small open ended one. So there I have changed the rod and reel, the main line and the design of the feeder already! Not content with that, I also changed my ground bait mix to a roughly 50:50 mix of Sensas Lake and Sensas Gross Gardons, laced with some crushed hemp and a few maggots for good measure. All I can say in my defence is I am fishing for fun, not trying to save a business.

Quiet roads, due to the early hour, made for an unusually relaxed journey. Normally these trips to the middle of Ireland are planned around the opening times of tackle shops where I can buy maggots but I still had a half pint left over from my last outing, hence the early start. This section of the canal is a joy to fish as I can park right next to the water. Gear decanted and rods set up, I made up the ground bait and began to feed the swim in front of me. In the end I plumped for my old ABU Legerlite, a 10 footer with an extremely sensitive tip (I bought is for a fiver years ago from a charity shop in Grimsby). A small fixed spool loaded with 5 pound mono matched the rod well and I tied up a simple running leger with a one eighth ounce bomb and two feet of 4 pound to a size 14 hook. That lot was cast out while I set up the chair and then the float rod. That was an eleven footer with six pound mono on a 2500 reel. A teensy-weensy little crystal waggler supported a four in hook length of 4 pound double strength nylon to another size 14.

Even this early in the morning there was heat in the sun, the few wisps of high cloud soon burned off leaving deep blue skies overhead. Despite this, I pulled on a hoodie to cover as much of my person as possible, my dislike of the sun showing no signs of diminishing with the advancing years. The few bits of skin not covered were liberally coated in sun cream, so, now smelling like a coconut grove I started to fish.

Once again, I was into fish right from the get-go. Second cast on the float produced a cute wee rudd, followed by a small perch a few casts later. Next up was a small roach before another rudd happened along. And so it continued, a silver every second or third cast, a few missed bites and a couple of rattles on the leger rod which didn’t turn into hook ups. It was the kind of morning you dream of in the cold dark days of winter, warm sunshine and the occasional fish pulling your float under. The poor response to the leger led me to make a change after an hour, taking off the bomb and replacing it with an open feeder which I filled with ground bait. The very first cast with the feeder brought me a perch, then a small rudd but it went quiet on that rod after those two small lads.

I was lobbing in balls of ground bait and loose feeding a pinch of maggots with each cast on the float rod, trying to keep a few fish in the swim. The float slid under one time and the rod bent into an impressive hoop, obviously a tench this time. Various dashes here and there kept me on my toes but there was something not quite right about this fish. It was heavy and powerful, but there was more to it than just that. The answer became evident when the tench cruised past me, 5 yards out. The hook was not in its mouth, but instead it seemed to be embedded in a pectoral fin. The battle went on for much longer than usual for a fish this size because each time I tried to lead it to the waiting net the fish would sink down deep and out of sight. Finally, I managed to guide the tired fish into the blue meshes and hoist it out of the tepid water. A good tench of about 3 pounds, the hook was in fact nicked in the skin behind the left pectoral fin and one swift pluck had it removed with no harm to the fish at all. It swam off strongly when I popped it back into the canal.

More rudd and small perch came my way but they stopped biting all of a sudden, probably due to a pike arriving in the swim. 20 minutes elapsed before the silvers came back on the feed again and I was catching rudd and perch once more. A really good perch dragged the waggler under and shot off, taking line from the reel. I brought it back under control and was leading it to the net when it made a sharp turn into some floating weeds. Much pulling, dragging and swearing later, I finally netted the fish and then sorted out the resulting mess.

The morning wore on and the temperature rose to nearly 30 degrees. The bits were slowing up so I decided it was time to try the jigging set. Stowing the other gear, I set up the rod and tied on a 3 gram jig head then threaded on a silvery paddle tail. Off down the towpath I went, casting and jigging the bait back to me. Nothing doing, so I switched to a dark brown paddle tail. No good, time to try a small creature bait. Same story, not so much as a nibble. I gave this an hour and covered a fair chunk of the canal but if I am very honest I can’t say I found this style of fishing very enjoyable. Of course it would have been different if I was catching a few perch but for me it is a poor second to feeder or float fishing. I packed up around 1pm and sauntered back to the oven-like Toyota and took down the rod.

The morning had produced 13 rudd (all small lads), a dozen perch, 5 roach and the foul hooked tench. Do you count foul hooked coarse fish? I think this is an interesting point as playing out the tench took a bit more skill than one which had been properly hooked in the mouth. 31 fish for a session in less than optimal conditions was not too shabby in my book. There is work to be done here at home and the good weather means I’ll be busy on outside jobs over the weekend. Next week might bring some rain, and with it the chance of some game fishing.