After a bit of a struggle to catch a few fish on my last outing, I thought I’d push my luck again and fish the often difficult stretch of water where the canal joins Lough Scur at Keshcarrigan. I have never blanked there, but on the other hand I have not had a red letter day either, so this was unlikely to be an overly productive session. The roach here tend to be on the small side and not very numerous, plus the season for good bream fishing is at an end, making me question my own sanity in travelling to this part of Leitrim. I sort of set myself a target of catching a dozen roach and skimmers, anything else would be a bonus. To give myself a fighting chance I brought both float and leger rods along with a healthy dose of optimism.
There are a couple of spots to fish in Keshcarrigan. The marina in the village is one and it can be good for bream and even the odd tench. This is a busy little wharf in the summer, but by mid-autumn it is ghostly quiet. A few yards to the east there are seven stands which is where I usually start. Roach, rudd and skimmers have made up the bulk of my catches from the stands over the years. High, cold water was making my task all the harder but I was keen to get out as I had been cooped up indoors for a long time due to the storms and generally crap weather we have recently endured.
Heavy overnight rain had left the roads sodden with standing water in any dips in the surface. As always, I took my time driving across to Leitrim (I am a notoriously slow driver), while the articulated lorries and white vans sped on by. A quick stop in Carrick for bait and then the 15 kilometre final leg along the twisting R209. In total, it was a tad over an hour-and-a-half from my front door to my final destination. (a quick aside – I only found out now that the tackle shop in Carrick-on-Shannon is open 7 days a week, useful to know for the the future)
This turned out to be a comfortable session, the strong west wind which was forecast failed to materialise and the day remained largely dry after all that overnight rain. It’s been a bit cooler of late, so I wrapped up well against the elements, a thick blue fleece under my jacket keeping me snug. The high water made me opt for fishing from the floating pontoon in the marina rather that the partly flooded stands close by. From there I could fish in to a good depth of water where the canal starts to widen out into the lough. Pulling into the leaf covered car park, I could see only three boats tied up. A couple of live in barges were hard against the quay while a lonely looking white cruiser was tied up near the end of the pontoon. With the whole marina to pick from I set up at the furthest point and surveyed my surroundings. The water, unsurprisingly given all the recent precipitation, was dirty brown and across from me the reeds and rushes were turning yellow as they died off for the winter. Horses whinnied and frolicked in the field behind the trees, seemingly enjoying the dry weather. It was incredibly peaceful and to be honest I could have just sat there and soaked up the tranquillity without bothering to fish! Sense came to me though and I roused myself into action after ten minutes of, well, nothing really.
Expecting small fish and delicate bites, I set up the little 9 foot winkle picker rod with a tiny maggot feeder. Any fish bigger than a pound is a struggle for the tiny featherweight rod but it is great fun to use when there is nothing big swimming about. I used my 13 foot float rod for this venue, a rod which has more or less replaced the old 11 footer except when fishing very overgrown pegs. I have tried, but failed, to make sense of my enjoyment of fishing for smaller fish and not being very interested in large specimens. I have little interest in fishing for pike, even though they grow to huge proportions here in Ireland. The English obsession with big carp leaves me cold, how anyone can enjoy spending days trying to catch one big carp is a mystery to me. Yet give me a swim with some average sized roach or skimmers in it and I am a happy boy.
Reading back over previous coarse fishing posts here on my blog I see that I tend not to go into the detail of my rigs. This is because I am no expert and I don’t want other anglers thinking I have the faintest idea of what I am doing. For a change though I will go over what I used on this session. Let me start with the float set up. Five pound breaking strain main line is what I had on the reel so I used that but I know I would be better off fishing with a lighter main line, say 3 pound or so. I will drop down to lighter line the next time I am respooling this reel. I started off with a 2BB waggler which was trapped in place with a float stop each side of it on the main line. I am not a huge fan of using shot to set the float position as I do tend to fiddle about with depth a lot when fishing and I fear for damaging the line if I use shot instead of the innocuous and easy to move plastic stops. On the end of the mainline I tie a loop and use that as the connection to the hook length. 4 pound double strength is my preferred hook length material for now but I go down lighter if I feel it will increase bites such as in very clear water. When after silvers I often start with a size 16 spade end barbless hook, changing up or down in size as required. Shotting patterns to cock the float vary a lot, ranging from multiple small shot applied shirt button style for a slow fall, to bulk at the loop to loop if I want to get down quick.
As for the feeder, after a lot of experimenting I usually begin with a very simple running set up. Six pound breaking strain mono is my usual main line, but venues such a big loughs or very snaggy bottoms see me move over to heavy brain which I find is better able to cope with abrasion. Feeder design can be anything depending on what the quarry species is, distance to cast, the season, the bait I am using, and a host of other variables. I thread the feeder on to the main line, followed by a small plastic bead. Next I tie on a swivel and on the other end of that swivel I tie a length on six pound line, usually about 16 inches long (but I do vary that as required). A loop in the end of that piece of 6 pound then attaches to a hook length of 5 pound mono, and this too can vary depending on a number of factors. Hook sizes vary from 16 to 10 depending on species sought and bait. As I said, this is all very basic and I guess a lot of readers are throwing their eyes to the heavens and thinking there are much better rigs I could be using. In my defence, I want to say that I do experiment a fair bit but keep coming back to the basics outlined above. As a purely pleasure angler the need to catch as many fish as fast as possible is not the most important factor in deciding if I have a good day or not. I catch a few, enough to keep me happy, and that is sufficient for me.
After both rods were set up, my next task was to figure out where to fish. Casting the unbaited float out, I found a steady current flowing from left to right. This was hardly a raging torrent but it was significant and would dictate how I would bait up the swim in front of me. Having fished here before I knew the depth was pretty even for 30 yards out before it began to shallow towards the reeds on the far side. I mixed some basic ground bait, just my favourite Sensa 3000 black with a little crushed hemp and a few old casters which had I found in the fridge at home. Three small balls went in slightly to my left and three rod lengths out. With the flow I hoped the balls would reach the bottom right in front of me. Interestingly, throughout the session this the speed of the flow of water out of the lough varied a bit, possibly as the water level in the canal was being controlled by releasing water further off towards Ballinamore.
I fished the little leger rod off to my right, effectively ‘downstream’ and over nearer to the far bank. A small roach soon broke my duck, but it went quiet for a spell on the leger after that fish. Having forgotten my pre-tied hook lengths I had tied one up and baited the hook with double red maggot, then commenced fishing. I was casting out, then feeding a small pinch of maggots over where I hoped my ground bait was sitting on the muddy bottom. A small adjustment was required to depth as I snagged on the bottom a few times, but only coming up only an inch made all the difference. Quiet for the first 20 minutes, I missed a couple of bites before striking into my second small roach and from then on the glittering little fish came quickly. Once I saw there were fish in the swim I threw in more ground bait to try and hold them there while keeping up a steady stream of loose fed maggots. Finding that balance of not too much verses not enough feed is one one the great fascinations of coarse angling for me.
As expected, the size of the roach was, shall we say, conservative. Some were really small, only a couple of ounces while the best of them might have pushed half a pound if I was lucky. I had caught a dozen before the first skimmer showed up, and it too was a little lad. Now the leger rod sprang into life and for an hour I was very busy as fish either pulled the waggler under or the tip of the leger rod jerked, sometime both at the same time! The odd hybrid showed up too just to add to the fun. Strangely, there were no perch in the catch. I usually have a few small perch from this area but they were totally absent today for some reason.
About lunchtime the uniformly grey clouds parted and in no time there was a beautiful blue sky above me. It felt almost magical to see the clear sky after so many rainy days. The fish kept on biting and the total was by now far in excess of my hoped for dozen or so. For non-coarse anglers it must be hard to understand the pleasure in this type of fishing, but there is something almost hypnotic about a busy session. The rhythm of ‘cast, strike, land, unhook, rebait – repeat’ triggers something in me, a deep contentment, a removal from normality and a focus that excludes all other thoughts. Wednesday was just such a session and I loved it. The clouds came over and hid the blue sky once more and with that the fish seemed to sense the change. Bites slackened off on both rods. I was still catching a few but nothing like it had been earlier. Checking the time, I thought of packing ups. I had landed 49 roach and 29 skimmers at that point. It would have been nice to reach 50 roach but I wanted to be home before dark so I took down the float rod, packed away all the tackle strewn around me and lastly lifted up the leger rod to reel it in. Hey presto! There was a roach on the end and in came my fiftieth roach of the session to round off a really lovely day out.
High pressure is due to start building over the coming days which at this time of the year usually means cooler but also drier weather. I hope to get out fishing again soon and make the most of this window. I’ll keep you all posted if I do.
