Brownies on the Frome

As its only a couple of weeks until the end of the trout season, I thought I'd make the effort to get out for an hour or 2 after work and try catch a couple before the season ends.

Low water levels on the river Frome 

I headed down to the local river Frome, a small stream that meanders its way through the Stroud valleys before joining the river Severn. Due to the more sever weather of recent times and a lack of sensible river management, the water levels can get very low (to only a few inches) from where the various old mill gates along its length are opened up to help prevent flooding during severe wet weather, and are inevitably forgotten about and left open so the river level drops right down during prolonged dry spells. This has pretty much pushed out all of the coarse fish species, which means the trout now have free reign over the river.

Fallen trees litter the banks of the Frome

Despite running adjacent to a footpath, the stretch I decided to fish is a pretty quiet stretch, with only the occasional passing dog walker disturbing the peace. Its also a fairly neglected stretch, which is often overgrown with a few fallen trees crossing the path or in the river. The fish don't get very big in this stretch, but its not far from home and I like it for the peace and quiet it offers.

Most people would probably associate trout fishing with fly fishing, but it doesn't have to be that way! Despite the fact that the overgrown and intimate nature of the river makes fly fishing almost impossible, I like to use an old simple method that's been around for centuries, a free lined worm. Just you're standard light float rod, some 4lb line on a small fixed spool reel or a centrepin, tied to a size 12 hook with the barb crushed (I return all the fish I catch so don't like to use barbed hooks, but find a worm will stay on a crushed barbed hook better than a shop bought barbless one). That's it, that's all you need along with a small landing net and of course a tub of big juicy worms! Simply cast your worm into a suitable spot, and let the current take it down stream, while carefully mending the line on the surface. You'll know when you get a take as the line will tighten and zip across the surface, or if you're fishing deeper water, simply just feel for bites by letting the line run over one of your fingers.

It didn't take long before I had my first take, after maybe 3 or 4 casts the curves in the line on the surface straightened out as the trout made off with my worm. It was only a small fish of a few ounces, but there's something about wild brownies that makes them all feel special, including the small ones. I popped the hook out and put him straight back, holding him in the current for a few seconds to make sure he was recovered and ready to go. I quietly made my way down stream looking for another likely spot when I heard the tell tale splash of a trout snatching something from the surface. I peeked through the undergrowth to see the remains of the rings in the water a few yards down stream, and carefully dropped my worm in an area where the current should carry it straight to my target. Ten to fifteen seconds later the line zipped off and I had another fish on, leaping clean out of the water in a bid for freedom, but the hook held and I soon had him on the bank. Another small trout, this time hooked fairly deep, but as I was using barbless hooks it came out straight away with the aid of some forceps without causing any damage to the fish, and I returned him to the water.

The light was starting to fade under the cover of the trees, so I decided I'd try and find one more fish and call it a day. It didn't take long before I spotted a fish a few feet from the bank, illuminated by a ray of sunshine that had managed to penetrate through the tree cover. I cast my worm a few yards up stream so it had a bit of time to sink down to the depth of the fish, and this time watched the fish instead of my line. As the worm drifted down in the current, I saw the fish just casually swim over and gobble it up, so I struck straight away to avoid deep hooking. A short battle ensued before the fish was in the net, another small brownie of maybe 5 or 6oz neatly hooked in the scissors. The hook popped out easy and again I held the fish in the current to regain some strength before releasing it. They might not have been very big but 3 fish in a little over an hour of fishing wasn't a bad result, and on light tackle even the little ones put up a fight in the fast currents of the river. That's probably the last trout I'll see now until the new season starts in March next year, when hopefully they'll have grown to be a bit bigger!

A small wild brownie from the river Frome

(no) Barbel on the Wye...

Well sadly there's nothing much to report from my session on the Wye. Despite getting up at a time I didn't even know existed in the morning, and fishing through all day until it got dark, its safe to say I'm a barbel blanker! I tried pretty much everything from meat, maggot, boilies, pellets, pepperami for baits. I tried the slack water, the fast water, the deep water, the shallow water, overhanging trees, underwater snags but it just wasn't to be. I had a few knocks during the first hour or so and a screamer of a run late evening (which bumped off the hook when I picked the rod up, doh!) but the rest of the day was pretty quiet.

The water was almost gin clear despite the thunderstorms from the day before, and the level was pretty low too. This might not have helped the fishing any, but it did enable me to watch a small group of perch hunting fry in the margins for most of the day. The bigger of the pack seemed to follow a strict routine of slowly emerging from the depths of a deep hole under a fallen willow tree, and pausing by a single strand of oxygen weed in the shallows that provided a bit of cover while he observed his prey. Then, when the time was right he'd burst into action and chase the fry into the bank and then disappear back into the dark depths beneath the willow, if only I'd had some underwater filming gear...
I also saw my first River Wye salmon, as a specimen which I'd guess at being around the 8lb mark decided to have a funny 5 minutes and leap wildly out of the water 4 or 5 times. Hopefully another visit won't be too far away, though next time I may target something considerably toothier than a barbel as it's getting that time of year again...

Fishing the Wye

Hopefully having a trip to the river Wye this weekend. Fingers crossed old whiskers will want to come out and play...

3 Days at Horseshoe

I don't do much big pit fishing, despite living within an hour of many large pits including the likes of Linear Fisheries, the Cotswold Water Park and of course the Carp Societies Horseshoe Lake. Still, I'm always up for a challenge and when a couple of friends (Ben and Lavis) told me they were going I figured it'd be rude not to join them!

Although Horseshoe is famous for its proper old Leney style carp, it also holds a few other coarse species up to specimen sizes, so knowing that my friends would almost certainly be after the carp, I thought I'd plan my 3 days a little different and try and break a PB in the process.

My plan was simple really, the first day and second morning I was going to fish for tench and try and beat my long standing "official" PB of 5lb 8oz (I say official PB as I've caught bigger but didn't have scales to weigh them). My plan was to feeder fish with maggots, lots and lots of maggots, over a bed of hemp and corn. These baits tend to get a bit forgotten in today's world of boilies and pellets, and tench love them, as do carp, which brings me to part 2 of my plan. During the last 2 days of my trip I was going to switch over to carp fishing, in the hope that by then the carp would have noticed my baited area and bullied the tench out of the way. Sounded like a good plan, in theory anyway...

Upon arrival we had a little wander around the middle part of the lake closest to the lodge (you can view a map of the lake here), only to find that pegs 1 to 30 were pre-booked for a fishing social by the BCSG, so that ruled out half of summer bay and all of winter bay. On top of that, the road bank of summer bay was closed off (I guess for fish safety reasons due to the crazy amount of weed that was present) and there were 3 anglers spread up the trout bank side of summer bay, so that pretty much ruled out the rest of summer bay too.

Eventually we decided to fish in the double (red post) swims on the trout bank, mainly because it was a lot closer to the car than what the Witney bank would have been (horseshoe is pretty big at 62 acres and I was the only one with a barrow). I ended up in peg 53 with Ben, while Lavis ended up in peg 54. As we were there for a few days, we thought it'd be worth the effort (and risk of spooking every fish from our swim) to have a good lead around to try and find some good spots to fish... The short answer is we didn't really find any. Both swims were full of weed, with a large band of silk weed from roughly 10-20 yards out, then from about 20-60 yards out it was Canadian pond weed on top of silk weed. After that there was a gravel area to about 80 yards, which was covered in Canadian pond weed and then around the 100+ yard mark the weed seemed to thin out a bit over a clay/silt area. As I was going to be feeder fishing there was no way I'd be casting 100+ yards, and the marginal silk weed area was quite shallow which would leave me wide open to attack from the resident waterfowl (of which there were many) so I opted to fish the gravel area at about 70 yards in a spot which appeared to be slightly less weedy.

First things first I wanted to get a bit of bait out there, so I put out about a kilo of my spod mix (5 litres of CCMoore hemp mixed with 3 tins of corn, a kilo of bloodworm pellet and few carp pellets and chopped boilies I had lying around, just to use them up). I didn't want to go too mad with the bait as I'd be piling maggots on top of it too with the feeder. Speaking of maggots, I'd forgotten about mine and during the time spent leading about and baiting up, the sun had come out and cooked them, so I now had about a 30/70 mix of dead/live maggots. Not a great start when you need them alive to wiggle out of a feeder.

I kept my rigs simple, just a medium sized maggot feeder and a small fox maggot clip filled with 8-12 red maggots on a size 8 hook. I recast every 10 minutes to keep the maggots going in and figured it'd only be a matter of time before something found them. Turns out it'd be about 2 hours time, just when I'd almost finished sorting all my gear out and was setting up my bed chair in my bivvy. I only had a few beeps, but combined with the loud crash of my swinger smashing into my rod blank, I knew it wasn't from ambitious silvers trying to make off with my maggots. Sadly whatever it was will remain a mystery, as it'd gone by the time I hit the rod. I re-filled the feeder and cast it back to the spot, I didn't need to change the hook bait which further indicated that it had been a bigger fish that took the whole ball of maggots rather than a roach sucking them dry one at a time. No sooner had I gone back in my bivvy to continue wrestling with my bed chair, the rod was off again! The same thing, just a few beeps and the crash of swinger and rod from the force of the take. Instead of hitting it, I decided to watch it for a bit. After a few seconds the line began to tighten so I hit it, and was into my first horseshoe fish! It didn't put up much of a fight, and at first I wondered if I'd picked up a bream, but as it neared the net it became obvious that whatever it was had given up due to it feeling safe having found refuge in the colossal ball of weed I was now reeling in. After netting it and digging it out of the weed, it turns out I'd caught a tench of 5lb 4oz, not a PB but pretty close and a cracking looking fish, and also my ticket out of Blanksville!

My first Horseshoe fish, a tench of 5lb 4oz

I put the rod back out on the spot and attempted to continue setting up my bed chair, when the alarm started beeping away again. This time it wasn't a violent take, but with the swinger dancing up and down I decided to hit it, but alas, there was nothing there. On inspecting the hook bait, which was now a soggy mess of empty maggot skins, it looked as if the silvers had finally moved in on the spot. This pattern was to continue for the next hour or so, during which time I made almost no progress with my bed chair. 

The light was starting to fade and I really needed to finish building "base camp" and I hadn't had chance to make any dinner yet, so I put a few rubber maggots on the clip along with the real ones so that I'd at least have some form of hook bait after the silvers had inevitably had their maggot smoothie within seconds of me casting out. I ignored the first couple of minutes of beeps and cracked on with setting up the bed chair, sorting out some lights for the night time and having a bit of food. After about an hour I was done setting up and somewhat fed, and was just thinking of re-casting and getting the maggots going in again when I had another take, only this time it was another violent swinger-meets-rod affair. A few minutes later I had another tench in the net, only about 2lb but at least I got a scrap out of this one as it hadn't got engulfed in weed. After that it went pretty quiet on the maggot fishing front, so I opted to spod out another kilo or so of bait and switch over to my "blowman" carp rigs for the night.

The moon shining down on Horseshoe lake

The night was pretty quiet and I only got awoken once by a couple of beeps, which could quite easily have been caused by one of the rats scurrying along the waters edge, either way it didn't develop into anything. The others didn't fare any better either, but at least we got a good nights sleep ready for an early start in the morning, or so I thought anyway...

When I awoke in the morning at about 6am, I was greeted by a thick mist, so thick in fact that you couldn't even see half way over the lake, let alone the trees on the skyline that I'd been using for casting markers. Because of this I opted to just leave the rods where they were rather than blindly cast into mist and probably end up missing the mark, and go back to sleep. It took until gone 9am before the mist had cleared enough to see the treeline, so I finally managed to get the tench rigs back out.

The morning was pretty quiet apart from the beeps from the silvers after casting out a freshly filled feeder, and it was gone dinnertime before the mist had fully cleared. I was starting to run low on maggots too, and my mix of what was mainly reds with a few whites was now more like a 50/50 mix from where I'd only been using reds to fill the maggot clips. I was starting to think about switching over to carp rigs proper when I got another violent take at about 2pm. It was another tench of around 4lb and put up a fairly good account for itself, giving me a bit of a run around in the margins. I decided to stick with maggots a little longer, in the hope that the tench had moved in, but it wasn't to be and that was the only action any of us saw that day.

A plane flying over Horseshoe

Night soon closed in and by this point I'd swapped over fully to carp fishing and had put out a fair bit of my spod mix and about a kilo of boilies over my spots. Nothing much was happening though, we hadn't seen any carp at all anywhere on the lake and with a light north easterly wind and high pressure conditions were about as far from "carpy" as you could get, still, you've got to be in it to win it as they say... 

What with Horseshoe being located bang in the middle of a triangle of RAF air bases (namely Fairford, Brize Norton and Lyneham) it sees more than its fair share of low flying aircraft, so I used the quiet spell as an opportunity to practise my photography (a hobby I've recently taken up, it seems to go well with fishing) and get some long exposures of aircraft in the hope I'd get some cool looking streaks of light across the sky. The above was the best I managed (I forgot my tripod so was limited to what I could get with my camera sat on my bait bucket) Its really quite difficult to get the focusing right in the dark, but for a first attempt I don't think its too bad.

I was awoken in the night by a screaming one toner, sadly it was from Ben's rods and not mine! After what seemed like an age, he finally hit it, but there was nothing there. How, I don't know as it was still screaming away and peeling line off of his spool when he picked his rod up. Still it was a bit of excitement after a relatively dull day.

The following day saw the arrival of the BCSG for their social and as it was Friday, also the arrival of the weekenders. Needless to say the lake went from having about 10 occupied swims to having about 10 unoccupied swims from the 75 it had to offer, and during the course of Friday afternoon what can only be described as enough food to feed a small country was spodded into the lake. It was like a contagious disease, as soon as one person got the spod out, the guy next door would then get his out and so it continued like some weird spodding Mexican wave around the lake. Unsurprisingly, this seemed to kill what little activity there was on the lake and the lake just died completely, no liners, no fish topping, nothing, just a LOT of over excited seagulls and waterfowl. 

The night didn't have anything to offer other than another chance to practise some long exposure photography, though there weren't any planes about this time. The following morning I used up what little was left of my maggots (now mostly casters) in a last ditch effort to bag another tench while I packed my kit down ready for the journey home, but to no avail, though I did manage to pick up a small roach, which rather unfortunately for him had managed to impale himself through the back of his head on my hook while presumably chomping his way through my maggot clip offerings. He swam off ok minus a few scales though, so I don't think any major damage was done.

Horseshoe at night time, the nearby light pollution illuminating the low level cloud cover.

All in all I quite enjoyed my time at Horseshoe Lake. The bailiffs were friendly and offered advice on areas to fish. The whole site is kept really well, with clean toilets, clear pathways and other than the roar of the odd military jet it's pretty peaceful too. I may have only legitimately caught 3 fish, and the others may have blanked, but with none of us having been there before we knew it was going to be a tough lake to fish. I think the number of people had a detrimental effect on the fishing, which didn't help but sometimes that's just how it goes. In hindsight we probably should have phoned up to see if there were any events happening while we were there, and gone a few days earlier to avoid it. I'm definitely up for going again and even quietly confident of catching now that I know what I'm up against, though next time I'll be sure to go when the lakes a bit quieter.

Horsing around

Well I did just over 3 days fishing on the carp societies Horseshoe Lake in Lechlade last week. Never fished it before and only the second time I've ever fished a big pit (the other being a 24h session on St Johns at Linear Fisheries a few years ago). Hopefully I'll get chance to do a bit of a write up soon, trying to make the most of the good weather at the moment before the nights really start to close in.

The "blowman" rig

This rig is based on a snowman variation I was shown by my friend Joe Drury of Anglers Paradise and CMCR. It's a balanced rig with lots of movement and anti-eject properties, hence why I have named it the "blowman".

You will need:

What you need to make the rig

• Size 6 hook (I use a fox SSC)
• Hook link braid (I use ESP camo sink link)
• Micro rig swivel
• Micro rig ring
• Bait floss (light mono will do)
• Braid scissors
• Rig puller
• Baiting needle
• Lighter
• 18mm boilie and 15mm pop-up (I use CCMoore live system)

Making the rig:

1. Cut off a length of hook link braid about 6" longer than you want the rig to be, to give yourself enough material to work with.
2. Using a 1 turn blood knot, tie the micro rig ring to one end of the braid, and trim the tag end with the scissors.
3. Pass the ring over the point of the hook, being careful not to pierce the braid on the hook.
   
4. Thread the micro rig swivel onto the braid, and then pass the braid through the eye of the hook (from back to front).
   
5. With the rig ring placed roughly level with where the barb would be, begin to tie a knotless knot, with 3 turns around both hook and braid to start, then a further 3 or 4 turns around just the hook to finish.
   
6. Tie a figure of 8 loop knot in the end of the braid and trim the tag end.
7. Cut off about 6 inches of bait floss, and pass through the micro rig swivel to about half way.
8. Thread the pop-up followed by the boilie onto a baiting needle, and then thread them onto the bait floss by doubling over the tag ends and hooking the created loop with the baiting needle. 
9. Push the boilie over the body of the micro rig swivel so only the eye is left showing, and snug the pop-up to the boilie.
10. Trim the tag ends of the bait floss 5-10mm from the pop-up, and then blob them with the lighter to hold the baits in place.
    

Fine tuning the rig:

How the rig should sit when finished

1. Test the finished rig in the margins or a bowl of water.
2. If the rig doesn't sink to the bottom, trim small pieces from the pop-up until it does.
3. If the rig sinks like a brick, trim small pieces from the boilie until it gently sinks to the bottom.
4. When balanced, the hook should lie flat on the bottom, with the bait just resting on the eye of the micro rig swivel.

The swivel allows the baits to rotate without turning the hook, and the D style loop combined with the rig ring allow the baits to move freely up and down the shank of the hook as well as closer and further from the hook. All this movement "separates" the bait from the hook, so in the event of a fish trying to eject the rig, the baits are free to move while the hook finds a hold in the fishes mouth.