The Pleasure Angle - Problems, Lessons, Goodbyes

Mark with a big perch caught on a lure Problems, Lessons Learnt and Sad Goodbyes It's been a busy few months at the house of Hodson, the end of Autumn and the start of winter brought work and family commitments plus 101 other things that had to come before fishing. I did, however, manage a few last minute chubbing and lure fishing outings which instead of quenching my angling thirst threw up a host of problems that have provided a few useful lessons in their solving. The problem with …. Planning I, as usual, made the mistake of planning ahead, but that great unknown variable Mother Nature threw a spanner in the works at every opportunity. Days that had been allocated to predator sessions on the Avon and Severn became washouts, with chocolate coloured, flooded rivers leaving me with no choice but to head to my local gravel pits and canals to search out some predator action there. On three occasions I've tried to kick off a long planned winter carp campaign only to find on each occasion both my chosen venues frozen solid. The alternative was to grab the chub gear just to spend a few hours on the bank. The morale of this tale is to remain flexible, don't make plans, fish to the conditions presented at the time. Choose the appropriate venue, species and technique due to the prevailing weather conditions, not due to your prevailing mindset. Leave the diary blank, fill it in after with the results of your sessions which will invariably be more successful. It really is a case of looking at the weather forecast a day or two in advance and then deciding. The problem with …. Pellets Well, to be honest there isn't one, but that's the problem, they are just too convenient, too easy to obtain and store - and they catch lots of fish. The problem is that they effect the rest of your fishing without you realising it. Due to their convenience and massive use, more traditional methods such as bread fishing for chub are overlooked or have to be tweaked to remain effective. On my first couple of chub sessions I struggled on my usual bread flake/paste strategy and only a change to the bread brought success. A recent forum thread spurred me to include this little tweak to the traditional bread flake technique as this is the second time I have experienced it in ten years, the first being in very different circumstances. Some ten years ago I was a regular at Mallory Park and the Glebe fisheries run by Roy Marlow. Now, at the time, despite only one make of fish friendly pellet being allowed, the Dynamite baits “Koi swim stim” type pellets, lots of other pellets on a massive scale went into these waters. I quickly found that a lump of brown flake was deadly for the big roach and bream that were rarely caught otherwise on these waters. White flake just couldn't compete and the only reason I could come up with was that the brown flake looked like a washed out breaking down pellet, just like the freebies the carp failed to mop up and some hours later the larger silver fish had discovered was a safe meal. I have now transferred this thinking to my running water roach fishing/chubbing and have found in my first two sessions a lump of brown bread paste with pellet oil added or a lump of brown flake dipped in pellet oil is providing equal if not better results than the old white bread. The use of 'granary' bread with its rougher texture seems to be the real winner. It seems the amount of pellets going into our rivers now may just change the colour of bread we take fishing for good as the roach, chub and even dace see washed out breaking down pellets as their easiest and safest meal. Goodbye Red Wool, hello Frankenstein Lures! Late Autumn saw me getting to do a little perch fishing with artificials and the night before my first outing I was hunting around the house for some red wool to add to my perch spinners which had not seen the light of day since twelve months previously and looked tatty to say the least. Now, after a lot of hunting and pestering the wife I discovered our home is a red wool free zone so I had to look for alternatives. The end result is that all my perch spinners are now tipped with Enterprise tackles artificial red maggots which seem to attract even better than the old red wool and are a lot more durable. A new personal best from the canal and a three pound stillwater fish mean the red wool is now consigned to the bin for good. I'm now experimenting with adding some of the other Enterprise tackle artificial baits to my lures and have taken my first Zander from the canal this year on a perch spinner with a couple of pieces of the 'glow in the dark' corn attached to the treble, a la sea angler style, as they have been using glow in the dark beads for years in deep depths to attract predators. Could the same work well at night in freshwater if used on lures or attached to dead or live baits? The term 'Frankenstein Lure' will not be a new one to those lure enthusiasts out there but to some it may be. It basically entails customising or modifying an existing lure by adding bits and pieces to enhance its performance or change its appearance completely. I've never been a fan, thinking that a lure would perform better in its natural state than modified; that was until three weeks ago. Confronted with a flooded river Avon I went to a local pit only to find that also flooded and coloured, not brilliant for lure fishing which was the only kit I had taken with me. I tried nearly every lure in the box without a sniff. Due to the poor water visibility I had tried all the bright, high vibration lures I had without not even a follow from a pike. In desperation I created my first 'Frankenstein' Lure on the bank, taking a Fox roach pattern chubby shad tail and impaling it on a Berkley spinner bait. The result was something that looked hideous. It was like casting a plastic bag, made a splash larger than the biggest method feeders, fished terribly, spinning 360 degrees in the water and spending more time upside down than the right way up. Archie, up to his old tricks again But boy does it catch fish! In the last hour of that initial session I had four takes resulting in two fish, a modification since with the addition of a stinger treble on the chubby shad body has resulted in a 100% take to hook-up rate in the two sessions after the birth of my creation. Two sessions, both on a pit that produces one, maybe two fish if you're lucky have resulted in six fish apiece; nothing massive, a low double being the best but I have produced the most effective lure I've had for a long time. A Sad Goodbye Before Christmas a good friend passed away, who I can only describe as the worst angling companion I ever had. He distracted me from my fishing at every opportunity, caused me more tangles than most anglers have in a lifetime, stole or ate my bait at every opportunity and scared more fish from my peg than a herd of passing wildebeest. I am of course talking about a dog. Archie, my Jack Russell cross, had a heart attack due to the heart condition he had developed in old age and left me in peace at last. Joking aside I will miss him dearly but regretted it every time I took him fishing. When I saw a Passion for angling on TV in the early nineties and saw Bob James two dogs so well behaved on the bank I thought, 'That's fantastic'. Unfortunately, when I took ownership of a six week old Jack Russell cross and told him he was my new fishing companion I didn't account on Archie being the maddest, most hyperactive and uncooperative 'fisher dog' ever. He has on occasions jumped into my keepnet after fish I have put in there, swam out after feeders and spods as they were cast, single handily destroyed a newly built wooden peg, chased bailiffs down the bank, chewed rod handles, landing net handles and urinated up every piece of fishing tackle I have ever owned, and once deposited a freshly killed rat in my sleeping bag. Goodbye my friend, thanks for the memories.