Wintle’s World of Angling – Dace

Mark Wintle, an angler for thirty-five years, is on a quest to discover and bring to you the magic of fishing. Previously heavily involved with match fishing he now fishes for the sheer fun of it. With an open and enquiring mind, each week Mark will bring to you articles on fishing different rivers, different methods and what makes rivers, and occasionally stillwaters, tick. Add to this a mixed bag of articles on catching big fish, tackle design, angling politics and a few surprises.

Are you stuck in a rut fishing the same swim every week? Do you dare to try something different and see a whole new world of angling open up? Yes? Then read Mark Wintle’s regular weekly column.

Crazy Dace

Last year, I visited Christchurch Harbour for the first time, targeting the shoals of mullet. Fishing bread punch, I also had plenty of good-sized dace and roach as well as a bream and mullet. A year later, with a fridge full of maggots left over from the Thames fish-in, I decided to have another go, but this time concentrating on the dace. What followed was one of the most frustrating and frantic day’s fishing that I’ve had for a long time.

Dace – Mark’s target fish

Armed with three pints of white maggots and float tackle, I made the long walk across Stanpit Marsh and set-up in the same swim as previously. I’d already checked the tide tables; low tide was about eleven, giving me two and a half hours of runoff before the rising tide would hopefully run back the other way and sustain the flow.

Early July was cool, and the blustery downstream North-Westerly breeze was going to make things tricky, at least until the tide turned. To make life easier, I set up a bait stand out as far as I could wade. This allowed me to fish a stick float at close range and feed by hand.

The Set-up
I kept the set-up simple; a 6 no. 4 John Allerton stickfloat shotted shirt button style with no. 8 shot with a size 18 Drennan Carbon chub hook to Reflo Powerline in 0.13mm, set around five feet deep to start with. This may seem a little strong but the fish are not especially hook or line shy, and there was a good chance that I might hit a seatrout at some point in the day. The recent heavy rain had put some colour into the Avon resulting in the harbour filling up with seatrout, some well into the teens of pounds! These were crashing out of the water all over the harbour.

Because I already had some idea of the depth, I used trial and error to get the right depth. Over time, the depth varied anyway due to the tide so I had to make adjustments during the day. I started by setting the float to about five feet. When it started to drag, I simply push the float down an inch or two (who needs metric? It wouldn’t make sense to say 25 or 50mm!).

Loads of bait
I’d got plenty of bait so I began by feeding heavily with a fair sized handful every cast. Hookbait was two maggots. It didn’t take long for the dace to find the maggots. By second trot, I got my first bite from a small dace. At first, the bites came some way down the swim, and I needed to keep tight control of the float to prevent it getting blown off course by the wind. Within twenty minutes the dace had moved so that the float had barely settled before it dipped. I cast and fed slightly downstream, reduced the worst effects of the wind. Many of the dace were around two ounces but there were the odd better ones from five to eight ounces.

Little dace

After an hour and a half, though the tide had been due to change it continued to drop. The dace continued to feed but I noticed that amongst the reasonable sized ones I was getting more and more tiddler dace. These were only around four inches long and meant that I had to change the bait every cast. Their small size also meant more missed bites. I tried stepping up the feed but to no avail. It was a case of catching what I could and hoping that eventually the better dace would fight their way through to get a better share of the loose feed.

Then the tide turned
An hour later, the tide finally turned. This is often a good time to get a mullet or bream so I quickly set up a quiver tip rod with an open-ended feeder and size 12 hook. Using bread on the hook, and packing the feeder with brown crumb, I cast around a third of the way across the river channel. It was not long before the tip signalled the first bites. I soon recognised a pattern. Within ten seconds of casting, there would be a quick couple of sharp taps then nothing. The bites did not develop further and I couldn’t hit them. After about twenty casts, I finally connected. It was yet another dace of around three ounces. With the tide coming in and flowing against the wind, I returned to my stick float fishing.

I had noticed that many of the smaller dace were grabbing the bait almost off the surface, and with this in mind I changed the shotting set-up so that majority of shot were bulked around twenty inches from the hook with two no. 8 droppers on the hooklength. Over the next hour I set about catching the dace with a vengeance yet the problems with the maggot-chewing tiddlers persisted. Oddly, I had not even seen a single roach. Further towards the sea the harbour widened out. At some point, the water must become too salty for the coarse fish, and having caught well over a hundred dace, I reckoned that a move a few hundred yards seaward would do no harm just to see if I could still pick up coarse fish.

The maggots were being crushed

Bigger fish in the new swim
In the new swim, there was less depth and a nasty snag that I soon found. Yet, within ten minutes of starting I began to get bites. At first, it was slow but as the shoal gathered drawn in by the loose feed, I got them going properly. The best news was that the tiddlers were no longer present in such numbers. This had a double benefit; not only was I avoiding the small stuff but also the bigger fish had more chance to take the bait. Many of the fish in this swim were from five ounces upwards and in excellent condition. I finally got a bonus fish in the shape of a two-pound seatrout that had to be returned. But after another hour of catching good dace, I’d finally had enough. After nearly six hours fishing, around 170 dace and a feeling of being totally knackered from the continuous action of casting, striking and feeding, I packed up and fought my way home through the Friday afternoon traffic. It was only afterwards that I realised that I had been so busy that I’d taken no pictures.

Photo call
What an excellent excuse to return for a couple of hours two days later to take some pictures! This time around in the late afternoon, the tide was at a later stage with the water still rising but running towards the sea.

Mark with a dace of decent size

These had been interesting sessions after the dace. I probably didn’t experiment enough the first time around; perhaps I need to set up two rods and take more of a matchman’s approach to determining the best method. I certainly timed my visits well for the extra colour had brought the dace on the feed. When the colour dropped out a week later so the dace fishing got a lot more patchy. But as ever I’ll return to the harbour another day.

Next week: ‘Floatfishing Up In The Water’