Golden Paws

Everywhere seems to be far busier than usual. I've just checked the Linear Site and B1 and B2 had 2 swims left, on a Tuesday at the end of September! A combination of a lot of people on furlough (or unemployed now) and the French holiday anglers staying closer to home. I know that peg booking lakes aren't everyone's cup of tea but I fish one quite regularly and really enjoy fishing there. At least you know you are guaranteed a swim and haven't wasted a journey or day off.

My first thought would be to take plenty of photo's and draw some maps showing where the snags are so you can avoid them when the level returns. A whole day spent doing that would probably pay off long term rather than sat behind the rods all day. That said, snags are fish magnets so fishing close to them could pay off but obviously wrapping up now would give a false reading when the levels increase and the bank retreats, so wrap to a fixed location like a boundary fence if possible. Plumbing should also be easier if it's 12 foot shallower and now is the time before the autumn rains come. Look along the bank for any depressions or smooth areas that fish would seek out and map them. I would definitely be looking at margin fishing and prebaiting would almost certainly accelerate their acceptance of the bait and the area as a safe place.

Slightly off topic but I gave some kids a night to remember. I was all night barbel fishing right out in the sticks when at 3 in the morning I heard some kids on the far bank coming down from half a mile away singing what could be described as "racist rugby songs". When they got opposite to where I was fishing, I dipped my isotope underwater and let out a piercing werewolf howl! They absolutely crapped their selves and and a few more howls had them running away. Well worth disturbing the swim I was fishing at the time and I dare say tales of the "Beast of Wiltshire" still get told!

Hi Shane. This is generally frowned upon as you could potentially create a "death rig", i.e. if the line breaks above the shot, the fish could be trailing the method feeder and this could cause the fish to snag up and die. Without the shot, the feeder will be free to run off and the fish only has a bit of line to deal with. I've borrowed this image from the ESP website that shows an in-line drop off system. The end of the swivel is plugged into the lead and will drop off with a bit of head shaking. The draw back and that it makes fishing expensive and the environmental impact of dumping fishing tackle troubles me. If you are fishing a snaggy river with a lot of boulders, unfortunately you are going to suffer from the fish using them to escape. Rather than using a method feeder, you could use a lead and wrap the method mix around that or use PVA bags to create a feeding area. Probably the best advice I can offer is to fish above the snags if possible and draw the fish out with feed. In rivers, you can't beat a bait dropper (below) to lay a carpet of bait down.

Wouldn't it have been better to get a review first and then order it?😀 Luckily found this on the Angling Direct website; 22-Jan-2020 5 Well packaged great product 12-Jan-2020 5 A bit ,bigger than i imagined but very smooth to use 07-Jan-2020 5 Excellent product, so glad I purchased these! Another great item from Sonik! 10-Sep-2019 5 Fantastic reel sturdy and quality. Would recommend 26-Aug-2019 5 Super impressed with this reel! Perfect big bit size, looks and feels great for the price. The deep spools will hold over 700 meters of Exocet 16lb line so if you fish from a boat at extreme range it would hold mega amounts of braid. The second spool is just as deep, so my only comment would be that a shallow spool option would be beneficial to most carp anglers as 700 meters is nearly 20 quids worth of line per spool. Totally happy with these and the quick release handle is a nice feature. Quality reel for the price. Shame Sonik no longer seem to do the 3 for 2 deals. Everyone has given it a 5 star rating and at £85, it does look like a lot of reel for the money.

Test your Carp fishing knowledge with some of these probing questions. In his book "In pursuit of the Largest", how many times did Terry Hearn admit to abusing the benefits system? Can you name one bait company that hasn't sponsored Jim Shelly? At it's current rate of acquisitions, how long will it take for Angling Direct to have a total monopoly on the UK tackle market? Can you name one product launched by Nash in the last ten years that isn't driven by pure opportunism and greed? In the "Redmire Legends" chapter on Passion for Angling, who was the most realistic scarecrow, Chris Yates or "Kevin"? If an otter kills a large carp and only eats the throat area and leaves the rest, how many carp would it need to sustain itself for a day? On average, how many times will Danny Fairbrass have a mental breakdown and scream "Get in the net" and "That was wicked, man" after landing a carp in an episode of Thinking Tackle? If you claim to have been intimate with Clarissa, Heather, Mary and Sally, have you been a successful Carp angler over the years or have you pulled again at a grab a granny? In what decade did the use of bait boats, sonar, underwater camera's and drones become essential items to track down carp? Does anyone actually know who Ronnie is? If you breed and feed a carp in a stock pond until it is larger than the current British record weight and then release it into a water you own, why did the British Record Fish Committee reject it? If you are a member of an exclusive syndicate that most anglers will never get to fish with a large carp that is potentially at risk from otters, how much gall does it take ask for a whip round to protect their fishing?

I prefer spods to spombs as you can "lay them down gently" whereas spombs you have to make nose dive to open. I always plug the spod with groundbait dampened with hemp juice or use crumbed boilie.

That's why I favour Combi's, you get the stiffness and resetting properties of the flouro but then have the final half inch that is (relatively) natural. I use wafters normally but presoaked in a flavour and that tends to over weight them so insert a cork plug in them so they are critically balanced. I prefer them to just lift the hook so the point is on the bottom and the gape is vertical.

We get "done" far more often then we think. I've watched barbel in shallow clear water take every grain of sweetcorn - except for one! I've also watched them blow it out with extreme force, the corn ends up further up the river than the 3 foot trace I was using. I was sight fishing so the long trace was purely to keep the end tackle as far away as possible. All you can do is play the percentage game. Ensure your hook is sharp, the rig is good, the line is out of the way and you don't spook them. A friend told me a story of how he watched 2 carp come into a swim and clocked the 22 boilies, 20 freebies and 2 with hooks. One fish went to take the baited hook twice and the other carp "rammed" it sideways on. They left 5 minutes later with the 2 baits left and my mate went home straight away as he couldn't comprehend what he'd just witnessed.

They say it's not a fool who makes a mistake but one who repeats it and so I must be right up there! I bought some X-line several years ago as I was told it was the best one out there. It sinks well (double the density of water) and is near invisible in water (unless you have it coming straight off the bottom and in bright conditions it looks like Darth Vader's light sabre!) I got fed up with the constant coiling of the stuff and it casts like a bag of spanners. I got rid of it and went back to mono (Gardner GT-HD like you which I really rate.) A few years back I bought some Fox Trans Kharki Illusion to use as a leader (about 30 foot) and although it was pretty good, I didn't like the knot on the cast or going through the rings whilst playing a fish. During the lock down and with too much time on my hands I revisited Fluorocarbon and was seduced by Berkley Connect CF600. It appeared fairly limp and claimed to iron out some of the inherent problems of Fluoro (stiffness and coiling issues.) I should have known better. I spooled it up and immediately the stuff started leaping off the spool. I managed to get it in a line clip and hoped that it would behave better on the bank. Wrong! The stuff was unruly and several times I had massive bird nest on a cast mid flight and I was only casting 40 yards. My advice, Fluorocarbon - give it a wide berth. If you are worried about the line behind the trace rising up, I've borrowed a tip from Martin Bowler and put on some matchmans olivettes on the line and they can be slid up and down at will and will easily pop off if a fish goes through weed.

A "Hampstead Heath Moment" seems to be the buzz word for any celeb that has been caught with his trousers down! Unfortunately on Hampstead Heath, it's not likely to be a lady being troubled! I would definitely keep this as a "days only" water.

Unfortunately most Committees are run by old farts who like to impose their will on us, despite the fact most of them haven't picked up a rod in years! Several years ago I went along to a Committee meeting of my local club with the idea that I wanted to give something back and get involved. I left shaking my head in disbelief. It was all so well scripted the Communist Party would have approved and any suggestions from the floor were rubbished and the 'old boys brigade' on the fringes were quick to establish a return to the status quo. Have a look at some Club's rule books and you'll see how they like to have every base covered and it just goes on and on and gets more ridiculous the further down the page they go. Some rules are purely to generate revenue such as only boilies or pellets bought on site. I can appreciate that you have to have some rules, for example not fishing next to electricity pylons or starting fires but others are more dubious.

Sounds like line bites, which are common when you have a pile of attraction in a small area. Slacken the line right off after casting and look at back leads or add some drops of rig putty to the line behind your rig. Blunt hooks are another common cause of bites not developing. Carp have leathery mouths and can pick up baits and not get hooked. Check how sharp the hook is by (gently) checking it against your thumb or running it along your thumb nail and seeing if it "digs" in. Hook sharpening is a bit of an art and there are companies that sell filing and polishing stones that can make even "sharp out of the packet" hooks that little bit better and restore hooks that have dulled a touch.

Yorkshire’s stolen fortnight Before some clever Yorkshireman emails in, the old rivers boards that were formed in the early 20th century were allowed to vary the close season provided it comprised a set number of days – 93 to be precise. Therefore, for a period 'Yorkshires stolen fortnight' allowed them to start coarse fishing on 01 June, though to be fair the whole of March was lost to fishing. These were their original proposals put forward in 1878 and somehow they crept back in, I think as part of the 1923 review of the Act. (Source: https://canalrivertrust.org.uk/enjoy-the-waterways/fishing/angling-histories/angling-history/history-of-the-coarse-fish-close-season) Many years ago you could fish in Yorkshire on the 1st of June, the so called stolen fortnight. Even though being further North and colder then most Southern area's and common sense would say their season should have finished and started later. I had a mate who is a very experienced river angler and went on the last day of the season which that year was on a Friday night. He commented to someone that he couldn't believe the car park was empty when he got there late afternoon. His mate looked a bit stunned and then told him the season finished on the Wednesday which was the 14th, not the 16th on Friday and the Penney dropped!

I think that you'll find most camping gas canisters are a mixture of propane (C3H8) and butane (C4H10). In an ideal world, it would completely combust in air with the Oxygen present and form Carbon Dioxide and Water. Unfortunately things are never perfect and you'll always get a percentage of Carbon Monoxide. The older and more blocked the nozzles are, the greater the chance of CO formation. You might get away with it for a while as CO is a silent killer (doesn't have a smell and the effects creep up on you). It's like loading a revolver with one bullet and playing Russian Roulette 6 times!

I disagree but agree with you! The worst thing you can possibly do is go to sleep with one on as you could possibly never wake up. I remember a while back Pete Reagan wrote in Carpology that he went to sleep with one burning during a cold spell and awoke a few hours later and was violently sick and had the mother of all headaches. He survives to tell the tale but hasn't used one since. Even if you use one just to warm up the bivvy, Carbon Monoxide poisoning causes drowsiness which is likely to make you sleepy. Don't do it!

There was a discussion on them a while back. My advice, don't!

MOT Check Try this Site. Enter the reg of the vehicle and it will give you the mileage and any failures or notifications on any car going back several years. Came in useful when my daughter was looking at a car and the amount of advisories and the severity of some of them made me advise her to give it a wide berth.

A long one at 1 hour 40 minutes but the calibre of some of the fish are truly stunning.

Simple answer is anything you have confidence in. Most bait companies still trading have been in the business for quite a while and to survive in a competitive world, you have to be good. The days of using sweepings from the floor are probably gone. If you half, crush or grind a boilie, it will leak off attraction quicker and it always pays to get some into the swim to get the fish grubbing about and get a taste for you hook bait.

Bought a 12.5kg of B&M sack of bird seed for silly cheap money and blended it with some hemp (which is very expensive now) and added a bag of frozen sweetcorn after cooking and use that as my spod mix. I get most of my seeds from Jollyes pet store as they have 20kg sacks or you can buy loose from the tubs which is far cheaper then buying from fishing shops. Pigeon conditioner is another good one although I do tend to add some foreign finch mix so there are a blend of larger and smaller seeds.

I'm not claiming to be experienced on such a daunting task but I remember watching a Terry Hearn video on the rarely caught 30 where for weeks he went to the lake but didn't even take the rods, just a bit of bait, a notebook and binoculars. First light is always a good time and I remember taking the dog on a walk around my local lake at 4:30 am one summer morning and was amazed at the amount of activity (note to oneself, do it more often!) If it's local, definitely try to catch it at a time of optimum shows or else you could be camping for months. Other than that, a baiting campaign might be worth trying. Good Luck.

As that great 20th Century philosopher Dolly Parton once said, If you wanna see a rainbow, you gotta put up with the rain!

Second part of the installment.

Passion for Angling episode on the search for "Harry the Monster Carp".