Canals can be a nightmare to fish in strong winds, but they are also landscaped to the extent that most have at least one or two sections sheltered behind high banks and/or trees. I found one such area on a wide bend of the Grand Western Canal today for some out and out roach fishing, a decision forced upon me by a 4pm visit to the local tackle shop yesterday which discovered that it closes at one o'clock on a Saturday. Therefore my baits for today were bread, hemp and tares, with some worm if the going was really tough and some scratching for perch was in order.
I've never actually used tares before, and first impressions today were somewhat misleading. After an hour of steady feeding with hemp and tares at twelve metres, I slipped on a small tare and landed a 1oz roach within a minute. That was it. I never had another bite on that or on hempseed.
I've never actually used tares before, and first impressions today were somewhat misleading. After an hour of steady feeding with hemp and tares at twelve metres, I slipped on a small tare and landed a 1oz roach within a minute. That was it. I never had another bite on that or on hempseed.
A recent sort out meant that I had to tie my rigs on the bank. I set up a hemp rig consisting of a 4x12 Drennan 'Seed', a pattern which I believe has now been discontinued but has brought me a lot of roach on this method since I was in my early teens. It also works well for breadpunch, although I now prefer a custom made pattern which I actually obtained through ebay. I settled for a 4x11 float in around four feet of water. I always fish these with a positive shotting pattern; a bulk of number elevens (plus any fine-tuning shot) with a short hooklength housing a number eleven and number 12 dropper. Fishing positively needn't mean heavy line and hooks and cumbersome presentation. This kind of shotting pattern registers bites very quickly and clearly, even when catching small fish. Besides, a wire stem and strung shotting is asking for tangles. If I wanted to fish the punch in this way I would use the carbon-stemmed Drennan Seed. One final rig was a 0.5g Drennan Pinkie for fishing larger pieces of punch on the off chance of a skimmer or big roach.
This rig did account for my best fish on the punch, but ironically the pinch of flake that I was fishing was taken on the drop and the large bulk held up by a rudd of about a pound. Otherwise it was only able to produce the same 12dr-1oz roach I had been catching on the lighter rig, only they were much longer in coming. That rudd was more or less the last fish of the day, which had begun in the expected way with a bite first drop over a nugget of liquidised bread.
As I mentioned in a recent blog post, I used to always carry a trace or two when pole fishing on this canal as the feeding activity, particularly when fishing the bread, inevitably arouses the interest of any nearby predators. Today that took around two hours, with a pike grabbing a roach hooked on the heavier rig (which gave me an outside chance of landing it). The same rig pattern with a 0.10mm hooklength and size 18 Drennan Super Carbon Maggot hook has brought me pike to around 10lb in similar circumstances previously, but not this time.
I carried on catching a few roach before the next pike attack came when a decent sized jack launched itself clear of the water in an attempt to grab another roach. I managed to land that fish quickly without it being snatched and reached straight for my spinning rod, assembling a basic float rig to a single barbless treble. In five chucks, I lost two pike and landed three from about 2lb to 4lb, before adding another small one a bit later. This messed up the roach fishing for a while and the only way I could catch was searching out my swim in areas I hadn't fed. I found some roach about three metres to the left of my feed area and swapped between there and where I had been introducing the liquidised, until the end of the session. It was very productive, and strangely would dry up and then return to being prolific with rest, despite the fact that I didn't feed even a crumb of bread there.