I name thee George of Jubilee.

Hi my names Daniel and it's been over eleven days since my last cast...

(Pause for applause)

...and I am clucking!!!

clucking

To be in a state of Drug/Heroin withdrawal. From the phrase cold turkey.

I was desperate to get out fishing after life and work seemed to conspire to prevent me getting out and I was in the need for something savage. The wonderful art of trotting, to sedately, delicately float fish for a crucian couldn't scratch this itch, nor would chasing illusive Rudd in clear water salve me. I needed something savage to satiate me; I needed rods being torn from rests, bite alarms screaming and battles that would make your arms ache. It's all right people wanting to be at one with nature and appreciating being out, but I needed the precious silence of the country to be shattered by vicious runs...I needed to be hit by something hard coursing through my veins.

Really, the surprise of the three foot barbel twitch would have been best, but with only a few hours to spare and the Avon being in about as good form as the England international side, carp it seemed would have to do. Searching out rarities was a gamble I was unwilling to take, so the familiar reliability of horseshoe pool nestled away at the back of jubilee pools seemed the perfect place to get me hit

I actually love carp fishing and in another life I could make a proper commitment to it if I didn't also love a variety of other fish. I get bored campaigning and am easily distracted from grey backed monsters. These short sessions margin carping are just up my street. As always the margins were my targets and the polished clear gravel where sneaky grubbers mop up dumped bait are my target areas. As always on this session I actually try to mimic these patches of chucked out bait and what always gets lobbed away at the end of a session?..corn. It's cheap and no one can be arsed to bag it for next time, so in it goes. That yellow signal draws them in every time, mix in a bit of something smelly with a few more tasty nutritional morsels and that rod has to bend round.

With one spot to my left baited up and three others primed in other swims, I sat on the ground ten feet from my rod in the shade of a tree. Dark shapes already moved over the bait and although they were tench it was only a matter of time before something bigger was alerted to the feast that lay on the gravel.

I'd barely whistled three bars of the latest CBeebies ear worm stuck in my head when the rod tip bent round and the alarm screamed blue murder. Good thing I had the fore thought to screw some snag ears on under the alarm the rod off the alarm before I dashed the short distance and grabbed the rod. The initial violence subsided quickly as a small, wildish looking common repeatedly rolled in the margin, and with one roll and twang of a fin it was free.

After checking the rig I peered onto the spot again to check it was clear before quietly placing the rig tight to the bank under an overhanging branch. A few more boilies, a dash of pellet-filled ground bait and a fist load of corn and I was back under the tree cross legged listening to the birds BEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEP BEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEP!!!!!!!  And the same performance was under away again. The rod tip was in the water this time as fish bolted after being nailed by the hook. An unusually spirited fight from a fish, it's size revealed a real bastard koi ghost common cross thing, which was probably the biggest gold fish I have caught to date. 

After posting the picture up on a whatsapp chat the first person to mock my mighty goldfish was George Burton off of float flight and flannel so in keeping with that popular carp angling tradition of naming fish, I name this oversized gold fish George of Jubilee. Hopefully everyone will take that one on and just to make sure, I will get it sent in for the next newsletter from the club ;)

With George set free I turned my attention back to this already productive spot, re-baited once again with more goodies and positioned my rig on the closest part of the baited area to the bank so as any feeding fish wouldn't find my line. With the line positioned carefully along the bank I retreated to wait for more action. It took a while but eventually the buzzer wailed but before I got to the rod the fish managed to shake the rig off some ten feet away from the spot where it had been hooked.

This time when I peered back over the bushes to see if the coast was clear to drop the rig in again, two carp were heads down having a munch. They didn't stick around long and soon enough I was tightening the line on my trap. More bait attracted more fish and a group of small tench soon drifted around over the bait, but once they cleared off the swim seemed abandoned. After waiting a good forty five minutes, I was getting ready to head off home via the chippy. I'd just picked up my little rod bag when all hell broke loose. The alarms shrill tone sounded and the rod arched round and a huge boil erupted in the edge.

I hadn't expected to get another one before I left, but it seems turning my back for that moment was long enough for a beautiful mirror to sneak in and snaffle some freebies and with them my hook bait. This fight and subsequent selfies added fifteen minutes to my leaving time. It was worth it though as this fish and its fight were exactly what I needed on this short session and it really satisfied my cravings for a good old bit of angling excitement and vigour.

Hard conditions and bastard bass.

The autumn warmth is a wonderful thing. It's like a special illicit treat when rightfully the damp of winter should be creeping in. Piles of rustling dry leaves and early morning chill you know will seep away as the sun rises. As far as I am concerned it's been a slow start to autumn and as we travelled east the hedgerows reflected as much. Surprisingly only the odd tree here and there showed signs of change, and the hopes of a late warm break beside a lake were perfectly valid. Little did we know that something moved to meet us in a few days time...

Rightfully being wired the way I currently am, I should have been in heaven, with hundreds of moored boats, spread over several marinas on a lake which, at times, is paved with so many perch you could be forgiven for thinking the bottom is striped.  Add to that its previous form for big perch and you could understand my inclination to take just two lure rods and an array of lures every colour of the rainbow.

But on that first trip out and after much probing of every nook and cranny I found my dropshot and micro jig tactics reaped nothing from thousands of casts. This was concerning as in these very same marinas I have caught one perch, unhooked it and just dropped a hook with a hulled maggot still attached in the edge and caught another. Then repeated the same debacle again and again until I suspect it's the same fish again and again.

I've never really just concentrated on lure fishing here and at first I didn't want to over react to the lack of hits at first, so took the inactivity in my stride. Another short session with zero hits though scratched away at my confidence somewhat. It wasn't until the following outing that I hooked a powerful little jack pike bouncing a 7.5cm salt and pepper zander shad along the side of a boat that I clawed confidence back a little.

There was certainly the odd fish around but where were the masses of perch? I ruminated over this as I continued casting. The one thing I kept coming back to was the clarity of the water. Though perfect for sight feeding predators, the clear water offered little cover to anything and with the array of bigger predators, that kind of made sense to me. If we think we have it bad with cormorants inland then around the coast they have it horrendous. Literally of a morning it's not unusual to see twenty or more on this Broad and otters are quite common as well. It often amazes me that there is still a viable population of fish in the Broads considering how hard it must be to maintain those levels under the circumstances.

Still, in the belief that the fish were present, I decided to go a bit more subtle to see if there was fish that weren't in an aggressive enough state to hit a lure but might take a bait. So a few worms were procured in order to see if a slow moving natural bait might sort a few fish out. Whether it was the worms or the more favorable conditions on the day, but walking the worm did put a few more fish on the bank. Only one marina which unlike all the others had an open side to the rest of the Broad instead of an entrance, seemed to have fish moving in and out of it and produced. Along with a whole mess of tiny and even tinier little Sargeants I did manage to sort out one decent perch by gyrating a worm along just off the bottom at a snail's pace.

From the corner vantage point where I could cast all around the marina, I figured the perch were collected close to pair of cruisers that looked like they hadn't been out of the marina in years. As I looked for possible other shoals I hooked into a fish that went insane and turned out to be a roach bream hybrid that had taken a shine to my split dendrobena hook bait.

Weirdly, once I had established the presence of fish I again switched to the lures for the following outings around the marinas. But not long after this the weather turned decidedly worse as the wind which had been blowing from the north east strengthened and pulled in some showers.

Somewhere in the breaks in the weather I snuck out back to the open sided marina and managed to find another little pike, which went like a rocket on my 1-8g outfit. The wind though kept my options very limited as white horses now danced across the lake and reduced the fishable area by half.

It wasn't literally until the day before we were due to leave that I got out again. For probably the first time all week I was able to actually get on and fish from a trio of stages outside the marinas. Up until now the wind had prohibited any casting from these areas as the waves and gust had made casting and retrieving impossible.

Lo and behold first cast, my three gram jig sailed out across the now still Broad; I felt it drop maybe ten or more feet to the bottom and a few lifts of the rod later I felt small yet distinct vibration come back up the line. Turns out the masses of perch were held up about fifty feet out into the water. Literally I couldn't go wrong as cast after cast brought me another little perch. They might have been small but I can honestly say I was truly glad to get into those little predators in the end and prove that if it weren't for that evil north easterly I might have been playing a numbers game to find a big one amongst the hordes of little ones.

Bastard Bass

Lake Loathing was full of juvenile mullet, bass and what not. I'd done a few circuits of the fishing spots searching for anything that might fancy a little rubber snack, like a tubby flounder or even a wary whiting, but only had a couple nibbles of interest from some unseen tiddler. Now though I was casting under huge concrete supports that supported a road over head. Years ago I am sure I saw a small cuckoo wrasse lingering in the shadows and that thought always made me cast into that area.

Watching half an Isome worm dance back a foot off the bottom leading a few tiny fish along was amusing, but when those fish scattered my vision opened up and I spotted something bigger move in and turn off quickly. Halting the retrieve and keeping the red worm moving brought it back in sight. Three times that fish went off and came back and when it passed into the half shaded water I got a perfect view of a mint bass of maybe three pounds.

Position, lure and tack were changed again and again, and in doing so I discovered that bass wasn't alone! Four or five similar sized fish repeatedly circled the concrete supports and after watching them for long enough it became clear they were interested in the shoals of juvenile fish. Luckily or unluckily I had a pretty good match for the fry in a small, random blue and silver shad someone had given me.

This where the frustration began; Moving the random shad around like a wounded fish would easily get the attention of the bass, which would fire in very quickly, but every time no matter how close, they would fall short and turn off as if they knew something was wrong. Two days this went on for and around the same state of tide those few fish would turn up and maraud around, sending the fry panicking whilst clocking my lure every time.

In the end those frustrating fish drove me to bait fishing. A pack of costly peeler crab was purchased and I set a trap. I knew where they seemed to patrol into the structure from and at the end of that route I cast my bait. I even used a sneaky fresh water running rig on fluorocarbon line so as not to alert those wary blighter's to my rouse. And what happened might you ask... well those bastard bass never turned up that day did they!

Lured by man made water.

Time is my enemy at the moment or lack of to be more specific. I mean I could fill every day between now and Christmas just fishing all the stretches of canal I want to go drop shotting on never mind everything else. But like most people I don't have the even one seventh of the free time every week I'd like to have to go fishing as earning a crust kind of gets in the way. Hence as we all have to I have prioritize what I want to do with my valuable fishing time. The canals of late have been the dominant target venues, but I know other things are on the horizon so for now they will have to be left alone. Though saying that, I did squeeze in one last day of canal drop shotting in on a stretch I used to fish years ago and the results were quite promising.

From the off, fishing round structure and features proved to be the order of the day. First chuck in and my Fox spiky shad got nobbled by a small zander and on the second cast the lure got literally ripped off the hook. After a few fish hitting in a frenzy, the zeds shut up shop. A quick change to a slow moving actual worm soon rooted out a nice perch which was lingering tight to the concrete margins.

It was the same story all day as I worked along the canal; I'd find a tasty looking spot fish it, get a few hits and maybe a fish or two then off I'd go on to the next one. The only thing was the general stamp of the fish was a little small considering the amount I caught. I landed easily ten or more zander and twice as many perch, but the all the zander were between 1-2lb and the perch were all 6oz-1lb. Now there isn't anything wrong with having a load of fun and a stack of action, but really I would have expected something bigger to have shown up somewhere in amongst that many fish and worryingly I know there are bigger specimens of both on this stretch so maybe I am doing something wrong...

That was it though for the canals for a little while as I had so many different types of venue I wanted to get on and the next was a real classical corker, and boy oh boy did I want to chuck a lure or two into this predator haven. A few years ago I fished a little known estate lake hidden deep in the Warwickshire countryside that as it turned out was stuffed with Jack pike. That first time I quite literally ran out of bait chucking dead fish around, so this time went back with nothing more than a light lure rod and enough lures to choke half the pike in the county.

It was a perfect winter's day to fish such wonderful venue. As we the crossed the rusting old fence into the ageing estate gardens and walked down through ankle deep leaves towards the lake the woods were alive with gaudy pheasants foraging under the alien pines. The cloud was clearing and the sun lit up the house atop the lawn over the lake. Bar the hundred or so Canadian geese ripping the well manicured lawn up over the water and a family of swans it seemed that we would be honoured, and have this wondrous lake to ourselves for the day.

We actually circumvented the lake and followed a small feeder stream through the trees to begin our fishing on an acute bend where a few hundred years of steady water flow have carved a bend into a deep holding spot. The water as predicted by my accomplice Rob was sluggish and slow with a large mat of debris collected where the branches of the ash that dominates the bend dipped into the stream. The sight of that bend alone would make any perch angler go weak at the knees. It had to be fate that I was here and I still had a drop shot rig set up ready to drag a worm down to its doom. It took the slightest of a flick to send my rig within inches of the debris and joyfully I watched as the braid spilled endlessly from my reel and informing me of how perfectly deep this swim was.

I couldn't have twitched that worm more than a hand full of times before something had it off the hook in a flash. The second cast was much the same apart from I did feel the tell tale vibration of a small stripy for a moment. After a fruitless retrieve I found that the inside line directly under my feet was even deeper than the outside of the bend. I could even feel some tree roots in one area which I did my best to avoid but target if that makes sense. It was whilst doing so that the first of a trio of small but perfectly formed perch zipped out and smashed my worm. Even convinced that there must be a bigger perch lingering in the shade of the tree roots somewhere I had an entire estate lake calling to me like a siren, so I reluctantly left the bend in the river thinking I might return at the end of the day.

The water of the main lake very clear as I expected it might be and I had always known it was going to be a case of going through half the lure box to find which fake folly might spur the pike to strike. In hindsight it was totally the wrong decision to chuck out a drop shot rig into this pike infested water. On the very first cast my line suddenly began moving in a very odd angle after something grabbed my lure. After the line fell slack I retrieved nothing more than two thirds of my leader and the hook. The lure and the weight as well as the other third of the leader were all long gone. Rob got the next bit of action as he retrieved a vigorous little roach he caught on a pinch of bread and the water not far from the bank erupted. I rushed to tie on a trace and rummaged around in my box to find something that would float and could work around mid water.

After settling on a small plug I raised three strikes and good hit before playing a excitable Jack into the edge before it threw the lure back at me by thrashing around in the edge. But that was just the start of things for the day. As we worked away around the lake I went through a whole variety of different colours and patterns before settling on a top three productive lures for the day.

The old school but ever reliable silver spinner worked best in the sun flashing away on a fast retrieve mid water and drew quite a bit of attention from some really tiny pike. I had hoped that it might attract a monster perch but they proved very absent through the day. The floating and super bright perch pattern mini fat plug seemed to wind the fish up into a frenzied attack, but as much as they went for that they seemed to miss it most times. The real winner and number one lure was actually a bit of bastard combination in the end. I had picked up a pack of E-sox paddle tails in the ubiquitous pearl and red pattern, and although they are designed to be fished on a drop shot rig I found they were much more productive at hooking these jacks fished on a 10gm jig head whilst being lifted and dropped on the retrieve.

As the day drew to a close we focused on an area where we had seen prey fish topping and it was here that the pike went into overdrive hitting my lure every other cast. In fact in a mad fifteen minutes I had three fish and six hits in as many casts. Although there was nothing bigger than five or six pounds all day these little predators were great fun on my light lure outfit.

I did in the end follow that stream back up to the bend as the sun dipped behind the woods. Before leaving I had dumped some left over chopped worm alongside the old ash's roots. The thought of what might have been drawn in by or whose appetite might have been peaked by the oozing worms had played on my mind all day.

Leaning against the trunk I flicked the rod sending a newly tied drop shot rig half way across the river. Nothing seemed to notice it fluttering across the flow and into the depths below the tree, so I began to bounce it round temptingly around in front of the roots in a figure of eight. The thump that got sent back up the tight line was epic and it really got my heart beating, but whatever did it seemed not to hold onto the bait. Not knowing what had happened I reeled up a ruined worm which looked as if it had been through a mangle. With a fresh one hooked I wasted no time casting and instead dropped it back on the spot. The next and identical hit came on the drop and also resulted into no fish. All became clear though when I once again retrieved the worm for checking and a pike of about five pounds followed the worm up like a Polaris missile before turning in a splash back to its haunt under the tree.

It was then I figured my attempts to lure one type of predator had not been as precise as I hoped and the likelihood of hooking and keeping on any big perch might be a little hampered. Carrying on though, I did again hook the pike which after smashing up the entire swim threw the hook directly up into the bows of the tree and ended my session. I will however be back to have another go after a monster estate lake stripy as we have it on good authority that there are some true beasts lurking in this lake and apparently they are rather partial to a spinner just as I suspected the might be.