Stuttering spring sessions.

I am not big on making excuses for not catching, but even I have to admit that the lure fishing round these parts is total rubbish at the moment. The pike I am sure have spawned by now, but both the perch and zander seem too have ended up in some kind of limbo due to the temperature first increasing and then dropping again. Literally, I have caught perch that haven't spawned and seen ribbons of eggs clinging to snags. Some zander to are being caught off nests whilst others are still bulging with spawn. I had hoped that after a week away at tropical Burnham-on-Sea I might return to post spawn predators going on the munch but that turned out to be wishful thinking as the low temps and frosty mornings have meant the limbo has persisted even further into April.

The day after returning from the seaside I was on the bank with my old mate Mick, off of Picatorial Quagswagging to check out the zander potential of a semi urban stretch we had both pondered but never fished. It was a great looking bit of canal which I am sure holds its fair share of zander but sadly we were never going to see anywhere near its potential...

For my part in this adventure I caught very little apart from several substantial branches, a few poo bags and a little zander of 45cm, which I assume was a little male as it showed no signs of spawn or having spawned. Mind Mick caught only two other smaller ones which gave both us very limited information on whether this area was worth a return visit.

I had to wait ages for my next session and when my chance came I nearly wasted it after going out for a curry with some mates and not crawling into bed until two in the morning. Lucky for me the family were receptive to me re-jigging our plans for the day and chipping off for a short evening session on a shallow water I know is rife with pike.

Two ideas came to mind re this trip; firstly I wanted to fish some surface/subsurface lures for the pike, secondly I wanted to have my first go fishing the reverse dropshot rig for the huge perch in this water. As this water is painfully shallow I was convinced both the perch and pike should have done with spawning by now and that after a few weeks with little rain the water would be gin clear and those pike couldn't fail to detect the noisy top water lures.

Sadly the wind was freezing and even after seeing the lake was gin clear I concluded to just fish a subsurface 3D Rad lure which attached by the lower split ring position runs a maximum of a foot under the surface

Casting the Rad about in the perfectly clear water turned out to be some of the most exciting fishing I've done for years. The little pike although out-sized by the lure would repeatedly charge after it as if they were about to attack, before turning off at the last minute once there realized exactly how much of a mouthful the lure was. It wasn't too long before I cracked out the drop shot rod to fish some highly buoyant worm style lures a foot and half off the weedy bottom. In doing so I quickly found a shoal of small greedy perch were hell bent on eating lures the same length as themselves and bigger.

Unfortunately the fuss caused by the writhing perch all too quickly got the attention of the hungry jack pike and after stealing a couple of captures I hooked one of the vicious attackers and on my light dropshot outfit in that shallow water, it sent my reel into meltdown. Lucky for me the hook was right in the corner of the cheeky jacks mouth and smashing up the shallows into a muddy soup I netted the hungry little fellow and grabbed myself one last hazy selfie due to my cracked phone screen.

I do hope the canals and all the other stuttering venues come back into form with the approaching warm temperatures, as I have plenty of practising to do for a couple of up and coming matches and I wouldn't mind actually catching a few of those hungry jacks off the top once their blood boils up and they grow even more savage.

Specimen lure fishing.

It seems modern society nowadays is obsessed with identity and this categorising has seeped its way into fishing as well. Once upon a time you were simply an angler, now though we all as anglers seem to want to categorise ourselves; carp anglers, predator anglers, match anglers, specimen anglers, barbel anglers, sea angler, lure anglers and pleasure anglers just to name a few. No doubt as you read those descriptions you quite likely would have put yourself into one of the categories as you read it. For my part though I don't see it this way... I see it like this: I think of myself as the centre of a pie chart where the surrounding sections are made up of the previously mentioned types of angler. Dependant on what I am interested in at any one time the specific sections of that pie chart might be bigger. I suppose by description that make me some kind of all rounder, but being an all rounder has its advantages in that by being informed of methods of many facets of angling you can mix and match what your doing to you're advantage!

Of late it is not untrue to say that I am leaning more towards lure angling, but its my knowledge as a specimen angler which inspired my most recent outing. You see I have long theorised that there might be some rather generous sized perch lurking in one of my favourite lakes. I actually know there is a large population of perch which are generally very focused on tiny baits like caster and maggot. These fish range up to 2lb in weight or 35cm-40cm if you're a lure angler. My thoughts though were that there must be a few really big mommas around and that maybe targeting them with lures which the smaller fish really don't respond to until later in the year might help target the big girls specifically.

My idea when I arrived early doors was to target some feature strewn spots using crayfish lures fished on Carolina rigs with which I had been having a lot of success lately. I love the way this set up works! By having the weight of the rig set away from the lure you get these few moments when the weight hits the bottom, the lure is no longer being pulled down by anything and it flutters slowly down - nine times out of ten that's when the perch hit.

Being as I was after a specimen and I knew the smaller perch were unlikely to make an appearance I wasn't expecting many fish, but after making hundreds of casts in likely areas I had zero to show for my efforts. That was until I began casting into a reedy bay where I hoped the perch could be gathering ready for spawning. On my first cast I watched the rig hit the bottom and then the sagging braided line shot taught and I struck into thin air. I was sure a fish had grabbed the lure and quickly ejected it. Then three casts later I felt a very distinctive thump resonate up the braided line which again came to naught. The wind was actually blowing a little into the bay and this was helping me to cast onto the reed line and fish a bent retrieve along the edge of the reeds where I thought the fish might been holed up. About three or four twitches along the reeds something smashed the lure hard sending a fizz up from the lake bed as it moved off. I really thought it could have been a perch at first but the fish just piled on the pressure and powered off sending my little 500 size reel into melt down. Ten minutes of me retrieving line and it smashing the swim to bits and I got my first sight of a nice looking pike deep down in the clear water. It wasn't until it went into the net that I realised just how much of a pig of a pike it was.

She might have been only 75cm long but she was probably 80cm round. Even though she obviously hadn't spawned, she was very much still feeding hard and her stomach was very much laden with fish. Other than her obvious weight issues she was a stunning fish all round and catching her more than made up for the lack of target fish on this outing.