Practice session (GU - Leamington Spa) - A case of cat and mouse.

With the LACC pairs open quickly approaching I was in desperate need to tune into the Grand Union canal where it was going to be held. The only problem was that competitors were asked to keep off the canal for a good period before to let the venue have a rest before it got smashed to pieces by sixty odd anglers thrashing the living hell out of it. So this in mind I opted to fish the same canal just off the match stretch so as I could try and tune into the conditions and methods ready for the upcoming match. Why it is that I have never fished this stretch of canal is beyond me as I live a very short journey away. Anyway with a short session available the weekend prior to the match I headed down to the very urban Leamington town section to try a get myself in sync with this unknown bit of water.

Venue = Grand union - Leamington Spa town sections - 3hrs

perch 22cm
perch 26cm
perch 18cm
perch 28cm
Total = 94cm

As the catch for the LACC pairs comp is only four perch and four zander I only included the four best perch that I caught. I did actually catch quite a few more though which leads me to the conclusion that the perch quota of the catch for the competition should be easy enough to fill. The zander on the other hand I feel will be the key to this match. Firstly I struggled to find them in the clear leaf filled water and the two I did encounter on this occasion were small and not that into attacking judging from the way they were just holding onto the tail of the lures.
As for what I learned about the Grand union canal in urban Leamington it pretty simple, it's clear, its lined with dog shit, it used by the local addicts to shoot up, there's loads of cool graffiti on and it's not a place to take the family for a walk after Sunday lunch.

Walking on battered ground.

I can't deny the River Leam has got me intrigued at the moment. It's one of those places I always thought not really worth bothering with, but earlier visits in the year have got me thinking otherwise. The sections below and up into Leamington Spa have up until now been the focus of my attention, but the sections leading out have so far been ignored.

A text from my old mate Andy Lewis prompted me to arrange a hook up with him to go and have a short prospecting afternoon session on these new upper town sections. Ironically I have been round the parks surrounding these stretches of river many times and I cross the bridges that run through them all the time when passing through Leamington Spa, but hand on heart I have never seen a single soul fishing on the Leam. So I was bit shocked when we arrived at a mint looking river to see that it was very obviously heavily fished.

We worked our way along the Mill Gardens section covering every square inch of water with all kinds of lures fished in every way we could think of, but all we had to show for our efforts was a single small jack which I nailed very early on, casting a savage gear 4play fungus roach swim bait on a five gram jig and working it very erratically along the bottom.

After thrashing the living shit out of Mill Gardens we crossed the road to check out Welches Meadow which leads out of the town. This bit of the Leam is a stunning bit of water to look at but worryingly seemed almost lifeless. Again the both of us worked really hard covering every angle, casting at every possible haunt, spot and feature. We'd been through at least half the stretch before I hooked into my second and last fish of the day, a nice perch which took a fancy to a large red head fox spiky shad I'd been working steadily along the margins.

That was it for my action. After fishing our way all the way along the meadow and back again we crossed back over the road to see if the quickly approaching darkness might spur a little action, just as the conditions became that bit more favourable for the predators. Andy wheedled out a similar sized perch to the one I'd had earlier on a white Eco gear bug ant, but that was it for the session.

Thinking about it now, two things bother me about these upper sections of the Leam. Firstly they are obviously fished quite a bit and from the look of the spots that are fished it's not anglers sitting for long periods of time, as there is little evidence of worn patches on the grass, signs of fishing boxes or bank stick holes. It's not hard to assume that lure anglers are going in and out of the swims, and that probably means the fish have seen their fair share of action and could have got a bit clued up already. Secondly, there was hardly any fish movement at all; both me and my companion for this session are very tuned into looking for topping fish and the like, and we saw only two signs of fish all afternoon. Given we fished right till dark, I would've thought we would have seen a decent bit of movement at the end of the day. The lack of fish activity has me thinking that maybe the larger part of the prey fish population might be holed up somewhere and with them  could be most of the predators.

 I reckon if I go back to these upper sections that I will really have to try and pin down the prey fish before casting something. I think it might actually be worth doing, as I keep hearing rumours of some big pike round these top sections. Even though I think they might be a bit pressured, I really like the idea of the challenge of searching out something decent from these town waters over the winter to come.

Change of plan.

It's not that often that I walk away from a venue before I've even started fishing, but that was the case the other day! I'd dropped off both JB and BB and made my way to a predetermined section of canal for what I had planned as a day of light lure fishing and roving off into the Warwickshire countryside. Admittedly I was a bit on the late side arriving. But after I did eventually arrive I got the gear out of the car, walked the short distance to the canal and peered at the water to see the boats had been at it for hours and done their worst. Literally, I reckon moles would have been more at home in that water than fish. Any love for the venue evaporated quickly and left me feeling rather flaccid about the whole session.

It took me a while to go through the local venues to choose an alternative that was in reasonable proximity to where I was and where I needed to be. As all I had was a very light lure outfit, the choices narrowed quickly and rather than go to another section of the same dirty canal I opted to head over to Leamington Spa to have a session on the Leam town waters again. The torpid Leam I surmised might be a good candidate for some light lure fishing and having been there a while ago I knew the waters running through the Victorian parks  held a few nice fish amongst all the bank side cover.

I reckon I'd been fishing all of ten minutes before I figured I'd made the right decision to move venues. The Leam it turns out is rammed to the reeds with small perch, and those small perch loved the tiny lures I was casting into the river and hopping slowly across the current. Literally every cast was getting some kind of  hit and in many cases multiple hits. There must have been groups of these tiny little predators chasing the lure back to the bank, gobbling it up and spitting it out until one got caught out.

All the perch activity raised the attention of the pike as well. Several small perch got chased around in the first swim until the naughty jack in question saw my lure and had a go itself, ending up getting hooked close to my bank after thinking its quarry was about to get away and engulfing it with a flare of its gills.

The fun went on all day and catching huge numbers of tiny perch meant it was only a matter of time before I located some bigger ones. In the shadow of a huge white building the far bank cover ended at a brick wall. Just where the cover ended, the wall began seemed to hold some different sized perch. At first it was just ones half as long again as the wasp average, but with the odd half pounder here and there. Someowhere amongst the multiple plucks from the smaller fish came a hard thump as something bigger hit the small spiky shad I was retrieving. The little fish and the small pike had proved sporty enough on my 1-7 gram outfit; this fish though was really having it. After playing it out in the flow in the middle of the river initially, it moved into the shallower clear waters close to my bank and I saw one chunky perch with my lure hanging out of its mouth being tracked by its identical twin. The second fish disappeared at the sight of my net in the water but the hooked fish went in good as gold.

I ran out of fish-able bank by mid afternoon and after a quiet break for lunch on a park bench in the sun, I turned around and worked my way all the way back down the stretch. Amazingly even after casting hundreds of times into the already fished swims, the stripy hordes were still well up for attacking the tiny lures as they skipped across the bottom. By the time I reached the end of the stretch, the river was in shade and the sun was heading towards the horizon. How many of those tiny perch I caught through the course of the day was impossible to calculate, but what I do know is the Leam where it runs through Leamington Spa is a brilliant venue for light lure fishing, and I will definitely be back for another go before winter sets in.

Poor relations #1

I've always thought the Leam to be the poor relation of the Warks Avon. This isn't a theory I have formulated out of thin air, it's based on hard evidence collected by myself and others. Literally there has always seemed to be smaller quantities of smaller fish in it than the Avon. I know all rivers aren't equal in fish populations and that there is probably a million ecological and geographic reasons why this should be so. Any reasons aside though, the fact is that you just don't ever hear anything to tempt you to fish the Leam and I think the lack of angling attention itself doesn't help its reputation.

Saying all that the other day I drove over the river in my van, looked out the window and my fishing senses went wild, it looked that good. As far as the eye could see the sloth-like Leam was lined with Lily pads and it looked just up my street for a spot of summer lure fishing. So early in the morning I headed down with a bag full of lures and my new Diawa crazy cranker lure rod to see for myself if there might be any good sport to be had amongst those beautiful dense beds of lily pads.

I parked in the free car park above Princes Drive weir, grabbed my kit and headed straight for the weir itself. It was quite an odd experience walking out along the stepped wall of the weir to the centre of the river with the entire mass of the Leam sluggishly crawling towards you. Sadly though there were signs that not only was this popular spot frequented by the local colour, but also by possibly our eastern European friends. Along with the empty packets of cheap spinner lures discarded in the bushes were innumerable empty cans of Tyskie and the like.

The weir didn't produce Jack and really I wasn't surprised at all given its location and obvious popularity, so I crossed the road and began searching the snaggy waters in the park itself. Initially I was using shallow running roach like plugs and slow sinking weed free lures. The hope was that the predators might be hanging out under the pads lining the banks and that I could entice a strike as the lure either sank close to or passed by the cover.

My initial approach though wasn't working so I changed over to a light jig head with a large hook so as to fish some rubber lures slowly in the near still water. It proved to be the right move and a couple of tiny jack pike later it seemed the fish were a lot closer to the bottom than I assumed they were.

Weirdly, the water of the Leam in this area had quite a bit more colour than I expected it to, but with my polaroids on I could see small groups of roach just under the surface as well as my lure as it came closer to my own bank. I persisted with the jig tactics as I moved through the park and managed to search out a nice perch from the shadows of some over hanging trees which came as a nice surprise and might indicate the presence of some decent perch sport.

After fishing several more openings in the bank side bushes, I was thinking that most of the fish populations were held up in the lower area which I had already passed through, as I couldn't find or see any fish anywhere. The river here seemed to shallow up as I could make out a few ancient snags protruding off the bottom covered in debris. It was after casting beyond one of the snags and attempting to steer my lure around it that everything went solid. I thought I'd found a trailing branch and my lure was done for, until the snag began moving upstream and it clicked that I'd hooked a better fish that was probably unaware of its predicament. Needless to say when it did realize something wasn't right, it went insane and attempted to get into every weed bed it passed by.

In the end though I did keep it under control long enough to slip the net under a very nice example of a Leam pike in its full summer finery. It wasn't until I lifted the fish out of the water and put it on the mat that I saw half the kids in the park had been attracted over by the sight of an angler actually catching something. Certainly they had never seen anything bigger than a roach caught out of the river and they were over the moon when I opened up its mouth to show them all its teeth.

I called it quits shortly after releasing the pike as I could see a number of canoes moving down the river. I have to say I was pleasantly surprised by the mornings fishing and by what I had seen of the Leams fish populations. Now I find myself wondering if I may have sold the Leam short thinking it the poor relation of the Avon; certainly as a predator venue it looks like it might have some mileage for a session here and there later in the year.