A competitive foray #1

My personal identity as an angler has always been pretty clear to me, "I am a specimen orientated angler who could could quite easily slip into that all consuming place where the biggest fish must be caught at all costs, but choose's not to as I value all the things that this would jeopardise too much to do it". Match angling therefore doesn't hold much interest for me. Well, that was until I began doing a spot of lure fishing when young BB was born. You see the two types of competitive match fishing are very different. Traditional match fishing involves drawing a peg, pitching up in that peg with nearly all the fishing gear you own and eeking the greatest weight of fish you can out of your prescribed swim within the specified time limit. Lure match fishing instead is about catching the greatest length of predatory fish out of said prescribed area, which could be many miles within a specified time limit. The latter is much more mobile and strangely you find yourself fishing areas others have fished and failed, only for you to catch.

I have not had much opportunity to explore this interesting facet of lure fishing before apart from a single foray a couple of years ago when I was asked to fish with the England contingent for the CRT International lure friendly, which is organised to build bridges between all nationalities of anglers in the UK. This was not the experience I expected as only a few weeks prior to the event I had surgery to remove a kidney stone which left me with a stent in my water works. A stent, for those who are unaware of such evil things, is a plastic pipe which is designed to hold open pipes inside your body and thus caused in my case, urinal reflux. This is where when-ever you take a pee, urine is forced back up the pipe from your bladder to your kidney. In short this feels like Satan is raping your pee pipe. Hence my first ever lure match involved me spending the day with a non English speaking chap, peeing blood into the bushes, being in a constant cold sweat on a burning hot day and generally feeling like death. I can't even remember the fishing and can only recall curling up on the bed once home whimpering with JB looking at me very worried.

It's taken a few years to get over that experience and conveniently I have been asked if I wanted to be part of the England team for this CRT event and after agreeing I have taken a dip into the world of competitive lure fishing to get myself prepared. Luckily for me a friendly event was organized by Tusses Lure Division a few weeks prior to the CRT event which it seemed might be a good warm up so I duly singed up for it.

Now I do not wish to give full blow by blow accounts of each outing as this would be terribly boring and might serve to share info with my competitors should they read this, so all I will do is outline the events, venues, catches and results with possibly conclusions should they be needed.

Tusses Autumn Friendly

Venue = All Tusses Lure Division waters

Total length = 151cm 

Finish position = 11th place

I did myself out of a couple of points through rushing to total my score, which is a lesson learned for next time. Though this wasn't the biggest lesson taken from this match. Throughout the match I lost four small zander of around 20cm+, two small perch of maybe 10cm+ and a better perch of at least 25cm+. All of which added up an estimated 115cm, which would have taken my score to around 266cm which could have jumped me two or even three places higher into the top ten. All of these lost fish were down to exactly the same thing, poor hook ups, and when forty five percent of hooked fish are coming off something needs addressing for the next time.

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After chatting with my good fried Carl Arcus who is a very experienced in this area, it became clear a practice session was a necessity to help pin down possible fish holding spots for the up coming CRT match. With limited time though and a cut off point for practice coming in before I had a day free, I had to reorganize a few things and skive an afternoon off to get some needed time on the water before the match day.

Practice for CRT International Friendly.

Venue = LACC sections bridge 18 - 30

Total Length = 111cm (In the CRT match only the best two perch count. So 51cm would be my perch quota)

Doesn't count.

Leave well alone!

As pleasing as the practice session was with me making up 51cm perch quota that I would be very happy with during the CRT event it was terribly disappointing on the zander front. With zander quota making up at least fifty percent of the fish you can submit it is imperative that competitors catch any they can. Even more worryingly was the fact that I only encountered two tiny ones both of which let go of the lure at the surface. On a better note a change of hook pattern seems to have helped increase my conversion of hits into fish. on the Tusses event where of sixteen good hits I landed nine giving me a 56% conversion rate of hits to fish. On this practice with a different hook pattern I landed eight fish out of eleven good hits giving me a conversion of hits to fish of 73%.

After only two dedicated outings trying to build up decent match scores I am having to quickly re-educate myself to not actually look for the biggest fish as I have been for many years, but to instead look for the most prevalent fish as this give better opportunity to build length quickly. With this in mind I felt I was on the way to focusing myself to think more like a lure match angler than like a specimen angler.

Go big or go home.

Of all the facets of light lure fishing it's the dropshot that intrigues me most. By that though I don't mean it's the only method I use, as I have grown to understand that every method has its moment and I am just as likely to cast a tiny crank bait, jig or Carolina rig when I believe it is appropriate as I am a dropshot. But all those methods have one single thing in common that the dropshot doesn't, and that's that they are predominantly retrieval methods where as the dropshot to all intents and purposes is generally conceived to keep the lure in one area, or at least retrieved at a snail's pace.

The other day I actually went out with the sole intent to fish the dropshot on a section of canal so rife with structure that it would be easy to think it was built specifically for the method. I had with me pretty much the entire spectrum of dropshot lures, from tiny Mebru shirasu worms right up to E-sox Lobworms, but it was the latter sized lures I intended to use... You see I have become adept at using all sizes of lures drop shotting, and see that by using scaled down tactics, micro hooks and tiny lures you can catch tiny predators all day long. Occasionally these mini methods tempt bigger fish, but honestly in my experience they do lean heavily towards small perch, or wasps, as people seem to be calling them in lure circles.

Now although I do not believe that the bigger bait catches the bigger fish, I do believe that if you offer a fish something that is too good to pass up they will more than likely eat it. It's like when you are trotting maggots on a river; once the fish are focused on the maggots that are moving towards them they have to make an instant choice - grab the maggots or let them pass by where they will be lost. Transpose that onto lure fishing and think of it this way; if you drop a tiny lure into the vicinity of a big old perch on a freezing cold day, if it is big enough to catch her attention then she is going to work out instantly if it's worth being bothered with or not and she might have it, or she might not. Now replace that tiny lure with a lure three inches long and suddenly it's a feast not a snack, and when you're weighing up energy expenditure verses reward, bigger baits have to be better, right.

So rather than mess around with 2lb line, mosquito hooks and maggot sized worms set up with a much larger rig intended to fish big lures. Given that the Grand Union was quite clear I chose a core few very natural looking lures, like the Wave pumpkin Tikki monky which looks rather like a newt, the E-sox lob worm which is a great replica of a lob worm and the now ubiquitous Savage gear 3D bleak to concentrate on through the afternoon.

In the past I have had some great results with the Tikki monkey creature bait, but even after working that hard in every conceivable manner around loads of structure, I had exactly no interest in it. The same went for the E-sox lob worm and even the 3D bleak was striking out fished under the rod tip. At this point the thought occurred to me that although the structure offered cover to the resident predators, maybe they were actually in the deeper water looking for warmth. So I resisted changing onto a jig rig to search out the open water and stuck with the drop shot rig so I could work the lure really slowly across the bottom. I knew there was a good chance I would lose some gear fishing this way in a snaggy area but the risk was worth it.

After casting onto the far shelf margin I gently work the life like little fish down the shelf into the trench the barges carve out. I worked the lure slowly down across and up the contours of the canal until finally I located a willing taker close to my own bank just were the shelf began to rise up. There was no doubting it was a fish, there were no plucks, just wallop, as a nice size perch engulfed the lure.

That same area produced three almost identical in size perch in consecutive casts and showed me exactly how tightly these fish were grouped in the clear and recently thawed and still thawing water.

I had my doubts that the zander might play ball at all in the clear conditions, but after working a few more areas over diligently, I targeted a patch of dead rushes on the far bank. Zander I have found can be very subtle taking lures, unlike perch and pike which seem to thump and tear respectively. I have often thought this might be because they sometimes seem to grab the lure and either stop or move forwards, which doesn't give a definable hit until I reel or lift the rod with something on the end. This was exactly one of those occasions where I felt no hit then reeled, the line went tight and the fish moved, then I struck. Considering how far in the mouth the hook was, anyone would have thought the fish had really hammered the lure which was just not the case.

The rest of the session passed by quickly with me working hard to find localized shoals of perch which all seemed to be lurking in similar areas around the bottom of the near side shelf, and I even found couple more small rouge zander loitering amongst them. My confidence in the 3D bleak lasted all day and every fish landed on this session felt the lure of this realistic replica fished as if it was a struggling injured fish, was too good of a meal to let pass by. 

Every single perch absolutely nobbled it and proved my decision to go big or go home right on this occasion. Although I feel I would have probably caught fish on smaller lures, I don't think I would have caught as many or as higher quality perch as I did. I ended up catching twelve good sized perch of between 20-25cm perch and three 25-30cm zander for a rough overall length of 3.5 meters, which I am led to believe is a respectable length of fish from any canal and happily I lost no gear as well.

Zed heads.

The weekend started with a wander down the Coventry to try out a new rod I've just bought. You see I've become a bit obsessed with finding the perfect rod to suit my canal lure fishing. By that I mean a rod that feels right and can perform multiple tasks, as I've been looking for a lure rod that can function both as a dropshot rod and light lure rod. The Sonik lightec I've been using for a while is an outstanding light lure rod for small hard lures and soft lures, but is a bit soft in the top section, which means it doesn't transfer much information back up the blank when fishing the dropshot with it. 

Its actually proved a hard task, as rod manufacturers would prefer you actually bought a rod for each discipline and so don't make an all round lure rod from what I can see. In any case this has led me to actually look for a rod which I think will be capable of multitasking even if it is labeled as something specific. A mistake I think I'd been making for a while though is only looking at light lure rods and thinking they could work as a dropshot rod, but then I saw a review of a dropshot rod on-line that said it worked well with small soft lures as well and realized maybe I'd been looking at the problem this the wrong way round. Once I'd handled several different dropshot rods I settled on Wychwood agitator dropshot rod in the 7ft version which is rated to cast 3-18 grams and I was dying to get out and have a go with it.

Unusually for me there was no real specific target for this little outing. Literally I just wanted to see how this new rod performed fishing both drop shot and small jigs. So I dropped on a section of the Coventry that is generally well populated with predators and began by using a super light dropshot rig to target any fishy looking structure. Straight away I could feel small perch plucking at the tiny pink shirasu lure I was using. After quickly landing a few small perch a little zander zipped off with the lure after hammering it close to some brick work on my bank.

A few stops later I switched over to fishing a 3 gram jig in conjunction with one of my favourite cannibal shads. The rod worked perfectly with this light rig and the stiff dropshot rod actually transfers so much information back up the blank. Literally as I lifted the lure off the bottom at any distance I could feel the paddle tail vibrating away. Happily the local perch were being obliging and quickly they were snatching the little lure as it dropped to the bottom, really engulfing the lure as they attacked.

So far so good with the Wychwood agitator dropshot rod; it does seem to be able to perform both as described as a dropshot rod and as a general purpose light lure rod. This hopefully should enable me to only carry the one rod and switch methods when I need whilst having confidence that the rod is doing a good job in any scenario.

A couple of days later I arranged to meet up with a fellow zed head Mick Newey to fish the Avon at night for zander. But a trip to Stratford with the JB and BB gave me a glimpse of the condition of the Avon and all confidence drained away after seeing it was very low and incredibly clear. On this occasion sense prevailed and we rearranged to instead have a session on a bit of canal that has produced some big fish quite consistently. I was almost tempted to take the new rod along, but as this bit of cut has such good form with big zeds I wanted to gamble and go big, taking instead a medium sized outfit so as to fish bigger lures.

We met up before first light miles away from anywhere and just as I arrived the rain began to fall gently in the half light. By the time we'd fished one known haunt, the rain began to pick up pace. By the time we were at the third spot it was torrential. We had no choice but to just shelter as best we could under some trees, Mick in his water proof jacket and me in the poncho that I always carry in my bag.  As we sheltered I had little choice but to abandon the lure rod which Id been casting repeatedly all morning, and this left me staring intently through the rain at my float rig. Nothing whatsoever happened whilst it was raining which was a bit perplexing as the dank conditions looked perfect for the zander to be feeding. Eventually the rain abated and once my soaking hat was rung out and abandoned it seemed like we could happily get out from under the trees and restart the session.

Not long after the rain stopped dimpling the surface, the canal seemed to spark into life once again. Fish were rolling up and down the canal and after persisting in one spot as I was convinced it held fish, a zander finally hit the 90mm spiky red head shad I was working along the bottom. After waiting it out in that chilly rain that little zander really put a smile back on my face.

With the weather now a bit more conducive to fishing, we both switched into proper zander fishing mode. With three dead bait lines and a lure rod on the go, we worked over every area we fancied for a maximum of thirty minutes before moving onto the next. This is the great thing about fishing with other zed heads, they fully appreciate the need to constantly keep moving to find feeding fish. So many times before I have just kept moving all day until I hit a sweet spot and the action just goes off instantly. On this occasion I don't think there was ever going to be a sweet spot though.

We both worked hard moving constantly and covering each swim we targeted well by moving baits round,  in my case covering every square inch with lures. Luckily for me I found another similar sized fish to the first close to an overhanging bush and then later in another swim a boat went through and that seemed to get a few inactive fish moving, in turn sparking a missed run for each of us.

The final fish of the morning sniffed out my dead bait in the now chocolate coloured water in  exactly the same spot as where I'd had the missed run and turned out to be yet another similar sized zander.

Time soon caught up with us and even though we could have gone on and on looking for more spots and scratched a few fish out of them, prior engagements called us away from the canal. With one Mick landed early on and the three I scratched out after the rain stopped it might not seem a bad result, but on this canal this was a bad days zander fishing. On any other canal in these conditions this would have been a blank I am sure. On some occasions on this canal I've had four out of a swim in under half an hour and it's not uncommon the get some action every swim you fish. But whatever the case it was good to catch up with fellow zed Mick and put a bend in the rod, and we are already planning going back once we've had a few frosts.