Practice sessions (Coventry)

I reckon every lure angler in the country has been waiting for the predators to get out of their spawning funk which seems rather prolonged this year by the up and down weather. I for one have really been looking forward to them getting back on the feed as I have recently freshened up my lure selection with an injection of custom lures from John Maher @ J.M Soft Baits and I have been gagging to throw them at some proper hungry fish. Not in my wildest dreams did I ever think that custom lures would be within my grasp until one of my fellow England CRT team members put me in touch with John who has produced for me a whole load of Grubby shads in special colours that look amazing and just have to catch fish!

With the upcoming League competition section now out of bounds for a pre-match rest I opted to stick on the Coventry but have a practice for the up coming Romanian Angling Associations spring predator race which I intend to fish in a few weeks time. This seemed the perfect opportunity to road test Mr Mahers handy work..

Venue = Coventry canal @ Hawksbury

Total = 277cm

Well it turned out to be one of those sessions where you drive home looking like you've taken some kind of smile inducing drug. From the outset I knew it was going to be a good session. I arrived early and the water was in perfect condition. I was instantly into fish with an early zander which I followed up with a hard fighting spawned out perch. Things though were going to go from good to brilliant quickly when I moved into an area I rarely fish. On my second cast I watched as the lure dropped through the layers in the deeper than average area. Suddenly the drooping line tightened and I reactively struck into a big fish which after a suitably epic fight turned out to be chunky 65cm zed. The zeds were back on the feed in a big way and after following up the big one with another chunky 52cm zed I plundered the shoals of little zeds where I could find them All in all it was a great practice session and the mixture of species, large and small fish was very pleasing to see and really left me feeling very buoyant for the upcoming matches.

Practice sessions (Coventry)

With the second round of the Tusses freestyle league fast approaching and me being a substitute for the Lure Witches team I felt I needed to get in a bit of practice so as to hopefully be of more value than just making up the numbers. Considering how well I know the Coventry canal from the city centre basin through to Hawksbury and beyond into bandit country (Bedworth), I really know very little of it beyond the border into Nuneaton. As a result this was really going to be a venture into the unknown for me to get an idea of where and what possibly, I should be doing once the match commences.

On this outing I joined up with Ashley Dixon from the Boinging Baggies team as he too wanted to familiarize himself with the water. I think we both knew it wasn't exactly going to be a fish fest and that the reality of the situation was pinning down areas that held fish...any fish.


Venue = Coventry canal/Hartsill area

Total = 100cm est

After initially deciding to venture in one direction from the starting point we eventually began fishing in some very fishy looking water and early on I pulled up a small sub 20cm zander which let go of the lure once at the surface. We worked that area hard with little to show but a few plucks to Ashley's rod and looking back probably spent a little to much time working the area. Once we moved on though, things changed when a few casts into a new spot a very large pike engulfed my lure and tore of savagely before severing my leader. A little way down the stretch Ash landed a very nice spawned out perch over 30cm and after leap frogging him I rooted out a long lean pike easily over 65cm. Bar few more fruitless hits we didn't land anything else in that productive area.

Our next bit of action came when Ashley began getting some interest off some tiny zander fishing a marginal feature. By this time though the boats had begun moving and any water clarity we had early on soon went as the shallow canal became more turbid. With the sun high and hot and the water conditionings deteriorating we had to change tactics to stand hope of catching any more fish. Going onto an old faithful lure helped me land another zander this time over 30cm for my final fish of the foray.

As expected this was a hard session with some of the fish still preoccupied by reproduction. Happily though it seems like little by little the predator spawning is coming to an end and with some ideas of fish holding areas this might mean the upcoming league match might not be as torrid as the last one.

Practice and Tusses Freestyle league round one.

Earlier on in the year when I first heard Tusses Lure Division would be running a league on my local waters I was very keen to take part. However it wasn't until I started looking at the calender and at the upcoming matches I wanted to fish combined with other fishing targets for the year that I concluded it was going to be too much of a commitment for me to make. But even though I was unable to commit I decided that I would still like to be involved even in a much smaller capacity if possible. So I put it out amongst the people I knew that were fishing that I would be more than happy to be a substitute if anyone needed one. Low and behold it turned out that Greg Bafia from Team Realistic shad was going to miss the first match and his partner, my old friend David Warren, soon asked me to fill in.

Considering I live very close to the stretch this first match was to be on I really don't fish it at all. This is largely to do with it being a bit of a rough urban stretch that is notoriously clear and snaggy. I have done a little bit though here and there and already knew this was by no means going to be an easy event. With little time available my only chance to get out for a practice was for a very short pre-work session the week before the match and surprisingly things went very well...

 Practice - 1 Hour Basin match stretch

65cm

30cm (est)

Total =95cm

The basin itself proved rather fruitless for me even though it did look good for a few hits, but it wasn't until I went walkies outside it that I found myself a couple of hungry predators. The first was a spawned out young female pike which I found lurking close to the edge and the second was a nice match sized zander which was lingering close to a brick wall. Ninety five centimetres in under and hour was a bit of a shock to be honest, but things would be very different in the match with thirty plus other lure anglers jockeying for position.

Tusses Freestyle League round one.

The morning of the match the car park on Leicester row near the basin was full of anglers when I arrived. I recognised most of them from various competitions and events and seeing them all, knowing this stretch to be a hard water thought this was going be a beast of an urban competition. Myself and David had already discussed a rough plan and after the complimentary bacon butties were eaten the event began with a staggered start. Even though we had drawn an early number we were the last team off as David was officiating and that meant we were the last ones away.

As predicted it was a torridly hard affair and we searched so much water in vain, catching very little for our efforts. The fish were very cagey all round; the few small perch we winkled out were really on the small side, the bigger ones near impossible to catch as they were still to spawn. My idea to gamble on taking a pike outfit turned out to be a bad decision as the only pike our team encountered came to David's rod, biting him off in an instant and as for my heavy rig, it pulled nothing but large branches out of the canal. Along with that pike bite off I had one better perch follow my lure right to the surface before turning off and we had handful of very unfruitful nibbles.

The saviour of our match had to be David's spectacular final capture where he dropped a lure straight onto what was obviously a nesting zander which in a savage act of defence tore into the lure and proceeded to jump out of the water like a tarpon. Once landed it was the most magnificent dark fish you're likely to see.

At 44cm this fish was very close to turning the biggest zed prize into a three way tie. Even missing out on that it still served to add vital species points to our score just before the sheets had to be handed in.

Total + species bonuses = 138cm  

1st place - Steve Wilson and Derek Homes (No wasps) = 277cm

2nd place - Phil Kenny and Jacob Stone (Bennett Pred pro team) = 258cm 

3rd place - Slawomir Mikolajczak and Daniel Osinski = 254cm

As for us... we were unlucky to finish in 11th place in this first match just outside the points. Literally one tiny perch could have made the difference for us in this one.

Personally I think I made a big mistake in taking along that second rod as I feel it distracted me far too much and should I have levelled that concentration on just fishing the light outfit I feel sure we could have added a couple of valuable fish to the score which may have made quite a difference to Team realistic shad rankings (Sorry David and Greg). However I already may have my opportunity at redemption in the Freestyle league after being recruited straight away to fill in for another team in round two - the all female Lure Witches team.

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.

LACC pairs open and a epiphany.

I was a little late deciding to enter this event and after making my mind up that I wanted to fish it I initially struggled to find a partner. It wasn't until I made an appeal to the chaps on the CRT England Facebook page that I finally found one in Ian Whittaker, and am I ever glad he stepped in. I'd met Ian previously on a Tusses match and at the CRT event and from what I had seen he was a methodical and competent, accurate lure angler with a fair bit of experience on the water. Little did I know that not only was he going to prove to be a brilliant partner but he was also going to change the way I thought about canal lure fishing all round...

The LACC pairs open is arguably becoming one of the best canal events in the country. Not only do the LACC run a superb event but it attracts loads of great lure anglers from up and down the country and this was very evident when I looked around the hordes of anglers tackling up for what was to be a very competitive event. If haven't built up a proper picture of the field of this event already I should make it clear that some of the best canal light lure anglers were there and of them many were proper specialists that do this week in and week out. This was going to be hard...very hard.

As we touched base with friends enjoying the inclusive bacon butty and cup of tea, we nattered loose plans for the day ahead. I'd located Ian getting ready and we quickly ran over our idea of what to do. Ian, having much more experience of this stretch than I, suggested we head to a section that had produced for him in the past where we could work our way along to try and locate fish.

Registration done we all stood listening to the expectations of the organizers before being released at ten second intervals. This staggered kick off was intended to stop a melee ensuing at the start of the match. The conception and realization of this were two totally different things and even under the instructions that there was to be no running, the actual fact was that there was plenty of unsavory jockeying for position as at least two thirds of the competitors were heading the same way down a narrow tow path. Eventually the hordes thinned out as anglers stopped at spots they fancied and soon enough we to came to the area where Ian thought we should begin.

The fishing for our pair went very well considering my poor start. Whether nerves or my unfamiliarity was effecting my performance I couldn't say, but initially I struggled to settle and thus switched from lure to lure and from method to method trying to get that key and settling first pluck.

The epiphany
Literally I had gone through a very large part of my go to lure fishing armoury and had not had a single dink, pluck or enquiry. Ian, on the other hand had lost one zander and landed two perch as he covered the water. It was at this point that Ian stepped in to get me dialled in for the sake of our team. As he ran through exactly what he was doing that was making all the difference and showed me it working in the clear water it was like a switch had been thrown in my mind. I am by my own admission an aggressive angler in many of the facets of my fishing and obviously to me now I was being very aggressive in how I was fishing lures. Ian on the other hand was being very subtle and this subtly was inclining fish that would not go near my aggressively fished lures to strike. The epiphany that struck me was how many opportunities I had probably missed in some amazing spots by being too aggressive and how many times had I been on fish and just assumed they wouldn't feed, when in actual fact they would have taken if it weren't for the fact I was being too aggressive!

To say the change was dramatic was an understatement. Matching the method and the way it was fished quickly brought me into the foray and in no time at all we had gone from a few fish on our score sheet to having a full quota of zander and most of the perch. With both of us working close together we quickly pinned down some shoals of small zander and worked them into a frenzy where they were chasing our lures right up to the surface and snatching them before we could recast.

By 11am we had the full quota for both the perch and zander and a rough tally had us just over two meters. Therefore we were both in agreement that as we needed to just up-grade, we should up-scale our tactics. This actually worked and intermittently as we worked along the tow path we found and caught fish here and there, upgrading our scores by a couple of centimeters. The one concern for us both was or lack of any decent sized zander. Our perch average was as we expected 25+, but the zander were a bit on the small side with most of them being around 25-30cm. If we were in a unlimited competition we would have been in heaven as we were throwing back small zander at an alarming rate as they were not big enough to improve our score.

With so many anglers battering the water senseless I suppose there had to be a point where the pressure took its toll and the latter few hours of the match the whole water seemed to shut off; it kind of makes sense with so many chaps stomping up and down the tow path, lots of yelling and coloured lures flying here there and everywhere. In the later stages we scratched a few perch here and there but our morning's scores were ultimately our best and we hoped it would be enough to get us up into the top half of the rankings.

In the end the finish was tight and the four best perch and four best zander limits did as it was probably intended and stopped any one team from running away with the lead. The top eighteen teams scored over two meters and in the end mine and Ian's team, 'Nothing to see here', placed 13th overall with some great teams above and below us.

I have thought about our performance again and again and truthfully I wouldn't change a thing about it. We caught fish and filled the quotas! I suppose our main problem was the lack of length in the zander we caught, but you can't always chose the fish you catch. We did lose a decent fish each which might have made some difference, but I reckon nether would have jumped us into a placing position.

This turned out to be a really enjoyable well run event by the LACC and one I am penciling in on next year's calendar already. If it keeps growing in popularity and size it should quickly become the premier open event in the UK for canal lure fishing and the organizers should be very happy with what they have done.

Really, I have to end this write up by thanking Ian. You were an amazing partner for this event and the thing's I learnt from fishing with you will have further reaching effects than you will ever know. You have actually changed how I perceive predators feeding and hopefully this will help me in any future competitive endeavors and certainly will help chasing specimens in the future. If ever you need a partner for anything you know how to contact me and thanks again mate.