Happy little fishes.

After that jaunt down south two weeks ago looking for big crucian carp I have been left with what I think is a mild case of crucianobsessionaris. Seemingly I can't get the idea of those most gentlest and our only native carp out of my head. I had plum forgotten how much fun and how much I enjoy to catch these little pixies on warm summer days, and once I again cast after them I seem unable to leave it alone.

We are lucky here in the midlands as we actually have quite a lot of access to some decent waters that hold what to all intents and purposes are true crucians. I reckon I can think of at least ten waters within twenty miles of my house that contain them. Some are age old places where a few gnarled old giant,s which are the last of their line, and others have recently been stocked with thousands of bright little discs. One of my favourites though is a bit of a mix of the two. Snitterfield reservoir has had crucians present for many years but the controlling club, Leamington Angling association, have just recently augmented their numbers with a generous injection of new fish, a necessary action of which they should be commend for. You see for some reason the population had seemingly stalled. Whether it was time that got to them and they stopped breeding, or whether it was lack of suitable spawning sights or conditions I am not sure, but the fact was that no new recruitment was being seen in their ranks. So in went a batch of perfect true blood crucians and the effects of this may have been more far reaching than expected.

It was two years ago I think when I last targeted crucians at Snitters, and on that occasion I was fishing a few months after the restock. Now anyone who fishes this bleak yet inviting pool knows on average the water is very clear and on my the visit I now recall it was as clear as I have ever seen it. So much so that I could see the ledge over which I favour fishing. On this occasion after depositing a light bed of fluffy ground bait and a liberal scattering of pellets I amused my self catching rudd whilst I waited for the spot to stew accordingly. I had not even considered fishing the spot when out of the corner of my Polaroid covered eye I spotted movement close to my bait.

What I saw has to be one of my all time top ten fishing sights. A group of five of the larger original crucians slowly drifted along the ledge homing in on my bait and behind them was a massive shoal of tiny new crucians. Although only related by species, the little ones were learning the ropes from the old guard in what I can only describe as poetic passing of the torch.

That day I caught seven of the originals and three of the tiny new fish. The babies were little more than a few inches long and no more than two ounces back then. But by now I wondered how big they might have grown and what of those old fish. Had they all drifted away as old crucians seem to do or what? So Sunday I headed back half filled with the urge to catch crucians and half filled with curiosity to see how those new crucians have done in the last two years.

In the early hours I descend the road leading to the lake and hoped as I free-wheeled down the hill that one of the few pegs I love to fish for crucians here was free. Turns out they all were and so I set up stall in a particular favourite of mine where a weed bed fills the space between the bank and the ledge. For there is no more romantic vision of English summer than a float framed by lillies or weed as it fishes for crucians. I spent my summer holidays fishing like this as a child watching floats on baking days next to a myriad of weed choked ponds fishing for crucians, hence it is a love I think I will never die for me.

Time has passed since my youth and gone is chunky old rod that used to make my arm ache from casting all day, and ultra light piece of carbon nowrests on my knee. Though what I am using  to catch them is irrelevant to me as I become instantly engrossed by the tiny shard of orange float just holding above the water. The first two bites are missed they are that subtle. Then on the third I connected with a fish which straight away makes all the right moves. I love that surging fight crucians make in close quarters. There constant vibration as the move quickly up and down in the water betrays them instantly. So light is my line that I dared not lift this one out and so I overcompensate by netting it, and the first fish of the day is one of the new crucians.

These new fish have at a conservative estimate tripled in size in two years and are now perfect little crucians of around six ounces. Their bodies have grown deep and the silveriness of youth is replaced by deeper gold and hints of black like the older fish. If these fish continue in this vein then it wont be long till they make a pound, and hopefully the few fish with the right genes in their blood and what they could achieve size-wise, might make Snitterfiled the best big crucian water in the Midlands.

As the morning wears on many more perfect little discs of gold get caught and something else becomes apparent. They seem rather happy! I can't say I have ever seen this behaviour anywhere else other than at marsh farm which is also stacked full of crucians. But the still youthful little ones repeatedly jump out of the water all around my swim. Its not like carp whose breaching generally seems for a reason, and its not like the laboured rolling of tench and bream, its more joyous. Like they are doing it for fun because they are happy. I am sure there is some scientific explanation but to me right now they look like kids bombing into a swimming pool.

Around mid morning I am sure I bump off a better fish in a less productive half hour. After topping up the bait and switching to try and catch roach of the top for a while until I gingerly recast on the freshened spot and straight away something is interested. A slight rise and slighter dip is enough for me to strike whilst crucian fishing and on this occasion I was dead on. A similar fight to all the the others ensues but this one put a much better bend in the rod as it leads me a merry dance around the weed. Though it keeps very low in the water and out of sight I know for sure its a crucian. Then I spot it circling through the clear water and I can see its a good fish. Then when it slides into my net I realise it's a decent size fish for this venue and maybe a little above the average size, or is it....

For as long as I have been fishing this lake the old crucians very rarely make more than a pound and a few ounces. This one though is knocking on the door of two pounds. Now either I have by pure chance caught one of the biggest residents on my first session back, or maybe that injection of smaller fish has added a little competition to the older fishes stagnant lives. Having those new hungry usurpers gallivanting all round the place may have actually served to gee up the old fish and caused an inadvertent growth spurt late in life.

Later when the bailiff comes round to check tickets the subject was broached, and low and behold it turns out they do seem to be getting bigger. Though his stories of three and even four pound fish are a little hard to digest and the recent picture of a three pound plus fish that emerged may hint at some guestimated weighing. But nonetheless, this long narrow strain of crucians might well be getting bigger and that thought alone is more than enough to make me start planning one last mid week foray back, to make further float fished enquires into the matter.

The Lake #1 Fishing with caged flowers

In the week just passed, the itch in my mind caused by my walk round the lake has turned into a rash that is now red raw from mental scratching. It got to the point where I had to remind myself of my patient and simple outlook towards this endeavour in order to stop myself over complicating things when I did finally arrive.

Soon enough though I found myself atop the grassy hill looking down towards the lake in the early hours of the morning on a cloudy and dull day. As I retraced my tracks back down to the lake the grass did not fold softly beneath my floating feet as before, for this time I was slung heavy with tackle, like some beast of burden; a few weeks free from lugging this around had given my body time to forget how heavy my fishing tackle can feel.

As we anglers often do, I had conceived visions of where I would make my first casts. This was not due to some mouth watering feature such as an island, because the lake beyond the bank is quite simply as featureless as a plain piece of paper. Instead my choice of spots was more governed by the simple attractiveness of what would be to my left or to my right. But as always with preconceived ideas they never work out, and upon rounding the bending approach to my spot, a dew covered bivvie was sighted.

Further down the track through an arch formed between two old oaks I had seen an quint little glade with short mown grass, which days before had caught my eye and now carried all hopes for my morning ahead.

Quiet and uninhabited upon arrival my second choice seemed the perfect place to begin this journey. I paused for a moment before passing down under the trees into the bank side glade. I like to think this was to take in the beauty of this place, but in actual fact it was more to do with me figuring where to place my feet on the bare earth leading down to the waters edge so as not to start the day on my bottom.

The first thing that hit me as I ventured out of the trees was that this was not in fact one little spot but the gateway to a sub bank which boasted four neat swims amongst one continuous reed bed. The second thing was what looked like a small chicken wire cage half way down the path about the size of a loaf of bread.

What animal would be so fierce that it should need it's own cage to protect passing anglers, I wondered. Maybe an out of control cricket or a shrew with an attitude problem was contained within. I had to investigate! Upon closer inspection no savage miniature animal raged within the wire. Rather it was seemingly filled with grass. Not until my nose was within inches of the wire did I spot the tiniest of pink and white flowers poking from within. The cage was not to protect me but to protect it from mine and others clumsy great size twelve feet, or possibly from the millions of rabbits which inhabit the area. 

The imprisoned tiny flower was an orchid no bigger than the top section of my finger. Call me a pansy but it seems a shame to me that something so rare and beautiful and wild should need to spend the rest of it's life behind bars. I actually decided to fish next to the little caged beauty and all through the day I pondered it in its little cage as my rods fished silently away close by.

My intention for my first trip had always been to attack from the off and although my initial intent for a twenty four hour session had been sidelined for the sake of my still niggling back, I stuck with my plan firing some twenty five cricket ball sized balls of mixed munga loosely around a marker float some sixty yards out by way of invite to the lakes illusive populations.

I would love to say that my ingenious ploy heralded an instant response but that would be no more than a common lie. Instead I sat snugly tucked under a convenient ash and watched as the wind built up through the morning and the ripple turned into waves, white caps and all.

Four hours in I was thinking I had over cooked it with my Dunkirk style approach, until the briefest of bites indicated the presence of something of the scaled variety. Thirty minutes later another dithering bite turned into a slow and steady run. Lolling round on the surface right over the baited spot out in the lake this had to be a bream and it was! sixty yards out fighting like a wet sack full of silt. A mighty fight it was not. But a mighty fish it will be one day.

Deep, long and young, this was great start to a new campaign. 8.3lb was more than I expected when I dragged myself out of bed this morning. If this is an average sized fish then I may not of been as mad as I thought I was when I handed over the money for my ticket.

Covered in a liberal layer of slime I sat smiling at what can only in this lakes terms be deemed a successful session. I have taken so so many blanks on this lake that a bite alone can be considered success. But that was not the end of it! A second dithering bite was struck too early before I again hooked a second bream. Although smaller by a third this fish was that oddity that seems only to exist in the world of abramis brama.

The poor and rushed picture gives enough of the bizarre phenomenon of the two tone bream. I have never fully understood why every so often one bream amongst a shoal of most likely siblings should be half light and half dark.

They were definately getting onto the feed towards noon but I had a date with a red head so was unable to reap the the benefit of what I had sown. However two fish and a few bites in a five hour toe dipping on this frugal old lake is certainly a good way to start, and bodes very well for up and coming longer sessions. And as for the poor little caged flower, I will stop by whenever I pass by just to have a look and watch it blossom.

Bream grind

An opportunity for mid week session gave me the chance to head down to jubilee pools with bream in mind. It's not a venue I have fished a lot and before going I tapped up Keith and Andy for the low down on the bream fishing. Amazingly both suggestions were exactly the same 'cage feeder filled with fish meal ground bait fished at 30 yards'. Now I know the bream in jubilee regularly get caught by carp anglers and have been caught in the past up to 8lb+; I also know that jubilee contains a good head of small to medium sized carp. With this in mind I thought banging a feeder full of fish meal ground bait on feeder rod in every ten minutes was only going to end in disaster. So instead I went for a heavy approach using large cage feeders on a paternoster with 2ft hook links of 6lb line, topped off with size 10 hook and hair rig, with the aim of fishing 10mm boilies on one line and three grains of corn on the other. Rather than trying to watch to quiver tips I used two specimen rods combined with indicators detect the bites.

After setting up half way down the lake in a peg normally coveted by carp anglers I began my attack by first clipping up one rod at 30 yards then casting out fifteen feeders of pellet and corn laced ground bait. I was hoping to bag four or five good bream and get the point the easy way but my first bite produced a fish only 1.5lb. A pattern soon formed as four more fish up to two pounds followed the first.

At mid morning I got my first run in with a carp as the buzzer went mad and for the first time line stripped from the bait runner. My beefed up bream rig coped perfectly and after several spirited runs a 8lb common was netted. Though after taking this photo myself and quickly releasing the fish I looked back as I often do to find it looked like some unseen alien space ship was trying to abduct both of us.

 

Don't go into the light!

Finally as I was trying to eat my leftover lasagna dinner I was disturbed by a bite which turned out to be better bream of 3.5lb. 

Getting Bigger

After this fish the roach moved in and began pecking at the corn baits before they even settled. Sometimes in the dead of winter roach can be little buggers that will only eat a specific bait in a certain way but today it turned out they had quite a fancy for three grains of corn attached to a size 10 hook, and four roach around 10-12oz hooked themselves up as they darted of with my bait.

With the roach brassing me off I decided to reorganize my kit and re bait the swim to try and attract the bream back in.

A bit of organization goes a long way

In early afternoon the wind changed direction and at first I thought I had detected the pungent aroma of the on site lavvi being pumped out but sadly I was wrong, and whilst on top of the bank giving Keith a status update I spotted a bloated carp bobbing in a fallen tree down the bank. There is nothing more unpleasant than getting a nose full of rotting carp every time the wind blows and by mid afternoon  I was considering risking moving just to get away from it.

Mr stinky

A late run of bream between three and four pounds pushed me over the record weight to bag the bream point and as I packed up, pulling my normal trick of leaving my rods out till the last possible moment, my boilie rod sparked into life. With everything packed away I hastily snapped this nobbly brama and quickly weighed it at just under five pounds.

Just five more minutes for five more pounds

The total now was comfortable 25lb of bream, though if I am honest a task which I at first thought was going to be no problem turned out to be quite a grind. Something I will say is that with the amount of bream in jubilee - some of which are already quite sizeable - and the large amount of bait the regular carp anglers are putting in,  the bream in this lake should increase in size relatively quickly, and in ten years time there could be some truly massive fish residing in this lake