Innholdsfortegnelse for Issue 3657 i Angling Times

WE ALL love those sessions when everything goes to plan and we fish like a superstar who can’t put a foot wrong. Unfortunately, I seem to be doing the exact opposite at the moment! My latest ‘let’s not talk about it’ outing came last weekend. With my local river finally back to a fishable level, I decided to have a few hours’ chubbing on Sunday. I should have known it wasn’t going to be a good day when I went to fill my flask and discovered we were out of coffee. After a quick detour to the garage’s Costa machine I was back on track, and walking across the meadow I could see I had the whole stretch to myself. My first cast went out nicely to a set of…

HAPPY BIRTHDAY SIMON! MY SON Simon has a special 30th birthday coming up, and he is a keen subscriber to Angling Times. He works incredibly hard as a carer for his disabled brother, and on his days off he loves to go fishing. He has caught some lovely fish, and we think he deserves a shout-out for what he does. It would be great to get a happy birthday message for a special son and amazing carer into the magazine. Tracy Wiggins, Northampton DON’T DISS THESE FISH! IF THERE'S one thing that gets my goat it’s the term ‘silvers’! It seems that most who use this word appear to be commercial anglers. It gives the impression that anything caught, other than a carp or F1, is seen as a…

YOU’D have thought that with such uniquely diverse venues and styles at our disposal, any World Floatfishing Championship (which Tom Pickering insists is the correct name) taking place in the British Isles would be nailed on for a home win. The facts – and team results – say different. Indeed, we seem to have had the mockers put on us. Okay, I know we won at Holme Pierrepont in the 1994 event. Indeed, only that and Bob Nudd’s fantastic gold medal saved it from catastrophe, at least as far as England were concerned. “The Europeans arrived bearing poles not much bigger than hazel twigs” Dave Thomas may also have won gold in the Warks Avon 1981 match, but the French scooped the team event. The following year Big Kevin Ashurst…

PERFECT FOR DEEP RIVERS FACED with a river swim 10ft or more deep, and flowing swiftly, it’s impossible to know where your cage or open-end feeder is emptying once it hits bottom. Switch to a window, and you’ll be far more accurate. A heavy window feeder will sink quickly, and land more or less where it hits the surface. This will then lead to the fish feeding closer to the feeder instead of being spread out for a fair distance down the peg. REGULATE THE LOOSEFEED BECAUSE of the way the window works, it allows you to control how much bait is going into the swim better than a cage or open-end feeder can. We’re talking particles here, which can be packed into the feeder with just a smear of…

THIS WEEK EVERYTHING YOU NEED TO KNOW FROM THE WORLD OF FISHING THE BIGGEST prize pot in barbel fishing history will be on offer later this year, in what could be the dawn of a new ‘mega money’ event. For the last three years, the UK Barbel Masters has proved a hit with the nation’s river anglers, but it’s now being run by new organisers, who are taking the event to the next level. It will, as usual, be held on the River Trent, with the stretch at A1 Pits hosting this year’s contest. A hundred anglers will take part, making it the biggest barbel-only match in UK history. Prize money for the champion has been increased from £1,000 to £2,500, and there’s cash on offer for section winners, too,…

“A WEAR PB, AND I WAS MADE UP!” Jonathan Hodgson – 6lb 4oz chub “I WENT fishing for an hour after work on my local River Wear. It was dropping and full of colour, but I’d had a run of half-a-dozen blanks in the lead up to the session. I hoped that, with a bit of extra colour, I’d stand a better chance of a bite, which are hard to come by here at the best of times. “First cast, I had a fish of 5lb 4oz, and my next two casts resulted in a missed bite and a lost fish. I moved 15 yards upstream to the other side of the bush I’d been targeting. There was a big back eddy here, into which I cast a 45g cage…

THE WORLD’S MOST EXPENSIVE FISHING CONTEST SOME readers might wince at the sums won in our domestic finals, but they seem like loose change compared to those of the US bass scene. With tens of thousands of domestic lure anglers and big-money sponsors involved, it’s a serious business that draws huge crowds. The daddy of them all is the Bassmaster Classic. Billed as “the Superbowl of bass fishing” it is hotly contested by a field of up to 61 elite anglers, with 150,000 spectators turning up at the final venue. It operates on a knockout system over three days, and only the leading anglers take part in the final session. There’s over a million dollars in prize money for the top names. TOO P*SSED TO FISH? LIKE many of us…

VAN DEN EYNDE SUPERROACH SUPERROACH contains finely ground seeds, including hemp, that give it plenty of fizz and action. Ideal when teamed with a fine pellet groundbait, it adds a secondary flavour that all commercial fish respond to. WHY WE LIKE IT: If you need a groundbait that can carry freebies well and go straight to the bottom, then Superroach takes some beating. Price: £3.99, www.baitsuperstore.com DRENNAN INSERT CRYSTAL WAGGLERS MOST of us own at least a couple of these iconic floats, which have a 2.3mm diameter insert – ideal for small baits and tentative winter bites – yet remain highly visible. The removable inserts interchange with other floats in the Drennan family. In six sizes from 0.8g to 3g. WHY WE LIKE THEM: Cast well, easy to see, and…

SOMETIMES you need to step away from the crowd. Right now, a lot of anglers are fishing for pike and casting as far as the weight of the bait will let them. Yet over the years my friends and I have caught lots of pike with the float only a couple of feet out from our boat. Some say you should cast away from the noise you are making, but pike don’t always read the same page in the book and will very often sit there, even if you’ve parked the boat on top of their heads. On Chew I’ve had a number of fish, good ones at that, very close to the boat when my other rod, chucked into the middle distance, has failed to produce a run. The…

THERE’S not a simpler or purer way to fish on rivers than with a whip. After all, it’s just a length of carbon with a line of the same length attached to the end. It’s almost a schoolboy way of fishing but, on prolific rivers, it’s fast become a tactic that you need to master. Key plus-points for the whip are the speed at which you can catch, and its simplicity. Watch the best river match anglers in action, and they’re like machines, getting into a routine of ‘cast, feed, strike, swing the fish in and repeat’. Often many hundreds of times! Yet so many anglers will make life hard for themselves. That’s typically down to fishing too far out, feeding the wrong way and not controlling the rig. I…

High-attract feed as well as hookbaits can catch you more carp at this time of year USING brightly-coloured hookbaits has pretty much become standard issue in carp fishing. I dare say that on most syndicate, day-ticket and club waters up and down the country you’ll find that, regardless of the time of year, the majority of anglers will be using some form of high-attract hookbait. Why is the use of ‘bright ones’ so popular? Primarily it’s because they catch carp! It’s no secret how devastating a yellow or pink pop-up can be, fished on a Ronnie Rig. Brightly-coloured baits are hard for carp to miss, and because they are so blatant and visible, carp are forced to make a decision – ignore it or inspect it by picking it up.…

DO YOU fancy having your name etched into angling’s history books? Well, catch a catfish over 130lb and you could be the holder of a new British record! That’s the target weight set by the British Record Fish Committee (BRFC) for a new contender, following a period of consultation after announcing it’d be reopening claims for the species in November last year. Catfish have soared in popularity since the record was suspended in 2000, with the official best standing at 62lb. That fish, known as Goliath, was caught from Telford’s Withy Pool by Richard Garner back in 1997. In 2021, that same fish was landed at 101lb. The Catfish Conservation Group was consulted before the 130lb benchmark was set, and general secretary, Steve Stewart, explained the decision. “The BRFC…

IT’S EASY to feel powerless about the current state of our rivers, but what if there was a fairly easy way to help? Mention water testing to most people, and they imagine bespectacled experts and laboratories. However, that’s all changing. As someone whose last science experiment led to a class detention in 1995, I am perhaps a good test case here. Before calling Angling Trust WQMN manager, Kris Kent, some common fears arose. I’m certainly not a scientist or a “techie” type of any kind. Detailed instruction manuals can send me into full-blown fight or flight mode. Was I really a suitable candidate to monitor pollution? GAME-CHANGING TECH As soon as the rather nifty, yellow-boxed testing kit came in the post, my worries began to evaporate. A series of quick…

Angling Times DRENNAN CUP CATCHES OF THE WEEK 2023 - 2024 SEASON DARREN ROBERTS – 4LB 10OZ PERCH “A FEW years back I caught a 2lb perch from the Yorkshire Ouse while pike fishing. “I planned to return, but it’d slipped my mind until recently, when I stumbled across some old match reports from the stretch. “They revealed that contests were often won with bags of perch, including fish to over 3lb. This reignited my interest in the area and, in between floods, I’ve been fishing it. Initially, I caught lots of smaller perch, before figuring out where the larger specimens were. “I’ve had my best results on lobworms, but I fish them slightly differently. Sometimes I’ll present them on the bottom, but injecting them with air through a fine-gauge…

A FEW weeks ago I tested out the new Drennan Acolyte Commercial rods (January 30 issue, in case you missed it). Mightily impressed I was, but that’s only half the story. Four sister Commercial F1-Silvers rods have also been released, sharing the same stunningly thin blanks, top-end Fuji reel seats and full cork handles with Acolyte engraved butt caps. That, though, is where the similarities end! Aside from being around 10 per cent softer-actioned than the Commercials, the F1-Silvers also have smaller, lighter guides and longer, slower-tapered tips – as a result, they look and feel like completely different rods. With no other excuse needed, I headed back out to put them through their paces. Winter fishing can be tricky at the best of times, but catching fish on demand…

THE BRIEF was to find a winter venue where tackle company Nash and I could film with a good chance of a bite – no matter what the weather! That turned out to be a no-brainer, as the owner of Milton Abbas fishery, Wayne Little, kindly put it at our disposal. It offers wonderful year-round carp fishing but in winter it really excels, in fact they are often easier to catch in January than in July. Being spring-fed, the lake benefits from a constant flow and steady temperature, which means that the carp don’t have to endure any extreme fluctuations. In turn, this means they’re happy to feed. Nash produces some great angling films, and as a sponsored angler I’m glad to be a part of this set-up, but it…

NO MATTER whereabouts in the country you live, there’s bound to be a specimen carp fishery within a short drive of home. Fed on a diet of high-protein pellets and boilies, the mirrors and commons in these waters grow astonishingly quickly, with 30lb-plus giants now commonplace. They’re the sole target of most visitors, while any other species present are given short shrift. So, if you’re on the hunt for a PB roach, such a venue should be on your radar. These fish mop up any food left by the carp and, as a result, they too reach impressive weights. These 15 waters have proven pedigree for specimen redfins, and current conditions give you an amazing opportunity to bank a fish to leave onlookers green with envy! ELVINGTON FISHERIES, YORK, NORTH…