Ready For Spring

The cold weather continues. Not the intense freeze that we had last month but generally, it's still cold and water temperatures are still hovering around the point where water turns hard. I'm a bit fed up of it now and ready for Spring but I'm still getting out and more importantly, still catching.

I had a day on the syndicate lake this week. I only caught one pike, a fish of 9lb 14oz which I thought might be my first double from the water but it wasn't to be. I got it on the bank and then realised I'd made a stupid mistake in leaving my forceps at home. Fortunately the hooks were right on the edge of the mouth so I was able to unhook it with my fingers but that was the end of my day's fishing. You just can't fish for pike without adequate unhooking gear so i packed up early and went home.

It was particularly disappointing since I had just discovered where the pike were. They had herded thousands of roach into a large reedbed and were sitting at the edge of the reeds making occasional forays into the vegetation, ploughing into the bait fish and taking a mouthful. I was astonished at how many roach were there, packed like sardines in a can in just a few inches of water. They went berserk every time a predator attacked, making quite a noise, which is how I discovered where they were. Look at the short film and you'll know what I mean.


After that it was out with the boat for a couple of days. Denis joined me but we found it quite tough, as did all the others fishing the lake at the time. To cut a long story short we had just nine pike between us with the biggest one weighing 19lbs 1oz. I caught this on a legered sardine in quite deep water very late in the day. Indeed a pattern is forming with regard to times of captures. We're getting very few runs in the middle part of the day just now, almost everything is coming in the first and last hours of daylight. That's the behaviour I expect later in the year, after the start of March, the pike can usually be caught all day long in January but then, this is no ordinary winter.



I had three doubles in all and one of them, an eleven pounder, was quite spectacular in that it was almost pure white. It wasn't an albino, just very very pale. Fish sometimes turn pale like this if they're living in very coloured water but of course this one was in very clear water so there must be some other reason for this phenomenon. Perhaps the fish was blind, although it's eyes looked clear enough.



That's 31 doubles since the start of the pike season but another week without a twenty pounder. Just where are those big fish right now?

Deep Thinking

Two contrasting weeks of piking have taught me a lesson which I needed to learn.

We're well into January now and the pike season is at its height - a time when I should be making hay and getting some big fish in the boat. It's been tough though and while results are picking up, they have done so at a slower rate than I would have liked.

The first week i was out with Denis for three days - three very wet days as it turned out. Fishing in the rain is never that much fun and when you're out in a boat it's worse still. My boat has a folding cuddy which keeps the worst of the rain off but when there are two of you, and baits and floats are spread around all over the place, the cuddy obscures your view and I don't like to use it. Fishing a mixture of float legered baits and plain legered ones helps a bit but it's not a big boat and there's not much room for two under the shelter.

So it was that we both got wet, then wetter and finally wettest. Three wet days and it gets through even the best waterproofs and we were both glad to get home at the end of it. The quality of the fishing made it worse with just two single figure fish and a twelve pounder to me although Denis did better with four doubles up to fifteen pounds.

What was noticeable was that the fish we had came from deeper water than usual and that the usual productive swims were almost devoid of fish. I spent some time thinking about this and wondering why it had come about and eventually the old grey cells kicked into gear. The exceptionally cold winter has created a condition in our lakes which doesn't always happen, turnover!

Turnover happens when the surface layers cool to four degrees centigrade, when water is at its densest. This causes a complete breakdown of any thermal stratification which has been present in the water column and leads to a total mixing of the upper and lower layers of the lake. This gives the pike access to the deeper layers which, ordinarily, they would avoid due to the very low oxygen levels that exist down there. Oxygen levels are high in the deep water after turnover and since there is food down there, in the form of Charr in particular, the pike will be spending much of their time very deep just now.

Turnover, if it happens at all in this country, usually takes place quite late in the winter after the coldest time of late January. If turnover takes place late, its effect is less pronounced since by early February light levels are starting to improve and we're getting close to spawning time, thus making the shallow water attractive. This season I expect it happened in the first week of December, two months early and this will have had a big effect on the fish, both pike and preyfish.

Armed with this thought I set forth on my second trip, another three day jaunt. No rain this time, indeed the weather was positively balmy, but I resolved to fish new swims and to fish deep. It paid off in terms of numbers of fish but I didn't get the big one I wanted. In three days I managed eight pike, all of them over ten pounds with the best five all over fifteen. These went 15.04, 15.10, 16.06, 17.00 and 17.06
All the fish came from swims I haven't fished before and all came from deep water.

It looks like I might make sense of this season after all but there's one other thing I have to mention. On a water whose size is measured in thousands of acres it really isn't necessary to anchor up right next to someone else - as the people in this picture did. You can see my float in the foreground there, couldn't they find their own swim?

Cold Turkey

What a tough end to the year! We had the coldest December for 120 years and not only were most of the stillwaters frozen (including the very large ones) but many stretches of river froze over as well. The bad weather conspired along with the Christmas festivities to prevent me from fishing altogether for fully three weeks and by the time New Year was over and done I was becoming stir crazy. January 3rd was a bank holiday, I try to avoid fishing on public holidays since the waters are invariably busy but I was desperate to wet a line so decided to take the boat out for a couple of days.

An early start almost ended in disaster the jockey wheel fell off my trailer as I was getting the boat out of its garage. Exactly how this happened I'm not too sure but it appears that during the very cold weather, when temperatures dipped down below minus 15 degrees locally, the bolts holding the jockey wheel to the trailer must have contracted so much that they snapped the lugs off the jockey wheel. As soon as I started to move the trailer the wheel fell off and the drawbar fell to earth with a clunk.

I managed to patch this up temporarily and set out an hour later than planned, meaning that I arrived well after first light and after a number of other anglers were already out fishing. This delay was important since it meant that my first, second and third choice swims were already taken and it left me scratching around trying to find fish on the sounder. It came home to me how lucky I am to be able to fish midweek most of the time. People who work monday to friday must be faced with this problem all the time and I don't doubt it impacts on their catches a great deal.

The day was grey and cold, very cold and the fish were very hard to find. I ended the day fishless, not a great start to 2011, and made my way back to the slipway in the dark where I encountered two other anglers. They had blanked as well but told me another piker they'd spoken to had had six fish, five of them jacks.

After cooking up some curry and rice I made my bed in the car and, exhausted, was asleep before eight but I awoke little more than an hour later when I experienced a strange rumbling, shaking feeling. I looked out expecting to see a vehicle driving past but there was none, nor was there a boat chugging by. I fell asleep again, mystified as to the cause of the disturbance and was awoken many hours later to the sound of rain hammering on the roof of the car.

It was soon time to get up, though the prospect of going out in such awful weather didn't inspire me and I switched on the radio as I made my first brew of the day. The news reporter revealed the source of the strange rumbling I'd experienced during the night, a minor earthquake had occurred in North Yorkshire and though that was many miles away, I had been aware of it due to the quietness of my location. What's more, the dawn was to bring another natural phenomenon in the way of a partial eclipse of the sun - what would the pike think of all this?

I got out at first light, successfully avoiding the few remaining ice floes and made my way to my first choice swim. Sure enough there were familiar arches on the trace from the sounder, betraying the presence of a number of large fish, probably pike. The downpour continued though and after getting four baits out in the water I raised my collapsible cuddy and snuggled down under the shelter it offered. I soon picked up a pike of around nine pounds on a mackerel head, a pretty fish which had a busted gill raker and expected more action to follow but it wasn't to be and in time I moved on.

I dropped into several more swims, watching the fishfinder intently at each one, looking for those telltale arches and eventually found what I was looking for. Several big fish were holding close to a dropoff in 29ft of water. I marked their position using an "H" block marker, anchored up and started to fish. The rain stopped but the wind picked up markedly and this swim was in a very exposed location so I started to get quite uncomfortable. The waves were building bigger and bigger and as each one slammed into the boat I was pitched forward, only to be dumped back down on my chair as the trough followed the wave.

It was early afternoon, I had only a couple of hours left before I had to go and I had just about made my mind up to move to quieter water when one of the floats disappeared beneath the waves. I swept back the rod and pulled in a scrappy fourteen pounder which was quickly unhooked and returned. A few minutes later a second float dipped and I subsequently boated an eight pounder. My mind was made up for me then, I had to sit tight and ride out the waves.

After another hour the wind had subsided a little and I was glad I had stayed put but I only had until three oclock to fish before I had to go home. It was two thirty when I got my next run, a screamer which was ripping line from the baitrunner on a legered bait right from the off. I pulled into this fish while it was still running fast and the rod bucked hard as a result. This was a very hard fighting fish and for a time I thought I might be into something a bit special so I was just a little disappointed when I got it to the boat and saw that it was only a mid double.

During the fight the baitrunner on the other legered bait had buzzed a few times. I thought this had been caused by the hard fighting fish pulling the boat around but as I netted the pike it continued to run and started to pick up speed, it was another run! I left the first fish in the net in the water and picked up the second rod, winding down hard and hooking into my fifth pike of the day. This was a fish of similar size and I was forced to hand-land this one, the net being already occupied.

I quickly took a picture of the two pike together in the net but I was till being tossed around by the wind and the picture suffers a little from camera shake as you can see. Both fish were fourteen pounds odd, the biggest being short of the fifteen pound mark by just two ounces and had I the time available I would have seen the day out in this spot but it was time to go.

Wind, rain, earthquakes and eclipses what a start to 2011, what will the rest of the year bring?