The bit about Fishing……….

P1010128 And here’s a page I’ve been meaning to write for quite some time and never quite got around to. Another one of my hobbies is fishing, although I’m not one of these guys who go out in all weathers fishing for 3oz to win a match. I prefer sitting somewhere peaceful on a sunny day and actually catching fish without TOO much of an effort. I’ll post a few pictures on here of some of the fish I’ve managed to catch, and hopefully give you a few laughs about the ones I didn’t catch…. The fish in the picture is one of the chub you can handily catch from the River Dane, providing it’s not too sunny, rainy or windy and the water level’s exactly where it should be. Not always a combination you can guarantee, although it’s not a bad place for paddling your feet if all else fails! A handy gas cooker and a suitable supply of stuff to cook also fills in the gaps between fish. Still, it’s a grand place to pass the day, even if you don’t catch a lot. Usually, fishing here consiists of catching a fish with the first cast, then bugger all for the rest of the day, after it’s gone back in and told all its mates to bugger off to a different bit of the river till we’ve gone home…….

And I can honestly say that when you decide to do a bit of winter fishing and you can’t actually break the ice on the pond with extremely large rocks due to it being a foot thick then fishing in the next door river isn’t going to work either, because the fish are frozen to the bloody bottom! And it doesn’t matter what bait you use because they ain’t interested in anything when it’s that cold. At least the fire we lit melted the snow from off the fishing tackle!

Still, there,s nothing like optimism, and at least it’s a peaceful place to sit for a while as long as you keep dusting the snow off your chair before you sit down as a wet arse often offends!

Weather isn’t always the most helpful thing when it comes to fishing either. I’m not sure why fish care which way the wind’s blowing but they do! You’d probably expect it on a pond when the wind’s blowing any food over to one side but on a river that’s zooming past at hairy speeds? Still, pike don’t seem to care as long as the bait passes within 6" of their nose and looks small enough to fit in their gob. Good old pike, you know where you are with them, in their bad books!

Carp are strange things, one day they’ll bite on fag ends and the next you can throw ANY kind of bait at them and they’ll sail past flicking fins at you as they pass by.

Fish’n'Tips:

Floating crust does not work well on a frozen lake - no matter how many carp are swimming beneath the ice - it just upsets them!

Unhooking Pike is more dangerous than repairing valve radios whilst standing in the bath, holding a lightning rod, in a thunderstorm!
Pike have no sense of humour and very few facial expressions - mostly consisting of; ‘I Kill You’ to ‘I Kill You then Eat You’.
An empty Coke bottle makes an excellent Pike gag (although it will tend to leak rather a lot afterwards).
Carp eh!
Trust me, trout love sweetcorn!
A good tip for combining vintage radio restoration and fishing; a pike’s mouth makes a grand multi-width wire stripper!
Foul-hooking 28lb koi carp rarely has the desired outcome.

The joy of fishing trips……

Went fishing yesterday (new Year’s Eve,) usual spot in Cheshire, weather a bit less than spectacular, camper van expired halfway there, changed points and seemed fine. Managed to fish out the coal burner I dropped in last time we went as i was emptying it. Wasn’t my fault, it was bloody red hot! Fished that out, using a cod rig and some speaker cable. Got rained on, caught bugger all and ended up watching 2012 in the bus. There’s a film with holes in the plot you could get the titanic through….. Them there mutated neutrinos eh? who’d have ‘em?

So after getting even more damp putting the tackle away, we head home to find the camper dies as we hit the M56 in the pitch dark. Managed to limp off again and made it almost to Altrincham before it expired completely. Ended up lying on me back underneath it in the rain blowing the fuel line back through the tank. Unleaded does not taste good… Fine since though…

Here is your local weather forecast for the next 4.5 light years:

Me and a mate were sat in field, in a thunderstorm, lightening striking all around, pouring with rain and we started to contemplate our immediate surroundings; we were sat on metal framed chairs, we had an aluminium umbrella pole in between us - firmly embedded in the wet ground, we were using metal rod rests, carbon fibre rods with wet line running into a pond full of lovely - highly conductive water. Those of you with an electrical background will begin to see the issue here!