A summary of sorts: Part 1

It’s been difficult to keep the blog going lately , I apologise but it seems to be a problem for many bloggers at the moment. In my case it’s a combination of my mother having a hip operation after a fall, being extremely busy at work and spending all my spare time fishing. Anyway what follows is a summary of August with September to follow within 24 hours. I am also going to share a fairly humiliating incident with you that seems funny in hindsight but I can assure you wasn’t at the time. It does us all to weather a little humility from time to time so I’ll share it, you will either think I’m a complete prat or it may just strike a chord. It may be a bit personal but I have a story to tell and tell it I will.

August 20th

Things have got a little out of chronological order but I had a nice session on the North West’s premier barbel river, the one not far from Preston. I met two regulars who had kindly offered to show me the ropes; Andrew Boyne and John Monaghan. Andrew and I fished whereas John was regaining his strength for a few beers that night after a fair few the night before, he went home after an hour but we agreed to meet up again soon. I think that he was aware of the rain that was on it’s way. Andy and I settled into a couple of swims that were prolific by reputation. The idea being to get a fish for me for my little rivers table and then we would move downstream after dark to where the better fish may be lying.

It seemed that Andrew had picked the better of the 2 swims for himself as he had 3 fish in as many casts, whereas I didn’t . I’m sure that it wasn’t intentional but a bit of banter ensued before eventually I had a little splasher which you can see in the photo below.  You may have noticed that I was quite dry at the time.

Andy had told me not to fetch a brolly as rain was unlikely, I was sceptical but deferred to his local knowledge. However I was in a long term relationship with a girl from the nearby Lancaster some 14 years ago and all I remember was lots of rain and longingly gazing at the very river I was fishing right at that moment. Petrol was much cheaper in them days but I was having a break from fishing at the time, I must admit it was a long time coming this session.

Tactics were not dissimilar to the Trent, ground bait feeder and small pellets during the daylight hours with long hook lengths.

It turns out that Andy was bang on with his swim choice but a really poor weatherman, yes folks it pissed it down! We managed to fish until just before dark and my 6th and final fish was a decent one. We settled on 7.5 lb but we didn’t weigh it. We decided to call it a day and I promised to take Andy and John on the Trent and that I would return to catch a big girl in October, and so I shall.

26/27th August

So as my previous post intimated I was down in Reading for work again this weekend and I planned to fish that infernal Thames tributary where the barbel had eluded me on the 3 previous occasions.

I arrived at the river at around 5:30 and things looked immediately better to me, the river had some colour and was up about a foot or so from my previous visit. I fished well downstream of where I had fished previously, the swim was rather more comfortable and easier to cast as well. There is a photo from my iPhone on the looks good post. I had also made my own baits this time, inspired by Ian Grant and Paul Monaghan who could not have been more helpful. A really sound bunch of lads frequent the Twyford Club, if I lived nearer I’d never be off their bits of river. They are quite heavily fished like most southern rivers within easy reach of large populations and yet the swims feel well isolated and are left alone just enough to be natural, hats off to you all.

Eventually my good friend Tom Herbert turned up and claimed that I was in his swim I promise that you get first dibs next time mate. Tom had brought the guest tickets and refused to accept payment such is his generosity. So Tom when you read this make sure that you actually come up North so that I can reciprocate, instead of just bloody talking about it! Otherwise I shall be very very 

There was some light rain and in the distance I could hear the Reading Festival, it seems strange but that is the 3rd festival I have been able to hear whilst out barbel fishing. On 2 previous occasions I have been fishing the river Wharfe when the Leeds festival was on, I may have mentioned this before somewhere. I was struggling to hear who was on most of the time as the weather and the surrounding trees were causing most of the top end detail to be muffled but I did hear 30 seconds to Mars  (Fellow northern barbel fisher  Gordon Helliwell made me listen to them) and the head liners My Chemical Romance. At one point I thought I heard the old Queen song ‘We will rock you’ but thought nah! Checking t’internet later I see that they did indeed cover the song with none other than Brian May on guitar, bet that surprised a few. It is a pretty distinctive bit of drumming though.

The best time for the barbel on this river is in the wee small hours which is fine unless you set off from your home at 5:30 AM that day in order to get your work done. I confess that I actually used bite alarms for the first time in 2011 just in case I nodded off, but don’t worry I didn’t point my rods up in the air. Such a thing would result in a permanent ban from the fishery I suspect.

As it happens I didn’t nod off at all but I was struggling after 1AM, fortunately at 01:35 my upstream rod started bouncing around and I subsequently hooked a barbel, not one of the big ones that are caught most weeks on the fishery but a barbel nonetheless. I had left my camera at home and as it was quite a long way off I had to alert Tom to take the photo for me, sorry for waking you up mate 

My barbel was blind in one eye so was probably a bit of a mug fish Ah well………., of course now that the pressure is off I’m looking forward to spending another Friday or Saturday night there to catch a proper fish, it’s worth it just to say hello to those splendid Twyford lads again.  I decided during the night to go in a North Easterly direction to fish a rather famous barbel river that flows in an Easterly direction if I was successful; I don’t think that it would do any harm to mention the Great Ouse, do you?

27/28th August – including  ‘The Blair Witch Wood Horror’ in full techni-colour

As dawn broke my aching limbs reluctantly projected me upright and I started to pack away. I found a hotel near the Great Ouse on my iPhone and booked in only to find out that check in was mid-day and no earlier, I decided to use the time to check out a few spots on the river and buy the necessary permit before having a few hours kip before returning to the river in the evening. I carried my kit back to the van where Tom was waiting for me to say our goodbyes. He mentioned the fact that I looked like Usain Bolt yomping across the field but there again he always was a sarcastic bugger.  I should also add that this was before the infamous false start incident.

I spent the morning driving up to Bedfordshire,sampling various brands of roadside coffee along the way.  I like coffee a lot especially when I’m tired! So the conclusion after trying Costa, Wild Bean, Coffee Nation and McDonald’s coffee is…………………wait for it……………..McDonald’s is best. Apparently they use Abracadabra beans or summat like that, anyhow it’s very nice. Not as good as the freshly ground stuff that I get from Pollards of Sheffield but considering the speed at which they dispense it, hats off to them. It’s a pity everything else is so ****!

I met Mike Heljula near the river and he was kind enough to spare an hour to show me the stretch that we would be fishing later that day. The yomp (such an apt word)  across the meadow was not bad when I had no tackle to carry and the grass was dry. The walk was also interspersed with stops to look at various swims and so didn’t seem far at all. During the daylight finding our way through the wood after was not that difficult, especially with someone who knows it as well as Mike does, however it was fairly obvious that the ‘paths’ were not well worn and that most anglers did not venture that far downstream. The character of the river changes somewhat in the wood as the flow is pushed toward the near bank and it is much slower and deeper in this section. However this day the river was up and coloured and the pace in the wooded area looked spot on to me.

‘Warning the following paragraph(s) contains whinging about my health’

I went back to the hotel and got there just before 12, by 12:10 I was utterly zonked out having been awake for 29 hours and after having driven for 7 of those hours. I slept for 4 hours and to be honest could quite easily have slept for 3 times that. I jumped in the shower and yet still I was feeling the burn in my limbs, yes I was pretty tired still. I found another McDonald’s and had a shot of coffee and I felt surprisingly OK all things considered. It looked like it was going to rain and so I took my brolly, I had no sooner got over the fence when it started, within minutes everything was pretty wet including the grass. My stuff was a little bit too heavy  (I hate carrying an umbrella) and I was trying to get to my destination a little too quickly, consequently my knee (MCL and miniscus tear in 2009) was giving me some gip. I had a bit of job getting over the style into the wood and was terrified of injuring it again by slipping. Despite the fact that 90% of the time my knee is fine I don’t trust it any more and avoid any twisting motion or even potential twisting motion, so climbing a style with heavy off balance weight on my back in the wet is not my favourite pastime. I injured my knee when my foot got wedged in a muddy bank and the counterbalance of my ruck sack caused me to twist but my foot stayed put. The subsequent crack and searing pain is not something that I will forget in a hurry, nor will I forget trying to make my way through York station on crutches for 12 weeks.  I doubt that the poor paramedic who had to lift me over yet another style will forget that night in a hurry either.  I give you this background so that you understand the amount of physical effort involved it what was a simple stroll earlier that afternoon. As I write this my knee is quite painful some 3 weeks later and I have decided to have surgery during the close season. I suspect that I just have some scar tissue in there but I need to get it done because it is starting to cause wear and tear on my hip due to insufficient knee movement. Bloody hell I should have got this sorted straight away, old man in my mid 40s, mind you it seems that many suddenly notice things are not quite what they used to be at my age.

Anyway despite being over-weight and with a slightly lame knee my cardio vascular strength is still good and so I carried on through the now very wet wood. I almost immediately lost the ‘path’ and found myself fighting my way through 6 foot high green stuff with a garnish of sinewy brambles. I got through some how but had to drop some of my tackle about 80 metres upstream of where I intended to fish intending to get the brolly up and go back for it. As I returned for my stuff I found Mike heading toward me whereupon I tripped on a bramble, managed to stay upright, decided that my legs were like jelly and to sit on my bait bucket which tipped over and deposited me in the undergrowth with the copious bugs, more of which later. Mike was very helpful and took a photo of me sprawled out like a beached whale, but a beached whale with attitude, thus……….

Some 10 minutes later I had got over my ungainly northern bloke humiliation escapade and cast in for the first time. It took me only a few minutes to discover the power of the Great Ouse signal crayfish. My 14mm lamprey pellets were off in no time, so most of the time I was fishing with no bloody bait on, meanwhile Mike’s rod hooped over which resulted in a nice 11lb 8oz fish after a mere 15 minutes.

I could tell that Mike was fairly surprised at this turn of events, whereas I was quite encouraged. I spent the next few hours battling to keep a bait on and battling those long gangly spindly spiders and earwigs which had taken residence in my brolly. They were all over my face, my neck and my hands. I was getting mildly irritated by this but my mate young Ricky would have legged it, he hates creepy crawlies. This wood has over-run with them, it was as though some predator was missing from the food chain.

Mike had moved downstream about 50 yards and had another fish, or was it……….no it wasn’t! Some 3 hours later and 40-50 yards away he had the same 11lb 8oz fish again. I was still quite encouraged as it was only about 1am or maybe 2am. Anyway Mike thought that things had been exceptional and left for home. I decided that I would stay another hour or two but move upstream on the edge of the wood and this is where things went a little wrong(er).

I took the bare minimum of tackle up through the woods to see if I could find the swim without mishap this time and to be honest it was very hard going again. I lost the path and while I did not get lost as such I was aware that I must not stray too far to my left or I would be in the river very easily. I eventually got to the the swim at the edge of the woods had a rest and went back for the rest of my kit. The brolly, a dodgy knee, fatigue and the wet marshy ground really was causing me some considerable difficulty but hey you have to suffer for your art. I was sniggering to myself  (it’s called jungle fever I believe) as I wrote a little blues ditty in my head all about my plight. Mike had advised me to climb the bank at the back of our woodland swims and walk along the field and back down at the end of the wood to get to where I was going, so I tried it. Well things were going great until I accumulated some 3 kg of mud from the wet soggy field on each of my muckboots, by now I was exhausted to the point of being in pain, I was disoriented and started to feel a bit nauseous. I then realised that the edge of the field was a bit uneven and grassy but at least there was no mud. I descended back into the wood when suddenly I was plunged into utter darkness – my headlamp had failed and the spare was already sat in the target swim in the rucksack that I had already carried there. I got lost very rapidly and began to panic, I was utterly lost in a wood adjacent to a river in the dark where everything was taller than me, even the toadstools. I was about to call the local emergency services for help I was in such a state when a car drove past on the road that passes over the river, with this I was able to get my bearings and walked until I got to a fence. I must have calmed down a lot by this point because I remembered that it was electrified and that if I followed it to my left I would get to the style. I could see quite well by now because my eyes had adjusted to the dark and I was on the periphery of the wood. It came as a shock to me the hysterical state that I got myself in. I am prone to flying off the handle from time to time but most of that is pure bluster and I am actually normally calm when faced with things like that. I get agitated about people being rude or dismissive and being late for work related issues where I feel that I may not appear to be doing my best or feel that I’m letting someone down, that bothers me and winds me up. This kind of situation doesn’t or didn’t. I would normally have just stopped, cleaned the mud off my boots and slowed down, probably took the longer and more open route to where I’m going justy allowing my eyes to adjust to the gloom. I definitely lost the plot completely and it worried me enough to take certain precautions in the future. I need to be more careful and stop thinking that I’m in my late twenties, I’m clearly not.

Despite that I got to my swim and decided that I would fish for an hour until 4AM thus giving me 6 hours sleep before I would have to check out. However my spare head torch didn’t work so I resigned myself to staying until first light. I lit a soggy fag and relaxed when whirrrrrrrrr off went the bait runner. I picked up the rod and after a fairly sedate but heavy plod around in front of me I drew a large barbel shaped thing over where I thought the front of the net was, I started to lift the net prematurely and suddenly everything went slack. So I’d like to say that there was a happy ending but that was not the case. Instead I lost what was almost certainly a Great Ouse double all because of an earwig! What you say?

Yes when I examined my head torch the failure mode was an earwig which had forced the positive terminal of one of the batteries off, that was it. A pair of tweezers removed the offending and now dead critter and the head torch works fine. There was nowt wrong with the other one either, I had put the batteries in the wrong way round. I checked this 3 times and still did it wrong. I was obviously too tired as a result of the escapade in the woods which was caused by an earwig! I don’t know why I lifted that net when I did. I wouldn’t normally do that, I would normally rest the fish in the net before lifting it out. Anyway shit happens……………………………..to me!

28th- 29th August

I slept like a log for 5 hours then got up and drove North to meet Ricky at the train station. We were to fish a secret place where I had my PB recently, we fished until 2AM and I may have had another really big fish and Ricky may have blanked again.

Would I do it again – of course I would. I could hardly wait to get back down to Bedfordshire and get a barbel from the Great Ouse. I will probably be doing one or two things differently in mitigation against my own stupidity. I have also re-assessed my lack of fitness and will adjust my behaviour accordingly. To prove it September has gone without any major catastrophes so far, mind you the Wye weekend is looming where I will probably get fairly tipsy.

So August resulted in a new PB of 16lb 1oz and 4 new rivers taking me to 28, all in all an enjoyable month full of variety and even an adventure.

September stuff tomorrow.