Grumpy Bastard

The clocks have gone back, the nights are now long and dark and during the lighter part of today it mostly pissed with rain.  It’s the time of year when the marketing machines convince people to buy pumpkins which will be mostly carved up then thrown away in the name of a “tradition” that didn’t exist forty years ago.  These things are more than enough to make me grumpy but not the reason I’m pressing keys with steam coming out of my lugs tonight.

These last few weeks have seen the Norfolk Broads battered day after day after day by successive salt tides surging up the rivers.  There was a brief respite but then it started again leading to it becoming the worst documented salt incursion that has hit the broads so far.  On the Bure, saltwater has travelled as far as Salhouse in recent days and on the Thurne it has reached the very top reaches of the system, over the banks and into the road.  There are areas of sanctuary but we anglers wait for the bloated dead fish to start popping up in the next few days, only then will we know what we’ve lost.  Or will it be a case of finding out what we have left?  Fair play to the beleaguered EA staff on the front line getting their hands wet, who have been called upon to rescue and relocate thousands of fish in recent weeks.  To the EA six figure CEO’s and head honchos counting beans in ivory towers, shame on you, fucking parasites.

Salt surges are nothing new, we get many every year and although the current situation is unprecedented, these tides damage the already fragile freshwater system every single time.  Salt water rushes upstream and untreated sewage flows down, an unappetising mix.  Saint John Currie and other local volunteers have been warning us of the potential hazards of salt surges for years and have been proactive in seeking a solution too.  The salt surges could be prevented by using “Air bubble curtains” which to quote from Google;

• “Air bubble curtains: Used in river mouths, these devices release compressed air from a perforated pipe on the riverbed. The rising bubbles create a vertical flow that disrupts the stratified layers of freshwater (top) and saltwater (bottom), forcing the saltwater wedge to mix with and be carried out by the river's freshwater current.

Obviously these things cost money but actually not as much as you’d think, two to three million pounds or so I was told recently.  Still a big wedge of cash but not when compared to the income generated by Broadland tourism which is conservatively estimated at £400 million, although a figure of £711 was cited for 2022.  A lot of money either way.

I suppose it is naive of me to think that the business world will assist in any way, even if this may literally save their own skins in the long term.  As I previously mentioned, our rivers are being pumped full of shit which should not be news to anyone but how many people realise it is avoidable.  Whereas in previous centuries people polluted out of ignorance, British water companies are polluting for profit.  Instead of reinvesting in infrastructure these PLC’s creamed off the money and paid it to their shareholders, now we are going to be hit with bigger bills to pay for their negligence.  Without going too far into politics, capitalism is killing everything and if you can’t see this you deserve to be a Dodo.  But with my angler’s hat on what, if anything, is the Angling Trust doing about this?  The very fact that I ask this question at all speaks for itself.  A look on the AT website revealed a few banner headlines but no actual substance, which has been the case every single time a contentious issue has reared its head.  Angling Trust, the voice of our sport just mutters and whispers then hides behind the settee.  Another organisation putting hefty salaries into the bank accounts of the public school cronies whose actual role appears not to be representing anglers but appeasing us for their political masters.  More parasites.

Back to Broadland and with the salt water hopefully receding, my old sparring partners – the Broads Authority – have a dredger in position ready to start scouring the bed of Hickling in the next few days.  Dredging is another highly contentious issue which BA says it’s obliged to carry out, despite the environmental risks which I’ve written about too many times in the past.  In brief anglers believe there is a link between dredging operations and outbreaks of the deadly Prymnesium parva algae, the BA wites this off as coincidence.  If we accept dredging must be done to maintain the boat channels then the least they could do is use the safer suction dredging method.  But no, constraints on budget, common sense and morality see a bloody great crane sitting on a pontoon waiting to wreak havoc.  After what we’ve seen this month, if the Thurne system suffers a Prymnesium bloom in the next few months then I doubt it will ever recover, the jewel of Broadland really will become a swamp.  How then will Dr John Packman hang on to his job and another six figure salary?

My last subject of ire tonight is another recurring theme in the form of social media/Youtube three minute heroes.  From memory I marked the changing of the year with a detailed rant about these self promoting pricks so I won’t bang on again, I’ll allow myself one sentence.  Social media is ruining angling and is killing Pike angling.  Ah fuck it, I go fishing to get away from the insanity of modern life so it’s particularly frustrating when the madness invades my space.  Most of the above can be described as just more small examples of a world that is corrupt from the top down and this last paragraph one of the reasons they get away with it, people are too distracted by being busy charging around screaming “Look at me!”

However, most of the time my escape is successful, however you measure it, as I hope to demonstrate below.

Some (mostly) good stuff .

 “Farewell and Thanks for all the fish” by Neville Fickling

Neville Fickling is undoubtedly one of Piking’s superstars and despite giving him a bit of stick from time to time, he’s someone I have a great deal of respect for.  His early writing had the same effect on me as the words of Rickards & Webb had on those a decade or so older.  In hindsight the influence of “Fishing for big Pike” is certainly present in Neville’s first book.  This latest one will be his last so he says, which sounds a bit morbid so I kind of hope it isn’t?

This book is Nev’s autobiography which does include a little bit about the man and his family (including a surprisingly ‘wild’ youth) but is mostly a fishing book.  For the first thirty odd years, NF has his own written fishing diaries to refer to so everything runs chronologically; early days in the Fens, then on to various pits and reservoirs, journeys east to the Broads as well as holiday trips to Ireland.  Everything flows and it reads really well.  As someone who was manically Pike obsessed as a younger man, I always thought I put a pretty big effort into fishing in those years.  I now know that I was not in the same league of obsessive insanity as young Fickling, the effort he put into his fishing as a young man was exceptional and probably unequalled.  How did he find the motivation and the energy?  I admire this but I don’t envy it.  At several points in the text the author does question his own actions and sanity.

For the latter years of Neville’s fishing life he doesn’t have diaries to refer to so the time line is much more mixed as waters are dealt with individually or in small groups.  For me this second half of the book doesn’t flow anything like as well as the early years, the writing is a little stodgy with a few mistakes creeping in.  The range of waters NF has caught big Pike from is bloody impressive; apart from those already mentioned there’s Irish Loughs and Scottish Lochs, Rivers of all sizes, just about every Trout water that ever smelt of Pike, stillwaters of all kinds as well as a few trips abroad.  I’ve got my Pike head on so have neglected to mention there’s plenty of Zander in the book too and I wonder if there’s another angler who’s caught two forty plus Pike and two nineteen plus Zander?  Ironically Neville would probably know the answer! 

The book touches on NF’s work and businesses in the fishing trade as well as a bit of angling politics.  I think he’s played down the role in the latter, there is almost nothing about the many positions he held for PAC over many years.  It’s fair to say that nobody has done more for the sport of Pike fishing than Neville Fickling so maybe he’s being modest?  But the author has also skipped over his uncanny ability to inadvertently (or not?) piss people off.  When all fishing gossip was printed in mags and in the early years of the internet age Mr Fickling seemed to take great pleasure in getting under people’s skin.  To be fair he does mention he regrets many of the things he wrote in the past.

So over the seventy odd years this book spans, Neville has caught an awful lot of seriously impressive fish.  The stories are all in there but for me many suffer from being told in more detail elsewhere.  For the ones I was unfamiliar with I would have liked a little bit more depth in the telling, but to be fair this is present in the more recent tales and there’s plenty of these.  I suppose I’d have been happy to have all the detail about all the captures whether I’ve heard it before or not and as such I thought this book would be longer/bigger and I’m a bit disappointed that it isn’t?  The one occasion that Neville and I have fished together does get a mention but you’d need to know the clues to spot it.  I suppose the sum of my waffling amounts to this, ‘Farewell…’ is a really good fishing read but it’s not the classic it very easily could have been.

Good gear/bad gear

Last season with stocks of my regular trace wire running low I decided to try something different and ended up with the Savage Gear “Raw 49” in 35 pounds breaking strain.  This was very different to the kind of wire I’ve used for nearly fifty years as I couldn’t twist it.  I could have crimped it, had I been arsed to buy all the extra paraphernalia required but this stuff is also knot-able so that’s what I did.  When I say knot-able what I really mean is I was able to form loops at either end to attach a hook and a swivel, the top hook I could attach as normal.  This looked a bit scruffy to me so I ended up covering the loops and tags with a bit of shrink tube which I’d bought for something I’d never got round to.  I made it work, the wire was perfectly fine and it never let me down so I can’t fault it where it matters.  But making a trace, which should have been less fiddly in theory actually wasn’t at all and the spool ran out a lot quicker than I expected.
I also tried an excellent professionally made titanium trace from Voodoo and I can’t help being impressed with this bomb proof material which should last as long as I don’t lose it.  Because this stuff will outlast the hooks the traces are made with split rings so the hooks can be changed.  This leaves the hooks, in particular the top hook, dangling from the wire instead of being effectively part of the trace.  I want my wire to run along the shank of the hook, fixing it in that position, this is because I use double hooks a lot for deadbaits and I want that point standing proud.  For livebaits and treble hooks the titanium trace could well be just the job, time will tell.
So after all that I’ve gone back to where I was a year ago and ordered a spool of the simple AFW Surfstrand from Eddie Turner.  The bulk spools last years, I can twist up a trace to any specification I choose in a matter of minutes and after years of fault free use it’s landed me a lot of Pike and I can recommend it without reservation.  People rave about the new improved trace wires out there and they are all very good I’m sure but the Pike really don’t care and they won’t catch us one extra fish.

I bought some of the Korum ‘Bolt and Run’ rig kits in an attempt to tidy up my river rigs.  These things work okay but to be honest I didn’t read the small print properly.  To really make them work I should have tied up some hooklengths terminating in a loop to be covered by the long sleeves provided.  Even had I read this I’m still more comfortable using a swivel so changing hooklengths (which I do often, a time saving idea borrowed from sea fishing) was way too fiddly for me.  Likewise the clip used for changing the lead or feeder was unnecessarily awkward too, most other clips I’ve used are much easier.  For example the Breakaway fast clips are a sea fishing product but I’ve used them in all sizes for most types of coarse fishing for at least thirty years.  So in short, I can see how these things should work but it’s too much faff for me and really just another gimmicky, unnecessary piece of plastic end tackle thrust upon us by the trade.  Reinventing the wheel and coming up with something square.

In the interests of balance I have to say that I like a lot of Korum gear, I’m not convinced it’s any better than another manufacturer but most of what I’ve used has been up to the job.  I use the river feeders out west and I like them.  The hooks have been very good too, almost all the Chub and Barbel I’ve caught over the last couple of years have been on either the ‘Specimen’ or ‘Power’ hooks.  One or the other has a slightly beaked point (can’t remember which at the moment). They are strong and stay sharp.  I do wonder how much thought went into those brand names though? How do they come up with them?

Years ago, Salmo lures always came in for a bit of stick from the lure snobs on fishing forums for reasons unknown?  I suspect it is because they are actually miles better than the cult bespoke jobs, even though these are hand whittled by a toothless redneck in a remote shack in the Minnesota wilderness.  The truth is Salmo lures are excellent; they are tough, have a range of great finishes, sensible hooks and really are idiot proof.  My biggest lure caught Pike came on a 10cm Slider and my best Chub on a lure took the 12cm version.  If I want to fish slowly with an erratic, gliding retrieve the floating Slider is my ‘go to’ and is the only ‘Jerkbait’ (are they still called that?) I use these days.  The Skinner is another good lure, particularly the largest version which is around 20cms but very hard to get hold of these days.  On the very rare occasions I troll lures this would be a first choice and in the days when I done a lot of trolling it caught me loads of Pike as well as a PB Perch.  Another good troller is the Salmo Perch and this little crankbait works very well when cast too, I’ve had Pike, Perch and Chub on this lure.  I’ve caught hundreds of fish on Salmo lures and unlike a lot of hard baits they aren’t too expensive, compared to Rapala for example which never seem to catch as many fish as they look like they should.

Lately I've mostly been doing this.