Storming Session on The Bridgewater Canal

A warm welcome to this weeks blog update and it was great to see last weeks Fishy Fact or fiction get such great reviews.  When coming up with new ideas it is always touch or go as the blog in its current format is very popular so tinkering with it can be risky but i guess this will add some variety to the blog and the main structure of the update is still there as well, so its the best of both worlds.

This week on my dinner hour this week i was just checking on the blog and i was really pleased to see in the "blogs i follow" widget that a certain Stuart Maddocks had updated his blog.  Stuart Maddocks blog along with Stewart Bloors were the first blogs i read many years ago and i remember being inspired by the fantastic fish captures on Stuart Maddocks blogs and at the time i was relatively new to river fishing and i always remember being inspired by Stuarts blogs updates as they more often than not included fishing on the River Dee.  Stuarts love and passion for his local River Dee was evident in the way he wrote about this river and his descriptions of the sights and sounds he witnessed while on her banks have stuck with me to this day.  I was very fortunate to have been contacted by Stuart via email in those early days of my blog and his sound advice on blogging and piking etiquette are ones i still to this day try to stick too.

One night on Facebook i asked a question around line i should be using for my pike fishing and it was clear from the off I was under-gunned for piking on a river and it was Stuart who was straight in there helping me out along with a few of his piking friends and again there was no air of your doing this wrong, your doing that wrong it was plain and simple advice and educating a new angler to pike fishing on his part and you can tell how stuart is on his blog is how he is in real life whether that is being a gillie on the River Severn or helping out a fellow blogger on Facebook, a sound bloke and a man who's blog updates cannot help but motivate people to venture onto our local rivers.  In recent times Stuart has moved away from angling and has pursued his love of photography and wildlife and it has been great seeing the fruits of his trips on the few updates on his blog over the past year but that need to go angling was only ever subdued flame waiting to be ignited again and how fitting this close to bonfire night that stuart chose to set that need to go fishing alight with this PB chub below from the River Severn, congratulations, is this the King returning back to his blogging throne?, i do hope so.



Link to Stuart Maddocks blog: http://gonnfishin.blogspot.co.uk/2013/10/back-in-flow-for-big-chub.html

Next up is this week's Fish Fact of Fiction and as said earlier i was really pleased to see this new part of the blog get such positive feedback and a few anglers got in touch with their views on the matter but the one that stood out was JAYZS who posted in the comments about his thoughts on the factors that can effect the chances of a fishes survival but it was his final paragraph that captured me "I suspect that keep nets kill more fish than hooks, fish jostling around in close company, and against the mesh, must put their protective slime coats at serious risk. And I still see some anglers holding fish in a towel, whilst they unhook them!"
Being an angler that does use a keep net i am sure we have a future Fishy Fact or Fiction hidden in that comments there, maybe even two and i am sure we will have great fun in upcoming blogs with those questions but for now its onto this weeks and it is in keeping with the fishing in this update.



"boats on a Canal are a pain and Ruin anglers fishing"

So this weeks question is all around canal fishing and the effect boats have on an anglers fortunes.  Many anglers who fish the canals are put off by the boats and curse as the boats begin to come through of a morning to the point some anglers only fish the morning sessions till the boats begin before packing up and heading home, so is that the best tactic and in my opinion do i think boats effect my fishing?

Firstly we have to take into account the different types of fishing you can do on the canal as each is definitely effected differently by boat traffic in my opinion.  In my late teen years on the canal i spent many an hour on the canal chasing pike, to many in fact i should have been in college, i would nip up the road to the canal armed with a few plugs, landing net and tools to unhook the pike.  It became apparent very early on that colour in the canal imparted by the boats was bad for the fishing and i got many more takes when the canal was clear as opposed to when it was coloured and it did get to the stage where i would only fish till the boats started.  This season i have spent many hours in the early morning fishing and i have noticed that the pike are a lot more active in the morning before the boats start with plenty of splashing as the pike crash into the shoals of fish, do not get me wrong i am not saying you don't catch pike when the canal is coloured or saying pike don't eat during the daytime as there is no doubt they do but i certainly have seen more action from this in the mornings than when the boats get going, it does seem strange as you would think the pike would take full advantage of the disorientation caused by a boat going through to ambush unsuspecting prey, so for this aspect i would certainly say boats do effect pike fishing for the worse.

Moving onto pole fishing for silvers and i do think this part of it is where most of the frustration is caused with boat traffic.  I fish mainly on the bridge water canal and the sankey canal and this puts me in a good place to comment as one has a height level of boat traffic and one has completely zero boat traffic as it is blocked at one end by silt and a bridge at the other.  I often have anglers stop by my peg on the bridgewater and a lot of them say the same thing "too many boats on here for my liking" and "bloody boats ruin the fishing on here" and i honestly feel it is completely the opposite as long as you choose your area of the canal to fish carefully.  I always choose a peg on the canal where i can put a line up out of the boat traffic, preferably up the side of a reed bed and this is purely to give me a line that i know is receiving little or disturbance from boats and i know my bait is there on the deck and not being spread far a wide but i also put another line just on the bottom of the far boat channel.  Take this weeks swim for example:



I put one line up the side of the reed bed and another line to the right of me right in front of the reeds right in the boats line of path,  i do this for one reason, i know the boats don't effect the fishing there and in fact the fishing gets better when the boats arrive and you can actually catch fish as a boat is approaching or straight after one has gone through, the fish are that used to it.  There is of course tactics in baits and feeding that change with each swim and i will go into that in the actual update on this session but for this type of fishing i would certainly say that boats do not directly effect fishing on the canal, however,  there is always an exception to every rule and this comes when in the depths on winter when bread fishing comes into its own and it is undoubtedly a fact that too much boat traffic in winter on your bread fishing can destroys your fishing as Alex Ferguson always says "No doubt about that".

These again are just my thoughts on the matter and born through my experiences on the canals, maybe your thoughts on it differ, if so why not get involved with the discussion on the blogs Twitter account or Facebook page or in the comments section of this post.  I post this question on each page during the week for people to discuss so why not come and put your two cents into the debate.

Storming Fishing on The Bridgewater Canal

This week and i guess it will be forever remembered as a week the country stood in wait for the storm of all storms to hit the UK.  The sad thing about these times is there are always those people in the wrong place at the wrong time and late on Saturday night word was spreading on Facebook that an angler on the River kennet had not returned home from the previous nights session, as of writing this blog he is still missing and i do hope that this story has a happy ending for this anglers family and my best wishes go out to the family and all concerned, fingers crossed for a positive outcome. This picture i captured after work on Thursday perfectly sums up the weather the week leading up to the weekend, heavy showers followed by bright warm gaps in the cloud.



The weather was due to hit late on Sunday evening but as i finished work on Friday it was plain to see the tone the weather was going to take the next day on the bank.  The one thing this weather did guarantee was the fact there would be no trip to the river to trot a float through the next day, a session on a still water was going to be the destination.

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