Fishing World

Archive for September, 2010

Probably one of the most frequent complaints you will hear from fishermen is that the cost of bait is outrageous. Now, the cost of bait is nowhere near the cost of your fishing rods or reels or even much of your tackle. There is one big difference, however. Your tackle does not expire like bait. If you buy night crawlers or minnows, you only have so long to use them until they die and get bad. Most of the time, you will end up running out of bait long before it has the chance to go bad.

There is a way around all of this. There is a way you can fish for free, avoiding the cost of bait. That way is to catch your own bait. Now, this sounds hard, but it really is not at all. It is not even time consuming. When you look at the benefits of catching your own bait, it is undeniable that it is well worth the little effort to catch and keep your own bait. Really, you are paying yourself money every time you go out and catch your own bait. As they say: a penny saved is a penny earned.

The two main baits that are used by fishermen are minnows and night crawlers (large worms). It just so happens that these are the two easiest types of bait that you can catch. For the night crawlers, all you have to do is go out in your yard at night with a flashlight and look in the grass. When you see one, move the light away and catch it. For the minnows, you will want to spend a little money up front for a seine net. This will last you a very long time and will pay it self off many times over. You take this net and cast it into the water and pull up the minnows. Only keep as many as you are allowed.

Before you can catch fish you must fish where they are, but most anglers still select river swims with their own comfort in mind, rather than giving thought as to whether the swim actually contains the fish they are seeking. For consistent success in all aspects of river angling, you must develop ways of reliably locating your quarry.

The Summer River

Even if you only fish rivers in the winter, time spent investigating the river in summer is never wasted. When the water is low and clear, and the weed beds and bankside vegetation at their height, river features are at their most obvious. Logging their position now is invaluable later in the season when the banks are barer and the river high and murky. Also, of course, the various species of fish are more easily seen in summer, and their feeding areas will always be a good starting point in winter.

Features to look for include smooth gravelly shallows, lily beds, undercut banks, positions of all rush beds, depressions in the river bed, underwater snags, deep runs under overgrown banks and so on. All these features will be attractive to one or more species of fish. Dace, roach and grayling will colonize the fast gravel, as will barbel, particularly at night. Big perch have an affinity for undercut banks and sedate, deep marginal flows. Chub, barbel and big roach will often be found in depressions, while river bream and tench like nothing better than browsing through lily beds. Marginal rushes are favourite ambush points for pike, while the angler seeking specimen barbel and chub need look no further than the underwater snag.

Any area of smooth flow overhung by trees will be a banker in winter for many species, especially if the river rises sufficiently to form rafts of flotsam around the lower branches. Many of these features will be obvious by eye, but, if the river is shallow enough, you can wade through it. This is the fastest way to discover the variations in the bottom contours. If you are not comfortable doing that, or the river is too deep, take the trouble to plumb all the areas where the bottom is not visible, and make a careful note of the results.

There are many anglers who only fish rivers in the winter months, when much of the fishing is undoubtedly at its peak, and they base their fish location on previous experience of the river plus their ability to read the water. Only stretches of river with character and variation in flow can be read accurately, and these will generally be of small to medium size. Straight, evenly flowing stretches, possibly wide and deep, present different location problems. You will discover, locating fish in these is often a painstaking process of elimination.