Gear reviews!

I have decided to jump on the bandwagon and do a review of the gear i use for chasing pike on the fly, however mine is gonna have a different purpose, most tackle reviews are done with top-end gear that would require a fair bit of saving to afford whereas I am going to share my thoughts on some of the better budget gear available and prove that fly fishing for big, nasty predators needn't be particularly expensive yet you can expect some good quality equiptment that will see you through any piking situation.

I have used my current set-up for almost a year and have tamed a few pike with it, although i feel i know the rod and reel inside out im going to fish over the next few days and pay lots of attention to my gear's good and bad points. My fishing gear takes LOTS of abuse and it becomes clear pretty quickly whether something is up to the job or not, whilst i cannot lay claim to be the best or most efficient caster, im confident that i can give a good, relevant review of a piece of kit and how it handles a variety of fishing instances.

Over the next few days i will report back on the following;

Ron Thompson mpx pike fly rod

Okuma SLV 8/9 fly reel

And other assorted bits and bobs that i need to complete the task in hand.

Scott.

Should have known better!

Last tuesday I got a text from a mate asking whether or not there was a window to go pike fishing this week. "Of course" was my reply.
As usual i had a good feeling about the day, conditions had been pretty constant for a week or so which is usually exactly what you are hoping for when planning a pike trip.
So the night before i did all the necessary prep, i cleaned my line, i even loaded a sinker onto my old reel so that i was covering all bases! I made up a handful of fresh traces in full expectation that the pike were gonna mangle every last one of them.

As it happens i need'nt have bothered!
We started on a fairly big reservoir right on the edge of my town, it is sandwiched between three housing estates, an industrial estate and a football stadium. As you would imagine its quite a scenic place......

However it holds BIG specimens of pretty much every species that inhabit its depths so we decided to grit out teeth and get on with it.
It became clear pretty quickly that this was'nt going to happen for us, the water was the colour of chocolate milk and visibility underwater was about two inches. Best left for the deadbaits we agreed.

Next stop was a small feature-packed stretch of my local canal that had fished well for me the week before, on arrival the east wind which normally kills the fishing here was blowing fairly strongly and soon killed our confidence. Still it was a cool stretch to fish with loads of areas of interest and it wont be long before im back.

We moved on to the biggest natural loch in the area, a water crammed with fairly small pike, the average being a couple of pounds but with a good sprinkling of bigger fish thrown in.
If ever a place looked pikey..this is it. The loch is almost completely fringed with reeds, making me think that summer surface fishing here is gonna be explosive!
The water is crystal clear and there is a also a head of bonus monster perch.
But again it wasnt to be our day, the problem being that the loch shelves off very gradually and at this time of year the pike will be sitting deeper in the water, somewhere we just couldnt reach with fly rods.

One major sore point here was the litter left on the bank by other "anglers". All sorts of booze bottles, bait packets, miles and miles of waste line, and the food wrappers they have taken.. it really was a disgrace. It makes me fear for any poor fish that is caught by these idiots.
In future i'll only be fishing the far bank of the loch as access is a little harder and this puts off the lazy, drunken tools that trash the rest of the loch.

SO.. we moved again, passing the mysterious "dead" loch i mentioned in the blog before and commenting on how undead it looked. This time we fished an old flooded quarry that has become one of my most frequent haunts. It holds lots and lots of pike although worryingly ive been catching a lot lately that have been damaged by others poor handling.
The water had cleared up considerably since last time i was there and is now close to the crystal clear tinge (or lack of) that it always used to have.
To cut a long story short we still caught nothing.

So in total we fished four completely different waters, with a tally of 0 fish. Not bad for winter flyfishing in scotland i think!
It was a great day nonetheless and the ever-changing surroundings made the lack of fish all the more bearable.

Hopefully i have more success to report this week.

goodbye troots

I was lucky enough to be working late today so i had the perfect opportunity to chase trout one last time for this season. Having slept in by two hours, my initial plan was out the window and i had to make do with my local kelvin tributary, as opposed to the more lofty one i had planned to fish.

Despite the heavy rain on saturday the water was about “average” height and pretty clear, with a slight upstream wind. could it be?….. perfect conditions?

Well. I had a few casts in a few wee corners i always have a few casts in. I never catch anything here but habit is a powerful force. After a few lost flies, trashed leaders and choice words i wandered a wee bit upstream. So, On to the pool i caught my first ever trout in some years back ( about 4, not that long really). At first glance i was horrified, the bank had been bulldozed and the features that defined the pool, or the bankside rather were gone. By this i mean the trolley, this was the trolley pool. ( it IS a kelvin trib after all)

At a second glance though, i realised this was a blessing in disguise, the wee point that the bubble float bams (B.B.B's for short) fish from has been taken away, although casting is awkward at best, this pool is now much improved in that it can no longer be emptied out of season for pike bait!
Nymphs were my chosen weapon, olive goldheads to be precise. After a few sharp pulls the first trout odf the day leapt clear of the water. After a full summer of pike and perch fishing i had forgotten how beautiful wild brownies really are, i admired the array of colours on his flanks and the tinge of blue on its ..err…face? and then slipped him back none the worse for his ordeal. After fighting and losing a good fish moments later the pool seemed to spook.

Not to worry, theres another nice pool just out of casting distance. This pool used to have a fallen tree bisecting it making it almost impossible to fish properly, however the phantom bankside bulldozers have removed it, revealing a beautiful wee pool on a bend. Its amazing that ive walked past this wee bit of water possibly hundreds of times and never cast a line.
After figuring out how best to deal with an “s” bend pool i started hitting fish. The first one was a quick wee bugger, i seemed to predict the bite and lifted before anything happened, sure enough he was on. I think he was only in the water for 2 seconds of the fight, the rest he spent displaying his golden flanks in the air, hilarious to watch. The second fish gave me a very subtle twitch to betray his presence, at first i thought it was a bandy, all i could feel was a wriggle, then it bored deep, running like a pike, except now i had fast water to contend with and a 3 rather than a 9 weight rod, he turned and i caught a glimpse of the length of the fish, my first pound plus fish from this stretch this year. It was a fantastic fight in a very confined space, magic

I winkled out another two from here about 6 or 7 ounces and bumped loads of fish but that was to be the highlight of that pool.

Onward and upward i searched out another few runs without much more than the odd pluck, until i hit a very unassuming little pool deep within the trees. First cast, bumped a fish, second cast, bumped the same fish, third cast.. BANG. He was stuck, again around the 7 ounce mark, this one ran between my legs, jumped then came back!
Similar events occured over the next ten minutes or so, many, many misses and two more fish. After this the fishing turned for want of a btter word, pish. No pictures as to be honest i expected a blank so the camera stayed at home.

So, in reflection i doubt i could have asked for a btter end to the season. Im glad i slept in! Usually the sixth of october puts me in a bad mood but today was different. I had hardly fished for trout all year, maybe six or seven outings, and to come back and have such a great day was exactly what i needed. Rather than be sad, or even feel as if i wasted time, im glad i fished for other species and was still able to enjoy some fantastic trout sessions this year. Today only served to whet my appetite for march 15th!


Scott

success!!!

Well back on the fishing scene again after a long summer of college work catch up and job hunting and what a start, fished my fav water of all, a small local pond, in all we had seven pike to me and my brother, three to me and four to him. All takes were screamers, none of the gentile takes that i am used too, where u get a few bleeps on the alarms, deep deep bleep......... and a little bit of line pulled off... these tore line viciously, all were decent fish apart from one, the smallest pike i have seen fell to my brother, it took a sardine, they all count though! Six of the fish averaged 6-8lbs but last for my bro was a monster at fourteen and a half pounds!!! Alot of the pike were battle scarred with hooks closing up their throats, hooks in their mouths, so alot of pike surgery was needed, luckily we got them all free and swimming again, it surprises me the amount of fannies who pike fishing and don’t have the proper gear or knowledge to unhook them, these people give fishing a bad name, anyway enough of my ramblings. Enjoy the eye candy, not me the fish. lol excuse my brothers advantage timber camo suit, but it keeps him happy.

R.I.P SUMMER 08

It dawned on me today that the summer is more or less over, the leaves are starting to turn, theres a pleasant chill in the air and it's too dark to fish after work. Every year about the same time i start to look back on my summers fishing, or rather, from the beginning of the trout season till september-ish.
In reflection this year has been very different from what i expected. Normally i would fish a local burn for trout 2/3 times a week, making regular trips into the hills in pursuit of spotty creatures aswell.
This was always my main interest, despite being a very keen coarse angler and enjoying many trips for pike, or evenings on the canal with a waggler.

However, at the tail end of last summer i planted a seed. An innocent idea.
I took my fly rod to the canal, more out of curiousity than anything else as i had often struggled to catch roach when they were feeding on the surface. Despite the fact that they proved incredibly difficult to catch i really enjoyed it.
Then i tried for perch (and snapped a 2 weight in the process)
And by autumn i had bought myself a pike fly outfit.

By the time this spring came around i was eager to start where i left off and chase coarse fish on the fly, negelcting my beloved trout for them.
I think this year i have fished for trout maybe 6 times. I would have done that in a fortnight last year. I became obsessed with catching the often overlooked species on fly gear. To be honest, its not something i feel ive truly "done" yet. Rather than a phase i can see it becoming a major, perhaps dominant factor in my fishing.

The start of the summer was very, very poor for me. All my experiments were failing miserably for a whole load of reasons. From poor weather, to poor venue choice, things just refused to click.
By the time july rolled around my fishing improved ten-fold. I was achieving similar success rates to last year except with a fly rod as opposed to a waggler set-up.

In summary, the last 2 and a half to 3 months have been some of the most amazing times ive had fishing. Eventually my experiments paid off, plans came together and new waters began to bear fruit.

Of course there are many trips i never made, many plans that never came to be and many days aborted due to mince weather but i dont want to dwell on them. This year, like the last few has been all about exploration and experimentation. New waters, new methods, new species and perhaps most importantly, new friends through fishing.

At work today i was trying to think what my most memorable trips/ sessions / fish were of this summer.
Was it the day spent in a remote glen in torrential rain with buzzards circling overhead, and the feeling nobody has wandered here in decades. catching FAT black trout with golden bellies on nothing but klinkhamers. with the water rising almost a foot in an hour?

Or was it the day i logged here, the true beginning of my coarse fly success, catching little aggressive perch and pristine roach on my favourite rod, the three weight, from the local canal?

Perhaps it was more recent, my pike fly escapades of the last fortnight, watching near double figure esox taking flies at my feet and making my 9 weight rod look like a piece of spaghetti?

Maybe it was an evening spent fishing tight to lock gates and beating my pb perch 3 times in an hour?

The truth is, its impossible to say. But i know im gonna enjoy this debate in my head all through the winter. Round about now i begin to plan my last trips for trout till march 15th again. My focus shifts (or stays) with pike and perch. Last winter proved to be very trying. I blanked for almost 4 months! I am determined that this wont happen again. I now have new skills to utilise, and new waters to tackle. Im almost looking forward to the challenge that frosty mornings or ice cold gales are gonna present in the coming months!

Hopefully over the coming weeks i will have plenty autumnal predator and trout stories to share.

Scott.

esox lucius

Over the past week i've been doing a lot of fishing, for pike, on the fly no less. Rather than write a seperate post for every trip i thought i should wait and lump all the days in together.

I've been hammering a wee water nearby that has a good head of pike, reputedly up to the golden 20lb mark. Not concerning myself with looking for the BIG fish, i was happy to get anything daft enough to snap at my flies. Unlike last winter the weeds have died back really early, to be honest this put me off at first because the number of features to cast to had been dramatically reduced, also, the water had coloured right up which id never seen there before, so straight away, things didnt look good.

However, within minutes a mini pike bulldozed my fly but managed to wriggle off, this would happen several more times before i got one to stick, in short, i managed 3 pike up to 3lbs that day, with loads and loadd of follows/ takes. it was such an exciting days fishing, every time i cast at scattering baitfish, my line would tighten and id feel that shudder up the line that we all crave.

Bizarrely, all the pike seemed to be concentrated in a tiny corner of the loch. This was my first real success with pike on the fly and was enough to force me out the next day. The biggest fish of the first day.

The second day saw me start in exactly the same fashion, same corner/ fly/ conditions but no fish. I had to cover a lot of water before the first pike had a go, at about 2lbs the fish put up a surprisingly strong fight on a stiff 9 weight pike rod. Another one would follow soon after then there was a dull period.

I wandered along to another water nearby which is one of the most popular pike waters in my area, after a long walk with no success, a green torpedo shot out from the marginal weed and very casually nibbled the fly and spat it out, then just the faintest nibble.....and he was stuck. I set the hook with a subtle lift, then in amazement, just watched him sit there. And sit. THEN, he realised there was a big pike fly in his mouth and tore off for the far bank, for the next 6/7 minutes i enjoyed the best scrap ive ever had from a fish, constantly running this way and that, waiting till i had some sort of control then ripping yard after yard of line from my reel.

Because i had left my net at home ( having not planned to fish here) I had to jump in up to my knees to unhook the bugger. No picture unfortunately but i put about 8lbs on him. That would be the perfect end to a perfect day.

Today, i hit the same water, with decent if not ideal conditions i struggled a bit, not getting any interest for the first half hour or so, i noticed some roach leaping free of the surface in unison. This can mean only one thing... PIKE ATTACK!!!!

After a few fruitless casts, i landed the fly around the area of the initial disturbance, as soon as the fly hit the water my line tightened and i met solid resistance. Typically, any pike over 5 or 6 pounds takes a minute to realise they are hooked and start fighting, this fish was no different.

Once he woke up my drag was put to the test, even with the brake on full the fish tore line with ease. The fact that the fish didnt show itself for a while only added to the excitement, was it 5lbs? was it 15lbs? Its impossible to tell. After another minute or two of spirited scrapping the fish rolled, betraying its true size, i would say about 7lbs. Once he finally came to hand he was very simply unhooked and was off like a shot. It just goes to show that heavy fly gear is essential to tame even these modest sized pike. I only managed shots of the fish during the fight as it swam away so quickly.

The rest of the day was pretty dull truth be told, one more fish about 10 inches which took a fly about 6 inches long! as you would expect it wasnt much of a fighter.

Over the 3 trips i managed to get 8 pike, a respectable total i think, and fingers crossed there will be more and more through the coming weeks!

the wee man. The big man.

forth and clyde canal last friday

sooooooooo its been ages since i updated the blog, i promise this will not happen again!

On Friday i decided i should make the best of my only day off in a fortnight and head out for a few casts.The original plan was to cycle to a nearby quarry that is rammed with perch, fish for an hour or two, then head home and get geared up for a visit to my local-ish hill burn.

After the 30 minute (uphill) ride there i fought my way through the woods to find somebody sitting in one of the two fishable swims. Bugger.

Not to worry, the canal is only five minutes away i reasoned, thankfully the rest of the ride was downhill. I had a few casts for the perch without any interest until i noticed a shoal of roach feeding on the surface, The decision was easy. On with a wee klink that a friend was kind enough to give me and away i go.

Roach are frustrating targets on the fly at the best of times but these chaps were especially awkward! I was getting nibbles on the fly approximately every ten seconds from the wee roach but none were taking with any conviction. after 8976689728697 failed strikes i moved on.

Quarter of a mile or so further east i spotted a smaller shoal of better sized fish, thankfully these fish were a bit more eager, within seconds i was into a wee roach. Im not gonna pretend that roach of this size are fighters but the challenge they present on the fly makes them worth targetting. Over the next hour or so i managed a couple more, some of the takes were surprisingly aggressive considering how placid they usually are.In amongst one of the shoals i spotted a few rogue perch, busy picking off the smaller members of the group. Now would be a good time to chuck on a lure i thought.

Two or three casts later a perch of about 5 ounces smashed into my fly harder than i thought possible for such a wee fish! Watching these wee bullies chase a fly is a real pleasure, dorsal fins erect and gills flared they really are an impressive sight. generally they take close to the bank so although your not fishing on the surface, sport is very visual. I find that exploiting the overly aggressive, predatory nature of the perch is one of the best ways to use a fly rod.

Throughout the rest of the afternoon i watched scores of these wee predators chase and attack my fly, i spotted some really nice fish, nudging 2lbs i guess, but the older, wiser fish couldnt be any less interested in my streamers.

At about 4 o'clock i decided i was well and truly satisfied so began the trek home, figuring that the dual carriageway i have to cross would be safer now than if i left it a bit later. Just before turning off the canal track i bumped into an older guy i meet quite regularly on the canal bank, a keen trout angler himself we never struggle for things to talk about. He recently started fishing for coarse species, pike and perch namely and is always keen to learn about these fish and methods of catching them, an attitude i admire as most older anglers i meet are quick to tell me im wrong or that you "canny catch on the flee in the canal".

I was especially chuffed to learn that advice i gave him a few weeks ago helped him catch his new pb pike.

He shared some stories about his trout adventures in years past, tours of the west coast lasting weeks at a time, fishing every burn, river or loch that he set eyes on. Ive always enjoyed listening to stories about trout fishing from years ago, before sea trout were a myth and pre bow-hole dominance.

Anyways, Two hours later he cycled away, and i spotted some more roach rising....To cut a long story short they teased and frustrated me to the point of insanity so i chucked on a streamer again in an attempt to make the extra hours worthwhile. After drawing blanks at a few swims i managed the best perch of the day, by no means a monster at about hand size he still managed to put up an admirable scrap on the 3 weight rod. He topped off a day that despite not going to plan, turned out to be amazing.

I didnt feel like a had missed out by not chasing the trout, i couldnt have had a more fun day with a fishing rod. My two hour taster turned into an 11 hour epic, fuelled by two packets of crisps and a can of coke. All in all it was magic. The roach presented a fantastic challenge whereas the perch provided some exciting sport.