Catch Fish with
Mike Ladle

Information Page

For anyone unfamiliar with the site always check the FRESHWATER, SALTWATER and TACK-TICS pages. The Saltwater page now extends back as a record of over four years of (mostly) sea fishing and may be a useful guide as to when to fish. The Freshwater stuff is also up to date now. I keep adding to both. These pages are effectively my diary and the latest will usually be about fishing in the previous day or two. The Tactics pages which are chiefly 'how I do it' plus a bit of science are also updated regularly and (I think) worth a read (the earlier ones are mostly tackle and 'how to do it' stuff so if you are new to fly fishing or spinning these are the ones for you).

29 November 2009.

Coarse fishing.

I don't really like the term 'coarse fishing' because it's nothing of the kind (actually it is the way I do it but most coarse anglers use only the finest tackle). Anyway, the weather has not relented. After my recent abortive sea fishing trip I felt that I needed to catch something. The problem was that it had rained heavily and repeatedly so the river was high and filthy. Undaunted I decided to give it a go. I'd managed to collect a few lobworms the night before so my first attempt was to catch a grayling on a legered worm. Not a sniff!

I moved to a side stream which to be honest didn't look any better than the main river. I changed the hook for a smaller one and swapped the worms for maggots before wandering along searching for a bit of a slack. I came to a small pool with the water roaring through it from an open hatch. Unfishable! On one side of the pool was the mouth of a ditch and perhaps a couple of metres of smooth, steady (if rather murky) flowing water. I clambered down and standing knee deep with my maggot box floating beside me among the flooded nettles I began to fish. I was still touch legering with a couple of AA shot for weight. I simply lowered the bait into the steady flow and jiggled it up and down on the bottom. After about five minutes I felt a knock and my strike met with a bit of resistance - nice dace! I kept loose feeding a few maggots and next cast another dace, then another and another. Some of them were quite big fish. Then I had a roach, another dace, a second roach and so on until I eventually packed in.

Of course none of my fish made the clutch scream or even put much of a bend in the little spinning rod that I was using (a really handy little weapon under the hanging branches incidentally) but they were fish and I enjoyed the session.

My first dace.

A bigger one.

A roach.

Close up.