Empty Handed

Easter Bank Holiday weekend, and I’ve only managed one short fishing trip. Not to worry.

So, Sunday evening, and a run up to Farletonview for a shot on their 3 hour sport ticket, a snip at 6 quid. With the settled and mild weather we’d been having and had been promised for Sunday, too, I was looking forward to some hot buzzer fishing and some surface action to emerger to round-off. The weather turned on me a bit, though, and despite starting the day out in shorts (first outing for my legs this year, I believe), which was lovely in the shelter of our garden and for a stroll to the swings (with the kids!) in Torrisholme village, I was to end it with frozen fingers, and being very pleased with myself for having the wisdom to take extra layers and a jumper to the lake with me.

The problem, temperature-wise, was the wind-chill, and up under the shadow of Ingleborough at Farleton, the wind was strong and thin. This made casting awkward at best and the couple of anglers already there when I arrived at just after 6pm were huddled in the SW corner, which had a little shelter. I headed for the NW corner and tackled up with a 2 fly team; a gold-head hare’s ear on the point and a red Daiwl Bach on the dropper. I began fishing along the northern shore, struggling with the wind swirling over my right-shoulder and trying to cover the water from 90 degrees round to the shallow margins, trying a mixture of retrieves from ’static’, through various figure-of-eights to fairly quick pulls. Cover the available water and move on a few paces.

After a couple of moves along, I got a take. This wasn’t a big fish by any means, and once it came within view I saw it was a silver fish of some sort which had taken the dropper. Cool! It looked like a decent size for a Roach, but I didn’t get a proper look at it before it came adrift, and it might even have been a skimmer - it looked very deep for a Roach. Anyway, I may never know for sure, but I was doing something right at least, and pushed on (after trying a few more casts into the same area to see if I could contact another of the shoal, of course).

Almost to the other corner now, and I’ve changed to an olive buzzer on the point, when a vicious take strips yards of line from the coils at my feet before I really get a grip on the situation. Wow, this fish has some go - but, after a while I see it and it’s not so big… I’m on the reel now, and it keeps running and taking line against the drag, and I can’t do a thing with it. I begin to get a sneaking suspicion, and when I do manage to get it closer in, I realise the suspicion is well-founded. The fish is either foul hooked, or the leader has somehow become entangled around its tail. I eventually get a completely average-size Farleton rainbow (about 2 1/4 - 2 1/2 lbs) into the net, with the size 16 olive buzzer firmly buried in the root of its tail. Lucky I fish barbless, or I would have had to chop its tail off altogether (possibly - I might just have snipped the fly, but it could have gone either way).

Now deep in the NE corner, and there seem to be a few fish around, and I hit into a couple on various flies. I try snatchers and wickhams spiders at this point, but it’s not clear which are the successful flies, since all of the fish get away after running around a bit and leaping clear of the water several times.

Next, as I’m running out of time, and there are some fish topping here and there, every now and then, I try some emergers, spending some time on my fave fly, the shipman’s, and some time with cdc shuttlecock buzzers. Weirdly, although there were clearly fish about, buzzers about, and fish eating those buzzers in/on the surface, and I cast to rising fish, I didn’t get a single offer at the surface. I tried several sizes and colours, and kept degreasing, but not a single rise. Ho hum.

Then I went to the chippy.

A good fun 3 hours though, and something I’m sure to repeat frequently over the next few months, I expect. The other thing I did for this session was try out my pared-down fishing pack in full for the first time. The fishing pack is a bum-bag, a rod and a net. In the bum bag is my (home-made) lanyard loaded with the stuff I usually have dangling off my vest, a reel and a few odds and sods like some spare spools of leader material and my usual pocket junk (fuller’s earth mix, mucilin, some indicators etc), my dry-fly box and camera. The idea is that, especially over the summer when clothing is less of an issue, the pack can stay in the car for those impromptu and shorter sessions. It’s just a lot quicker and less cumbersome than having bags and vests and all that shit.

I’ll post some more details and some pictures at a later date.

Google Maps has a cool new feature (well, I’ve only just noticed it) where you can create personal maps with notes and locations, and publish a public URL, or generate a Google Earth KML file.

I’ve created a Fishing Map, with all of the local fisheries I either use or am planning to take a shot at.

Wow, what a fantastic spring day! I’ve been on holiday today, and so we took the kids out and up to Docker Park Farm to see the lambs and that. Now, Docker Park is no Folly Farm, a visitor centre so good we went not once but twice in our only-one-week family holiday to Saundersfoot last year, and are returning again this year with Folly being one of the key factors in our decision to go back to the same place two years on the trot (oh, and the fishing lake, of course), but in the end we spent a good 3 hours or so there this afternoon enjoying the sunshine and playing with the kids, who enjoyed it very much, so we shouldn’t complain. It is a bit crap and small though. Oops, sorry, I said we shouldn’t complain. Toby fed the lambs, petted the rabbits and chicks and says he liked the pigs most of all. William terrorised the ducks and chickens and was fascinated by the geese. The other bonus today was that we were more or less the only people there later in the afternoon.

What a difference the clocks going forward makes, especially when the sun shines for us. I know I’ve been off work, but even so, I feel so much happier and more relaxed with the ‘extra’ daylight. Soon it’ll be golf and even fishing in the evenings after work, family commitments allowing. Luverly! I’ve promised myself I’ll make the most of the summer evenings this year, particulary since they don’t seem to last that long before the buggers start drawing in again, and I’d forgotten how miserable the cold and dark winter evenings really are.

As a follow up to this post about my domain being spoofed by spammers, a quick note on what I did about it and the current situation.

Firstly, I investigated just to make sure that they were spoofing the address, and hadn’t in someway accessed my account or the mail servers from my ISP. It certainly didn’t look this way from what I could see through my account settings, but I changed my passwords and all that, just in case. I then wrote to my domain hosts, Nativespace, explaining the situation and asking them to confirm that my account itself hadn’t been compromised and wasn’t being used to actually send the spam. They responded very quickly with some suggestions, including just failing the returned emails (although I wasn’t concerned about these, more on that in a moment), and this:

Secondly, you can look into generating an SPF record at openspf.org While this doesnt guarantee that it will prevent spoofing, it may assist you.

So I did. I won’t go into the details of SPF records here, the site linked above is obviously your best bet for that, other than just to say that I used the excellent wizards to generate records for each of my domains hosted at Nativespace, sent the records by email to support who then did the necessary with them. Excellent service, very quick, friendly and completely lacking the patronizing attitude some support teams seem to exude.

This was back on the 18th Feb. I’ve no idea if it’s made any difference, but the bounced mail from the spoofed spam has dried up now, either way, with the last serious block coming in about 3 or 4 days ago, with only one or two stragglers from that lot arriving today. I kinda expected that they’d eventually stop anyway, so it’s not clear at all if the SPF records make any difference, but they probably don’t do any harm either.

I wasn’t bothered about the bounced mails coming in because I simply set up a filter on my GMail account to label mails to the spoofed address as such and archive them. This way I was able to monitor the situation. At the moment, I have c.7500 mail items labeled ’spoofed’. God only knows what percentage of the totals sent out they represent.

Vodka-fuelled fisherman wrestles with shark | Oddly Enough | Reuters.co.uk

“I just snuck up behind him and eventually I went for the big grab and I fluked it and got him,” Kerkhof told Australian Broadcasting Corp.

I’ve never been shark fishing, but if I did, this is how I would do it. Definitely. You’ve got to love Australians.

As mentioned in a previous post, I’d stopped off at this fishery to take a look at the catch returns to see if it would be worth a visit. The returns didn’t seem too bad, and Sunday afternoon presented a small window of opportunity to go and do something apart from the family, as they were going to Nana’s. Golf or fishing, golf or fishing..?

With the much vaunted, eagerly anticipated and long planned trip to Stocks Reservoir coming up in 2 weeks, I thought I ought to try out some of the tackle and techniques likely to be in use then. Looking at the catch returns and daily reports from this time last year seems to indicate that intermediate lines and mini-lures/cormorants/cat’s-whisker were topping the charts, so I got out my 9′6″ #6/7 GRX and the intermediate line and wacked on a damsel, a red cormorant and a black buzzer (well, you never know) and had at it.

It was a dry and pretty afternoon, if a little breezy, so I was fairly confident, even with the doubtful stock levels here. I’d fished this water a few times last year. The first time I went with Stuart we learned that the previous week the fishery had been opened to any method, with the intention of depleting the existing stock prior to restocking, and the restocking part of the plan hadn’t yet happened. I’m not sure how true this was, but there certainly wasn’t much happening; I caught two fish that day. The first was a beautiful hand-sized roach to a black and green buzzer within a few casts. The second was a rainbow, foul hooked - the water’s pretty clear, and I was fishing a midge pupae pattern to this fish when it came over to the fly, but seemed to turn away before it got all that close. Weirdly, the line started following it off and it had been fouled under the chin. Stupid prismatic effect. Anyway, Stuart didn’t get a thing, and it seemed pretty lifeless. I tried a few other trips later in the year with mixed results; one time I had half a dozen to buzzers and elk hair emergers in a few hours (good result for me), but a month later got nothing. I don’t pretend to really understand it, and it’s another honesty box pond, so I can’t ask the staff, or anything. Pretty much all of the anglers I meet there complain about the stocking (lack thereof), but I dunno. I’ll keep trying the occasional trip because it’s a nice little water, it’s not far away and you never have to book!

Back to this afternoon, and the result was nil points. I fished around the entire pond with my intermediate and covered every level in the water, from top to bottom and at every retrieve rate with a selection of lures, blobs, cormorants, nymphs and wets (stopping short of egg flies) and didn’t get so much as a touch. Indeed, I didn’t see a single fish all afternoon - no rises, no splashes or swirls, no signs of any near the margins (the water is clear and I was wearing poloroids), nothing. Until very close to home time, when one jumped quite nearby. Quite a big one. But that was it. One other guy did come and fish. He stayed for about 3 hours, moaned about the stocking levels, talked about flogging a dead horse and then fucked off. At least he didn’t bag up whilst I couldn’t buy a bite, that would have been too much. What was really puzzling was that the conditions later on were perfect to actually see some surface activity. It was mild, the wind had calmed and there was quite a prolific buzzer hatch. I really would have expected to see some rises, but the surface remained unbroken by anything but my flappings…

I did see some weird black cryptid hunting on one of the islands, though! Except it was a ferret, I think.

Or Chupacabra!

edit: Just re-reading the part about the trip last year with Stuart reminded me of an amusing incident from that day. The guy who told us about the any method fishing didn’t stay long, but he did catch a fish. I was maybe 150-200 yards down the bank from him, and saw him catch a pretty standard stockie, maybe a couple of pounds, obvious even from this distance; then he left not long after. Later, Stuart, who had been fishing around the other side of the water at the time and couldn’t see any of this, told me that the guy had spoken to him on the way out and had said he was leaving because it was rubbish - he’d only caught one fish, but at least it was a big one. Huh? The guy told Stuart that the fish he’d had was a TEN POUNDER!

I mainly use GMail as my mail client, and have several addresses directing to that mailbox. The spam filters are pretty good, but you do get the occasional false positive, so I tend to check the spam folder pretty regularly and clear it down each time. This just makes it easier to spot those false positives.

Imagine my surprise on returning home this evening to find an unusually large amount of spam messages had arrived in the spam folder in just a few hours since I checked it last. Most of these are bounced, blocked and otherwise failed messages, like:

• **Message you sent blocked by our bulk email filter**
• Delivery Status Notification (Failure)
• Spam: Delivery Status Notification (Failure)
• Warning: could not send message for past 4 hours

etc.

Anyway, jrwi dot net is being spoofed by a spamming fucktard.

Just to clarify, I am NOT responsible for, nor do I allow jrwi dot net to be used to send, bulk email of any sort. If you’ve been spammed from this domain, it has been done without my consent, and you have my apologies.

Hopefully, they’ll get bored with it, or it’ll be blocked by every ISP on the planet, and they’ll move on. Cunts.

Decided to give Borwick Waters a go for a couple of hours this morning. I’d previously told myself that I wasn’t going back there until well into Spring or even Summer, when the conditions for catching some coarse fish on the fly were more favourable, but, with the weather being so nice, fancied a little experiment to see if I could tempt anything with some deep bloodworm and buzzer patterns.

Arrived at the water for just before 10 and started straight off over in the corner (Griffish), with a bloodworm pattern under a yarn indicator. Tried several other flies, such as white latex grubs (to imitate a maggot?) and various sizes and shades of buzzer, but, after an hour, it was pretty clear nothing was going to happen for me here. So I walked the 5 yards over the road to Gattenby to see if any of the Crucians would play. Same tactics, same result.

Interestingly, there did appear to be several fish feeding. That’s if I’m right about the feeding bubbles that Crucians give off. There were several patches of these moving around the pool. Obviously, I concentrated on these, and I fancied I saw a bit of a take at one point, but didn’t connect with anything. The bubbles were probably marsh gas and the take just the indicator settling, but it kept me interested for an hour…

In my defence, I didn’t really expect to catch anything, and just thought it would be nice to be at the bankside on such a glorious (sunny, crisp and still) day, and to keep my casting hand in. Another plus, I finally gave my ‘new’ intermediate line a swim. It’s been waiting for some use since I got it ages ago and I tried it out for the last ten minutes today, partly because I’ve been meaning to for ages but mainly in anticipation of a planned trip to Stocks Reservoir on the opening weekend (24th Feb), where I think it will be useful. I didn’t want to get there, only to find it floating like a cork, or something. It doesn’t. It sinks like a stone. I thought it was a medium intermediate, but it seems pretty fast to me. Mind you, I’ve only ever fished floating lines before, any sink will seem fast to me!

So, I packed up and was off again by 12. Nipped over to Hallmore Fishery just up the road to have a look at the returns book. Seems like a few are coming out of there again, now, and there are people visiting regularly. Most seem to be catching 1 or 2, with the odd 6 and 8-er mixed in, so looks like it might be worth a visit next weekend, if the weather is reasonable. Otherwise, I’ll stick to the golf.

From Chris McCully:

These roach rise at dawn and dusk, even in these depths of the year. What they’re rising to, here in December, is a bit of a mystery, though it must, surely, be tiny midge pupae. In any sort of calm weather you see the fish topping, dawn and dusk, hard by the tram-stop…fish up to a massive 8 or 9 inches long.

This afternoon, as a change from working and writing (manic laughter in distance; pig flies past…) I spent an hour over these little scraps as the day steepened into night. Artificial was a size 16 or 18 Witch (an old grayling pattern) fished just sub-surface. I watched the leader-end for takes - an edge of nylon cutting through the reflections of city neon.

Read the rest and see the cool photo of the flies he used at his web log. Fly fishing for Coarse fish is one of my interests, too. See my group on Flickr and all my own Coarse Fish on the Fly shots.