Like many of today’s modern match anglers 99% of my fishing time is spent on commercial lakes and ponds – even though I was brought-up fishing the upper Thames around Lechlade, Kelmscott and Radcot, rivers and suchlike nowadays hold little fascination for me. However one exception to my natural water aversion (if you can call such an obviously manmade structure ‘natural’) is the Basingstoke canal – the last time I’d fished the venue was way back in August 2011 when my Godalming Midweekers team somehow defied all odds and gained promotion from the division 2 national to the top flight, so despite a shocking weather forecast I was really looking forward to today’s club match on the Heath Vale stretch.
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| Will Raison’s Canal Roach on Breadpunch DVD – classic! |
As per usual a plan of attack started to form during the week preceding today’s match and that plan had three main options:
- Punched bread over liquidised bread for roach
- Half a lobworm over chopped worms and dead maggots for perch
- Pinkie over groundbait for roach/skimmers
Having not fished liquidised bread for a number of years I decided to do some homework, digging out some old fishing magazines and watching the excellent V2V DVD featuring Will Raison fishing with bread on the Kennet & Avon canal. As ever there is some conflicting advice to be had, with many magazine articles insisting that your liquidised bread should be as fine as possible and as a result elaborate processes involving freezing, defrosting, refreezing and super fine flour sieves are needed – however I have to say I agree with Will Raison’s view, namely that in order to attract the better stamp fish often needed to win canal matches it is better to have your liquidised bread fairly coarse, so as a result I prepared my feed by simply liquidising a whole sliced loaf (crusts included) and passing the resulting crumb through a pinkie riddle.
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| The Basey at Heath Vale |
After a cracking breakfast at Willow Park it was soon time to decamp to the venue – a stretch of the Basingstoke Canal known as the Heath Vale section. There were 11 of us fishing today and (as the pegging saw 5 pegs below the bridge and 6 above) my calculator tells me I had a 36% chance of drawing one of the four end pegs on offer – though of course you won’t be at all surprised to hear that I drew a peg slap bang in the middle of the upstream section, pretty much as far from an end peg as I could’ve been! However as the pegs were nicely spaced I wasn’t too unhappy with my draw, especially as I had a fantastic looking bush trailing into the water on the far bank!!!
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| Roach rig components |
Prior to the start of the match I set-up two rigs for fishing with bread at top kit plus 3 straight in front – with the canal being about 12m wide in my peg this put this initial swim just my side of halfway. The rigs were similar as they were both made-up of Sensas Series 6 pencil floats on 0.11 main line to 0.08 bottoms – however the heavier rig consisted of a 0.6g float, a size 18 Gamakatsu Green hook and double number 4 elastic whereas the lighter rig had a 0.4g float, a size 20 hook and double number 3 elastic. Both featured a number 10 stotz at 20cm from the hook and a bulk of number 8s at 40cm – each float was set so that the hook was 5cm off bottom. (The plan was to use the same rigs at the same depths on different swims by adding a pole section and fishing the same depth as the original swims a little further to the left or right.)
I also had a 4x12 Chianti rig on standby if I felt the need to fish with a spread-out shotting pattern, plus the components for putting together a perch rig for under the far bank bush were also close to hand.
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| Unfortunately this was a very accurate forecast! |
On the whistle I fed a nice big ball of liquidised bread and set about my business with the heavier rig and a 5mm punch – I always like to start heavy as in my experience the bonus skimmers often appear at the start of a session and as time goes by the fish get smaller and smaller, leading to a switch to a lighter rig/smaller punch later in the match.
The first hour went fairly well with 22 roach hitting the net – however the stamp was rather small and no bonus fish appeared. (I can remember fishing a match on the Basey a few years back when the chap next to me put over one hundred fish on the scales for less than a pound – my fish weren’t quite that small, but then again they weren’t far off!!!)
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| My choice of bread for punching |
Things started to slow at around 11 o’clock so I decided to re-fed with a smaller ball of liquidised bread – this brought the fish back into the peg and by switching to the 0.4g rig with a 4mm punch I got to noon with 47 fish in the net. (I normally use a clicker to ensure I don’t exceed keepnet limits on carp matches, but they are also extremely useful for monitoring your catch rate on canal competitions.)
Around 12 o’clock the catch rate dropped-off again so I decided to open a new line at TK+4 to my left – however this never really got going and by 1245 I was only up to 55 fish and going nowhere fast!!!
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| Now that’s what I call a feature! |
Word on the bank was that some decent stamp roach and the odd bonus skimmer/perch were being caught with 6 anglers admitting to 3 pounds plus. At this point it dawned on me that even though I was catching at a fairly good rate, the fish I was catching were so small that it was unlikely I could get to three pounds by the end of the match even if I could maintain the same catch rate (which itself was rather unlikely). At this point I abandoned bread fishing for roach and decided to fish exclusively for big perch – this was off course a massive gamble and could lead to a blow-out, but what’s the point fishing conservatively in an individual match just to save face when it means you have zero chance of winning?
So I jumped off my box and set-up a new rig based on 0.15 Guru N-Gauge straight through to a size 12 MWG with a 0.2g SconeZone V6 and white Hydro – this rig was for catching big (potentially three pound plus) perch with half a big lobworm for bait so there was no room for light lines and super-soft elastics. (I would’ve fished with black Hydro, but because the towpath was rather narrow I had to break-down my 10 and 11.5 sections separately then ship the rest of the pole over a hedge in order to ship back from the far bank bush so white Hydro seemed a better compromise.)
Plumbing-up under the far bank bush I found a nice three feet of depth so I was more than happy to fish tight to it – to start with I didn’t feed anything but dobbed about with just the hookbait to see if any resident perch were at home. Unfortunately this didn’t lead to any bites so five minutes later I was in with half a cup of chopped lobworms/dendras and dead maggots. As it happened by 2 o’clock I’d nothing to show for my constant lifting and dropping other than 2 very iffy bites (which could’ve been down to a passing leaf or crayfish).
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| Gear for the perch rig |
Going into the final hour I decided to give my bread lines another go, but all that got me were 6 tiny roach for less than 2 ounces so it was back on the worm for perch!!! Just as I was about to give-up the float finally slid under and after a pause (to count 1, 2, 3 in my head) a firm strike was met with some solid resistance – at 12 ounces it wasn’t a big perch but it was certainly bigger than the roach I’d been catching!
As there were still 20 minutes to go I was hoping that a shoal had moved in and that the one I’d snared was the runt of the litter – unfortunately this wasn’t to be and the float didn’t go under again until 5 seconds before the final whistle when a 2 ounce specimen (which was probably shorter than the lobworm hookbait) decided to impale itself on my size 12 hook!
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| The view to the right |
Match secretary Roger Howe was soon ‘round with the scales and despite my best efforts I could only muster 2-2-0. However some of the others had done much better – the overall top three reading:
- Chris Kampa, 7-8-0
- Andy Rogers, 6-11-0
- Lee Simmons, 4-6-0
(Looking back my 61 roach probably weighed 1-4-0, with a 12 ounce and a 2 ounce perch making-up the rest of my 2-2-0.)
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| Were these actually my downfall today? |
Conclusions: During the second half of the match I was concerned that I’d spent too much time fishing for perch and should’ve stuck with the roach. However with hindsight I should’ve spent the first half an hour of the match fishing for roach, figured-out that the stamp I was catching wasn’t good enough to do any damage then spent the following four and a half hours fishing for perch. As advised by Lee Simmons after the match I should’ve also put a perch line in down the middle of the canal – I already knew that this is a good line on the Basey, however that far bank bush was just so appealing I couldn’t help myself!!!
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