Angling

Hard times call for new approach

Hard's not the word for it. Despite the wintrier outlook to the weather, the pike fishing hasn't got out of first gear yet and there's not much else going on to get your teeth into.

Fish have been few and far between on most of the rivers and drains. When it didn't rain, we blamed clear water and lack of flow.

'Now we need some frosts' is the bankside refrain, though the current lows look likely to last until the middle of this month.

If we're not catching them and can face up to the fact we may be getting it wrong, rather than the conditions being wrong, it might be time to challenge a few assumptions.

The one half-successful trip I've enjoyed in six weeks was spent trolling tight to bankside cover. We had fish after fish, but the lures only got hit when they were working tight to reeds and undergrowth. Fishing the same stretch from the bank, we'd probably have blanked because it's physically impossible to fish most swims like that from terra firma.

Someone once observed he caught most of his pike within a rod length of the bank. This stood me in good stead in my younger years, when I couldn't cast for toffee. But the old adage had me thinking again when rods cast to features around a pit failed to produce any pulls, while baits dropped in the margins were soon snaffled.

This time of the year, the margins are the last stronghold of plant and insect life until the first frosts start killing the weed back. That attracts fry as well as larger fish like perch and rudd. So you never know, it might be an idea to drop a rod in that natural larder while it lasts.

Silver fish seem to have gone off the boil a bit, with just a couple of sections on the Middle Level - Pingle and Neeps - worth a mention in despatches.

Bailiffs on one or two waters were last weekend blaming lack of anglers on the weather. Twenty years back, you'd have called that mild for November.