BRYANS ANGLE

On sunday after work ( yes i had to work sunday, horrible, horrible, horrible) i thought i,d take the dogs out for a nice long run. I had an area in mind for us as i wanted to check out the local sea wall for a couple of areas that have been recommended to me as being good spots for bass and ray fishing. When i arrived i was quite surprised at how many people there was walking, it was a lovely day though so can,t blame them for disturbing my peace lol. Well we had a lovely walk of roughly 6 miles along the wall, with Harry the retreiver and Oscar the springer having fun splodging around in the thick, black, stinking estaury mud. They were both totally knackered by the time we got back to the truck and i even had to lift them into the back. Harry loves swimming now, he never used too but last year we managed to get him swimming at Bradwell and now you can,t keep him out of the water. Its a bit of a pain really as i can,t take him fishing with me. Oscar on the other isn,t too bothe...

Having been thinking about it for a while now i finally decided to get my ass in gear, order some worms and have a few hours sea fishing this tuesday just gone. It was only a wee trip to blow the cobwebs out so to speak as i havn,t cast a line into saltwater for over a year now. My intended quarry was going to be the humble flounder, with maybe a late whiting thrown in. The venue was to be one of the floating boat pontoons situated along the front of Burnham as its only a couple of miles from home, is nice and comfortable to fish and puts you over 12-15ft of water so you don,t really need to cast that far, although i do. With a couple of packs of lugworm picked up from Angling Essentials and a couple of mackeral from my freezer i set of for Burnham at 6.30pm. By 7pm i was set up and had both rods cast out, one cast as far as possible and the other around 30 yards out. No action occured until just before high tide when a rattle on my short cast rod resulted in a tiny pin whiting. Well ...

I,ve been thinking lately about how i go about my fishing, how i plan trips, what species i fish for, where i fish, how i fish etc etc. I,m come to the conclusion that i don,t actually do myself any favours really as i normally just grab my gear and go whenever the need grabs me. I guess that part of this is down to the fact that i have quite a busy lifestyle. I run my own business building ornamental fish ponds and landscaping, see my website www.waterbouy.co.uk, and anyone who has done so will know that even if you are not actually physically working you are still mentally doing so. Due to my workloads i spent most weekends and evenings last year at work so little fishing went on. Add to that the fact that we,re currently trying to "do up" our house means that any spare time is quite often spent diy,ing. Then theres the dog walking, the general house work, and the fact that my girlfriend has thousands of friends that seem to have birthday parties, get married, and keep invi...

This sunday morning i was at the river bank as the sun was just coming up ready for another couple of hours after the resident big perch. I,d failed miserably last week using my usual technique of free roaming float fished lives whilst Ryan had quite literally kicked my ass using float fished lobworms, so this time i was planning on giving the worm a good go. I fished the same swims i normally would whilst using lives but this time used lobworms in conjunction with either red maggot or chopped worm groundbait. Well to put it simply i struggled to  catch. I did get a couple of very sensitive dips on the float in one swim but no fish. It wasn,t until i set up in front of the blue boat, my favourite swim as this is where i have had quite a few 3lbers, that i actually got a proper bite which turned out to be a nice fat half pound perch. I proceeded to then catch a couple more half pounders followed by a few perchlings before i decided to head home for some breakfast. I can,t figure ou...

The sun was just rising as i made my first cast, if you can call it that as i was only fishing 3ft out from the concrete edging, into the dark waters in hope of a spiky finned perch. Before my float had even settled i got a whistle from Ryan to signal that he had a good fish on. Once netted it was placed on the unhooking mat for us to view, a cracking perch of roughly 2.5lb. As Ryan unhooked it i noticed my float had disappeared so i grabbed my rod and struck as i caught a glance of my float shooting from left to right below the surface. For a second i thought i was in contact with a big perch but it soon became apparent that the unseen fish was actually a turbo charged pike. After a good tussle for a couple of minutes the 6lb culprit was netted, unhooked and returned. And thats how the fishing carried on for a couple of hours. Ryan would have a nice perch on his worm baits and i would have a jack pike on my little livies. Strange but i get the feeling that the big perch might be shyin...