BRYANS ANGLE

Got these little beauties through the post this morning. I reckon they will be great for perch on a couple of waters that i know. Not bad for £3.50 of Ebay... Slow sinking with an internal rattle, got to have a fish or 2 on these. I,ll give them a try first to see how they fair and then might change the hook for a smaller size..........

I,ve just seen this on bookface and thought i,d share it.

 Last week the it snowed as predicated. The weather men had predicted heavy snowfall along with strong winds as a bad weather system was meant to be hitting the country. People started the usual panic buying of food in case we were going to get snowed in for countless days, and what did we get... Barely half inch... And guess what, this small amount of snowfall brought chaos to the country as it usually does. How come Canada can be under feet of snow and no one bats an eyelid and keep going about their business, but we get half a fookin inch and all hell breaks loose. This country is a joke sometimes. Now on that note i couldn,t work the first day of the snow as the boss pulled the plug on the building job we were doing. But this time i wasn,t complaining as i had deadbaits in the freezer and my pike rods were already set up and ready to go from a session a couple of days. So as the sun was rising i was crunching through the now thinning but frozen solid snow on my way to t...

 I soaked a couple of deadbaits for a couple hours the other day at a local water hoping to catch a half decent sized pike.  It was a bloody cold morning and a good part of the lake was frozen but i found a nice looking spot and cast out my two floatfished deadbaits. One was a standard static bait, half a bluey cast to the far reeds. The other was a smelt hooked through the back so it sits just of horizontal in the water and was set up under a float allowing it to drift around the swim on the breeze. Expectations were high but the pike didn,t want to play ball. I left after a couple fo hours ready for a nice big fry-up at the local eatery........ I had a visit from a friendly Robin though so wasn,t all bad.

After taking a walk along my favourite marina and seeing the lock empty it gave me the urge to get up there at first light and have a wee dangle for the once plentiful perch that used to reside there. So the next day saw me sitting in the car park just before dawn eagerly awaiting the big ball of fire to rise over the tree tops. After what seemed like hours but was probably only 20 mins it was light enough for me to grab my kit, dropshot and light lure set-up this morning, and try my luck. Well i started of by using the drop shot method in between the moored boats in the hope of a perch or two as i,ve had plenty of action here in previous years. The drop shot is an ideal method for fishing in tight gaps as i was, because you can just flick the small weight and lure out and fish it in one position for a while, just giving the rod tip a little tap tap now and then to get the little imitation fish to waggle around seductively. I did this for 45 mins or so in various spots, all spots tha...

 Over the years i,ve walked across and fished alongside countless amounts of locks on numerous rivers and canals, but i,ve never really given much thought as to what they actually look like once empty. A couple of days ago i took a walk along a local river and found that one of the lock gates had been removed and the lock itself had been drained and obviously is having some work undertaken. I took these pictures with my phone just to show how deep the lock actually is. I wish i,d taken a picture of the removed lock gate but didn,t think of it at the time. The gate fits where the scaffolding is now, and i,m standing on the middle gate. Standing on the scaffolding looking inland. Its amazing that all that is holding back the river is these steel sheets thumped into the river bed and that one steel rsj. There must be one hell of a lot of pressure pushing against that sheeting. I wonder if you get danger pay for going down that ladder and working at botto...

My first trip of the New Year saw me on a perch hunt at my favourite location armed with a couple of pints of maggots to catch some livebait and a tub of lobworms as back-up in case no little silver fish could be caught. Arriving before it was light i sat in my truck eagerly waiting for the sun to rise so i could set of to my chosen spot. I,ve fished this location  quite a bit over the years and have had some cracking perch, fishing small free roaming livies in between the moored boats. My PB of 3lb 14oz came from here as well as more perch over 3lb than i can remember. In fact a few years ago it got to the point that if i hadn,t caught a perch over 3lb in the 2 hours i was there, bit of a naughty place to fish so only had a couple hours fishing before lock keeper was out of bed, then it was a poor session. Anyway, eventually it was light enough so off i trudged through the car park and up the steps to find the whole river frozen solid. OOPPSSS!!!!! Should of checked the weather...

HAPPY NEW YEAR to all my fellow danglers out there... I guess a round up of the highs and lows of my years fishing would be in order at this point. Except that i,ve barely set foot on the bank this past year. Work and building my extension has literally taken over my life, resulting in not having much free time and when i do i,m generally too knackered to lift my lazy arse outta the bed. I have had a few short sessions and thoroughly enjoyed myself, even though catch results have been pretty poor. But as they say that,s why its called 'fishing' and not 'catching'. Highlights of my year, not fishing related, have been getting more and more interested in photography, Earlier in the year i purchased a Canon 7D mk11 so i could use it to take better quality pictures of the local wildlife, although time has restricted me to limited use so i,m still learning about the camera and the various settings, jargon etc. A couple of months back i had a right result and bought a s...