Childhood Tench and Bad Bobbies

I am quite old now (nearly fifty) and have fished since I was twelve. I am not a”natural” angler. Any success I have is through sticking at it and very gradually learning new things. By “very gradually” I mean being totally shit at something for ages, possibly years and then, often quite suddenly, getting it and applying it successfully (a bit successfully sometimes). An example is tench fishing when I was a kid. Myself and friends used to fish a series of shallow weed choked ponds with a good number of large Tench. Standard approach developed by the “natural” anglers amongst my peers was to either freeline or use a tiny float with bread flake. Lob the thing in along with a bit of ground bait and wait for bubbles and mud to start rising up through the two feet of gin clear water. Many Tench were caught by this method though not by me. I fished that place for three years and never caught one. A few years back I returned as an adult and much more experienced angler and caught three in an afternoon.

I think I will add in bits of my personal angling history to this blog as I go along but for now that will do.

I want to relate a conversation I had with an angler at a local reservoir. I had just caught a fish on what was a uniformly tough day for fly fishing for Rainbows. By that I mean it was not just me being hopeless, hardly anyone seemed to be catching anything. He watched me unhook the fish and asked what fly I was using, “green and black booby”, “oh on a full sinker I suppose” was the reply, he went on to tell me that he did not like fishing with buoyant flies on sinking lines “I catch all my fish on a floater using small flies” he told me. I am a sensitive soul and can over interpret / invent peoples hidden meanings but this guy was definitely letting me know that using boobies on a sinker was in his opinion only one up from throwing in a stick of dynamite. I experience a flash of irritation and thought about saying “well this place is hardly the Test is it” but instead went for grinning smiling and shrugging as he floated off on a cloud of superiority. Thinking about it afterwards though it struck me that he had showed me a Dwail Bach as an example of one of his small flies. Now I tie my own flies and the Booby I was using was tied on a size ten, his Dwail Bach was on a twelve. He was using a long leader to fish the thing at some depth so I am popping up a fly to within a couple of feet of his drifting fly dangling from the surface. We were both using flies that are very general imitations of something that might be alive and good to eat from a fishy point of view. Now maybe I am missing something, but really what’s the difference? The sinker gave me more control of a very slow retrieve and the depth at which I was fishing and above all it worked!! He hadn’t caught anything! Maybe I am getting too worked up about this, I need to calm down, i’m going off to practice my breathing exercises in a darkened room.

Cheers

Jon