nature is great

Isn’t nature great

Most mornings I walk my son to school and we take pretty much the same route every day, I live in a large suburb of Edinburgh although a lovely place to live and to be fair it has some stunning views like the picture below from last week (taken from my sons school looking towards my house)the hills in the background are called the pentlands and Edinburgh sits in between these and the sea so I’m fairly high up on the south side .

On my way to the boy’s school I have to walk along a path with a shallow clear water stream that runs from somewhere up in these hills, being an angler I just resist peering into the stream as I walk along the path to maybe see an occasional flash of a small trout or minnow dancing in the current, although I think I may have seen the odd shadow in the water that may well have been a small fish I haven’t as yet actually spotted anything in the 4 years I’ve lived here , I know there probably is fish in there somewhere obviously there better at seeing me than I am seeing them ……

Well I never

So imagine my surprise when this afternoon I spotted this beauty standing in the stream looking for its dinner, I can’t quite believe how close I got to this heron I would have stood there a lot longer watching this majestic bird had it not been for some toe rag on a bmx with headphones blaring out some dance garbage obviously the bird though as much of the garbage as I did and promptly flew off.

The thing is I think if id stayed there long enough I think I may have seen him catch something and verifying my hunch that there is indeed fish in there oh well maybe he will be there tomorrow ……… or maybe I should take the 3wgt with me on the walk to school

Relax time
Plan x tonight

Looks like a cracking watch, full report later
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Cool UK blog alert

http://www.pikeblog.com/
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Restock time

Also having a busy time doing a re stock for www.deercreek.co.uk who sell very limited editions of my flies they have sold out of a load of the patterns so ill have the restock done and posted out by the weekend hopefully , it’s so bloody cold in the cave just now so I have little bursts of time in there as heating is so bloody expensive in the uk it’s only the very well off who can afford to heat all the rooms in their homes these days in the uk because of rocketing fuel prices ……

So anyway doing a restock and tying a few for myself this week I’m hoping to get out next week but depends if the thin layer of ice melts or not but I have a five day window next week to get out so fingers crossed for a mild week .

Life at the bench
For the last year or so I’ve been using one of those new-fangled low energy light bulbs doing my bit for the environment and stuff, but I’m afraid I’ve had to revert back to a normal 60 watt penguin killer iceberg melting normal light bulb because I simply don’t get enough light out of the thing to work and it takes 5 hours to bloody get to a level you can actually see anything , listen I’m all for low energy and stuff but at least make a useful product give me a light build that is low energy and ill actually use the thing as long as its fits for purpose , in fact the whole fair trade good thing get me as well I mean I had some fair trade chocolate the other day and let me tell you it was twice as expensive as a normal bar and tasted gross I’m afraid I’d rather have the half price tasty unfair product , I still don’t get why its twice as expensive if most of the cash goes back to the farmer then by cutting out the middleman it should be a cheaper product ….i don’t get it

Sorry seem to have gone off track a bit there normal service now resumes with a picture of my bench and the new offending light bulb in place

A couple of experiments
Sometimes you see a bargain in a tackle shop and you buy it there and then pretty much without thinking about simply because it’s a really good deal well I had that in summer when I was on the trail of some hooks , I went off to my local tackle shop and they had on the floor a box a plain plastic box tucked away at the back of a box load of lead sinkers and I noticed they were packets of hooks so I picked a few packs up and realised they were like those hooks for Texas rigging rubber worms and they obviously couldn’t sell them so they had them at a knock down price so these hooks were originally £2.50 a pack(10) for the 4/0 and they had them at half price so that was £1.25 for a 10 pack now I thought that was dam good value so I actually opened a pack to have a closer look and the things were outstanding quality and bloody razor sharp , so I dug around in my pockets for as much cash as I could find this was a bargain that I needed to stock up on

Having bought a bucket load of the hooks in 4/0 5/0 and 6/0 I then headed off back to the cave quite pleased with myself although not quite knowing what I was going to use them for but I knew they would come in handy at some point for something .

So that was summer 2011 and I stuck them away in a box today I found while looking for other hooks I found them and as I laid my eyes on the packs straight away I had a flash of inspiration (or I may have seen something on the web at some point and it just clicked together) I could do some weedless bendback type flies with them so I set to work and came up with the offending baitfish below

The thing behind this is that the material (bucktail) sits on top of the hook and as there isn’t a great deal of material it doesn’t effect the hook up rate and this is what makes it weed free pretty much the same as tying on a bendback but without the hassle of bending the hook just right . I like it

So on the hook shaft I tied in a piece of bog standard mylar tubing just to give the effect of a sparkling belly to this I’ve added at the eye bend a pinch of white bucktail a couple of woolly bugger feathers, some peacock hearl for the back and all tied in so the eye sits on top of where all the material sites and if I say so myself looks like a fish catcher to me

Same idea but in black I’m still on my black fly trip , but with this one I’ve added the hearl on the back I think this adds just that little something to the fly , I’m sure this fly will do really well on my local weeded up bottom canal in the summer time will tell but I’m sure this will be a winner…………………………
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Matchman’s revenge
For the benefit of our overseas fellow fishers I’ll explain what a match man is first in case you not familiar with the term if you do know what a matchman is then please skip the explanation. in the uk (more in England than anywhere else) they have regular fishing match’s where the aim of the game is to catch as many fish as possible in the allowed time , the fish are kept in a keep net until the net can be weighed at the end of the allowed time and the winner gets the prize , matches can be at a club level for a small trophy or at international level for your country earning thousands of pounds for the winner kind of like a bass tournament but without all the boat bling
A uk fishing match

Now the above picture isn’t really my idea of fun although I did actually try it once and came second and won £30.00 uk for a sack full of carp didn’t really do anything for me though so just got the fly rods back out, but the thing is that with a lot of these matches, especially on waters with pike in, the pike will actually sit close to the angler on the bottom and attack the small silver fish as it comes in on the end of a matchmans line hey who can blame them easy meal , they have learned that when lots of bait keeps hitting the water then an easy meal is to be had very clever but then I suppose it’s the same as crocs knowing when animals have to migrate across a river they turn up at the same time clever predators are

So with that in mind I thought I tie up a fly especially for those areas that the matchmen fish those areas usually have high concentrations of small silver fish

The idea is that it looks like a small roach that’s hanging of a hook, the fly being tied sort of tarpon style (thanks to nikki “slay the steel” page) for reminding me about this style. The fly has the hook as you can see well in front of any material now you may say that fish will miss the hook when hitting it but actually the fly isn’t that big (around five inches) so even the smallest fish will engulf it and nine times out of ten you will get a fish hooked in lip area so that’s not a massive problem building the flies like this for pike ……….

Doing a natural roach pattern I’ve wanted to get something as near as I could to the colour of the fish in the water so I’ve used a black deercreek gliss and glint plus with a green flash through it this is as close as I’ve seen to a roach colour in the water, it’s really nice stuff and quite a subtle colour of course what the fish see maybe completely different but I’ve looked over enough bridges on places like the fens and seen enough roach to know that’s the colour I see …….nice blend

The eyes are glued onto the point where the material has been tied onto the back of the hook this will be the heaviest point of the fly and buy using a uv tack free epoxy you can build up the layers in between the eyes by doing this you’re not only making the eyes bomb proof but your adding the correct weight to give the fly a little action on the strip again with this fly and with all synthetics there is really hardly any material in this fly which means its ultra-light to use and you could easily play with this all day on a 9 wgt .
And don’t forget you could of course tie this in smaller sizes for pretty much anything that swims
So with that im going to go and play some more at the vice and do some stockin up on these patterns and fingers crossed I’ll get out next week as long as the temps stay high and the ice buggers off I just have to go and get these wet

next week i plan to sort out my subbug boxes into one easy grab box and tie up a few fresh patterns for it so expect some hairy deerhair action next week .

Mcfluffchucker
(a cave in Scotland)