Sutton Bingham

First trip this year to Sutton Bingham, I was surprised how low the water was, but we have not had rain in weeks so I suppose it is hardly surprising.  The sky was over cast when I arrived and the wind was blowing towards the dam wall and onto the south bank.  A number of fishermen were lined out in front of the lodge and most were catching so all the indicators were good.


After chatting with the water bailiff I decided to walk to the point along the south bank,  I fished with my favourite fly; the orange gold head tadpole, I used my Orvis ten foot rod which made battling with the stiff breeze a little easier, I had a few bites and hooked a fish but lost it when I played it near the shore.  It then went very quite so I tried a black nomad but no joy either.


I then changed to an orange blob fly tied to Neil Jones' pattern, this has a foam strip along the top of the hook, the foam extends a little beyond the hook bend. This must make the fly waggle or vibrate in some way as fish usually find it irresistible.

Changing to an intermediate line and wading on the point opposite the yacht club I got into a wind lane and cast out into the middle, I found a slow figure of eight retrieve was effective.  The first fish took after I had let the fly drop for 20 seconds, and just started my retrieve.  After a short battle this lovely 2Ib fish was in the net.  







I was on a two fish ticket and the second fish did not take long to come.  A slow figure of eight retrieve induced a terrific take and after striking, the fish took off striping the line off down to the backing, I very seldom have this when fishing stocked rainbows so I new I had on a good fish on, twice more this fish ran of the depths stripping the line out before the snowbee drag reel started to do its job and tire the fish.  I was grateful to run my small net under the fish and feel the weight of the four and a half pound fish in the mesh.





On closer examination I was very lucky to have landed this fish as the hook was only just in the bottom jaw, my Orvis Western rod is really good at gently playing in fish. In the phot below you can also see Neil Jones' pattern for this blob.  Its the first time I have used this type of fly and it will be going in the favourites box from now on.

Scissor Mole Trap

The Scissor trap is the most commonly used mole trap and has been around for years and years. There are many different designs some better than others.  Things to lookout for when choosing a scissor trap include the spring, which should be of the leaf kind rather than a wire coiled type, prongs on the trap which go straight down rather than curve under and galvanisation which is dull not shiny.  You also have to check that the tongue is secured adequately to the main frame of the trap.  This has been learnt through bitter experience!

You need also to check the prongs on the trap overlap rather than meet together, we want a dead mole not a mangled one. You can see on the pictures below what I mean.

 

Instead of

The most important part of any trap is the trigger mechanism.  Mass produced mole traps are notorious for their stiff mechanisms. This will result in moles stuffing the traps with soil as they go underneath the trap, once they have learnt to do this for one trap they seem to stuff all the traps they come across and are very hard to catch.

If the tongue has metal tabs that can be bent, it is an easy job to bend them in order to achieve a hair trigger on the trap. see the photograph below.

If the tongue has been cast you have to use a file to get the same result; a tiny bit of metal contact holding the jaws apart.

Finally all mole traps should be buried for a couple of weeks to rid them of factory scent.  Mole have incredible noses an detect anything out of order quickly.  It was always said that the man who milked cows was useless as a mole catcher as the scent was transferred to the trap, same for those who smoke.

Red Kites

While back on the farm this week, the aged parents pointed out Red Kites nesting in trees by the lambing shed.  Red Kites have gone from being a very rare sight in Mid-Wales to being very common, especially around Rhayader where the artificial feeding of the Kites for the gawking tourist has meant a leap in population of these raptors.


Red Kites are distinctive because of their forked tail and striking colour - predominantly chestnut red with white patches under the wings and a pale grey head.  They have a wingspan of nearly two metres (about five-and-a-half-feet), but a relatively small body weight of 2 - 3 Ibs.  This means the bird is incredibly agile, and can stay in the air for many hours with hardly a beat of its wings.


Father is pleased as these large birds keep the crows at bay, so this means less damage to lambs is done by these opportunistic black birds.  Crows love to find vulnerable lambs and peck out eyes and navels.  Some Ravens are even worse seeming to delight in pecking out lambs tongues. They don't show that on 'Spring Watch'!


I will be keeping an eye on the kites over the next few months and hopefully they will manage to hatch out a chick, certainly they are undisturbed where they are as its well away from any public highway and the birds are left to get on with their own thing.

Moles

I have been thinking a lot about moles this week.  Not because I have been reading Wind in the Willows, excellent book though it is, rather I have been chatting with a friend who will be leaving the military soon and is retraining as a mole catcher.

As a youngster I considered this the perfect job, but when I came to an employable age I found I had to do other work to make ends meet and my mole catching, was not catching, but poisoning; at that time using strychnine.  I would buy my little pot of poison from Boots and mix it with earth worms then off to some farm to walk miles baiting mole runs with worms. Could you imagine popping into Boots now and asking for strychnine?

Now of course strychnine is banned, and while we may grumble about the pathetic nanny state we live in, which assumes if a person has a gun he will run amok, or if a mole catcher buys poison he will be using it for nefarious purposes, such a finishing off worthless politicians, the up side is the art of mole trapping has come back.

I learnt the art of mole trapping mostly through trial and error.  My father gave me the basics and then I picked the brains of others and read as much as I could on mole trapping, and there was not a great deal in the public library about trapping moles and certainly no internet

I started with two scissor traps bought from the Farm Store, they were heavy, stiff, and the mole had to be built like Arnie to trip them.  I soon learnt that an hours work with a file would would reshape the trigger part of the tongue so that it moved as soon as touched and caused the trap to snap shut immediately.  Another lesson I quickly learnt was; always mark where your mole traps were set. It was most distressing having to spend hours digging in hopeful places trying to locate the mole trap that had disappeared into the ground because a load of sheep had rioted over it or worse cattle.

My father paid me the princely sum of 20 pence each, I think now the cost is £5.00 a mole.  There is nothing like the promise of pocket money to a kid to motivate, and I soon became very good a catching moles and had added to my small collection of traps a Duffus trap which could catch a mole in both ends. This trap too need the judicious application of the file to make it trip easily, and was even harder to find if buried and not marked.

The runs I found by running my the heel of my wellie between two fresh mole hills, by applying pressure you can usually feel the turf give if you are over a run, unless its really deep.  I used a heavy sheaf knife to cut a trap sized hole in the turf and would try and lift the plug out whole.  By using a knife it was usually easy to see the mole run.

These were the basics of catching moles, but the art took much much longer to learn.

Bushy Leaze

Bushy Leaze

Middle of March and the first competition of the season,  it was a low key well mannered affair with a good turn out of eighteen at Bushy Leaze.  The twenty two acre lake looked perfect for fishing, with fish rising all over, taking buzzers sub surface.  The sky was overcast and a gentle breeze provided the push for the water to ripple.

One or two characters turned up, one chap in his camper van with a bucket full of cray fish caught in the Thames, another with an incredible multicoloured Peruvian hat, thankfully fish have taste and he failed to catch his four fish that day.

Most caught fish quickly catching them on buzzers, blobs and cats whisker.  The fish here fight well and average two to three pounds, with one or two lumps in there, one lad caught a five pound rainbow in great condition.

I caught my four fish by fourteen hundred so I had a couple of hours to kill, along with a good few others, giving military men a few hours with nothing to do is always dangerous, but we happily filled it by finding team mates and giving them helpful advice, such as change to a brighter coloured fishing line, standing on one leg, removing the hook to be more sporting. As you can see from the photo Neil found our help useful, I am sure he meant to say thank you guys but some how it came out as '**** off'

 Others found amusement in collecting tree flies, the photo is of Tug collecting from a prime fly tree next to the boat deck.

Two guys were fishing from float tubes, this looks great fun and certainly catches fish in some order, I suppose that, in effect it is trolling for trout which always works. 


If you fancy fishing in this excellent fishery their web site is www.lechladetrout.co.uk

Fishing and the Spiritual

Fishing and the Spiritual

Many fly fishers know that the faith that we are going to catch a fish leads to a faith in the possibility of another, more precious catch, namely peace of the soul. So says Turan Tirana in his excellent essays.

Fish have always been seen as spiritual.  In Christianity the fish was used as a type of recognition code; one person drew half of the fish and the other completed.  Fish we eaten on the fast day of Friday because they did not count as meat.

Fish do live in another world, the Celts believed that lakes were the door way to the underworld, hence King Arther's sword being thrown in the lake for the lady to take below.  This in between world was and is where fish dwell.

An Assyrian tablet from 2000 BC reflects that fishing is a spiritual thing and adds this incentive; The gods do not subtract from the allotted span of men’s lives the time spent fishing.

The migration patterns of fish must have puzzled the ancients.  Why would salmon suddenly appear, or tuna or a myriad of other fish.  For those of us who fish it does seem that fish move in mysterious ways; one day they are feeding on a certain insect in a certain area of a lake at a certain depth.  Even worse why is it one you can have two fishermen in boat using the same gear and one will catch and the other won’t.  If you have ever experienced this, it is most frustrating.

In that way grace in the religious sense plays a role in the religious sense plays a role in fly fishing.  Some anglers are ‘chosen’ others not, and when we are not chosen we pray.  When it works though we are aware that we are blessed.  Dimly we are at harmony with creation and at peace with ourselves.

Starling Flocks

Starling Flocks.

The kids and I went up to a reserve close to Glastonbury to watch flocks of starlings come into roost. Shapwick Heath is a well known spot for these large flocks of starlings so we were not alone; twichers with long lenses on their cameras and spotting scopes on tripods were there.

There is something faintly amusing about these characters. Are the long lenses and long spotter scope a substitute for something lacking in their lives, like life? Or are they frustrated hunters who have given into the modern pressure of pretending nothing ever dies?

As well as twitchers there were nice normal people gathered to watch as well, some in bright colours, which did not bother the starlings, but seemed to offend the drab clothed twichers. There was even one splendid chap in tweeds and a canary coloured cravat.

No matter how we were apparelled all were amazed by the thousands of starling that swooped and wheeled making swirling amoeba like shapes in the sky. How they don't collide with one another is a mystery, I wonder does it have anything to do with their iridescent plumage, does this enable them to see and react instantly to any movement?

I quite often have starlings on my lawn, they always seem in a hurry stuffing them selves with bread and then off they go. When the lawn is short they can be seen paddling their feet to encourage the worms to come up. I wonder how the lame starling who is often out their manages; perhaps he has become a vegetarian, poor thing.

It is said that starling have a truly awful taste, and it used to be the test of a really good gun dog to see if it would retrieve one. This is sometime true of woodcock too, which gundogs do not seem to like retrieving, though my terrier never seemed to mind.

On a reminisce, the last time I saw flocks of the magnitude of Shapwick Heath was in Aberystwyth ; having finished a funeral there the undertaker and I went for tea on the sea front. While we wee enjoying old fashioned tea and scones in one of the hotels we witnessed thousands of starlings coming in to roost under the pier.