Jorvik Angler: A sad Loss

The hunt for the first fish of the year continued today with a trip to the river. Down to it's normal winter level and colour, but still flowing through at a fair rate after the floods. It looked good and I was quite confident that my collect of noisy jerk baits would attract a pike. The only problem I could foresee were the banks. Would I be able to get down them and more to the point, back up.


Traveling Light

I started off with a, recently acquired, Savage Gear Jerkster in Rudd pattern and just couldn't get the damn thing to behave. No matter how I timed my taps and retrieve the trace kept getting tangled in the front treble. I persisted for a bit longer with it, but only one in four retrieves worked. I need to try it in clearer water to see what is happening really. A change to a large noisy, fire tiger, sinking beast had me fishing with confidence again. A couple of dozen cast in each swim, counting down to various depths and retrieving at different rates was the plan. Working my way down stream, I was able to access more swims than I thought I would, but get back up proved a bit tricky at times. The banks had collapsed in a few swims and there was just a sheer, six to eight foot, cliff left. Working a jerkbait at that height doesn't really work as they tend to pop out of the water.

The inevitable then happened, when fishing a tree lined river, the lure snagged up. No problem, I'd hauled the beast out before. I'd changed the hooks and split rings to something lighter after an earlier incident that had seen the lure left on the far bank, resulting in an hours walk to retrieve it. Having wrapped the braid round my pliers I started to pull, only to start sliding towards the river. Moving to the top of the bank I proceeded to pull again from a slightly different angle and something very heavy started to move. A branch popped out of the water some twenty foot out. Having backed up to a fence I started to move along the fence when every thing went slack and the branch disappeared back under water.. Retrieve the rest of the line showed the last few inches to be frayed. I'd obviously rubbed the braid along something rough, probably another branch.

The annoying thing about the loss was, the fact that I have a lot of confidence in this lure. It had worked really well in deep water on rivers. It never worked well on still waters for some reason. The problem with replacing it is I don't know where I'd bought, nor it's name or manufacturer. I now know how River Piker felt when he lost 'Burt'.

After a cup of tea and some fruit cake I tied on a new trace have inspected the last few feet of braid. Not sure which lure to try next I opened the lure bag to find a perch pattern jerkster at the top of the pile. Despite my previous problems with this lure I decided to give it a go. After a few casts I seemed to be getting my rhythm with it, no longer was I getting the trace tangled in the treble. On one cast it was accompanied in by a couple of perch no bigger than the lure. Buoyed by my sorting this lure out I fished a few more swims, but to no avail.

Savage Gear Jerkster

By now the sun was behind the trees and after a nice warm day, for winter, needing only a fleece it was starting to get cold again. I then managed a rather nasty birds nest as I was too busy watching a sparrow hawk on the far bank. The lure had hit a branch above me and caused a backlash. Rather that faff with it on the bank I used it as an excuse to finish for the day.