Bullheads and Bizarreness

It was a somewhat curtailed session on the Derwent this week, but interesting nonetheless. Bait for the day was, hemp, caster and maggot. There was supposed to be sweetcorn as well, but it failed to find it's way into my bag. The 15' float rod was rigged with a 4g bolo float at 12'. A feeder rod was also set up.











Feeding caster upstream of myself and the hemp down stream with maggot on the hook started catching roach after 15 minutes or so before the minnows moved in. A change to casters on the hook resulted in crushed casters and no fish. I had grabbed a bunch of elderberries  on the way to the swim, one of the few decent bunches on the tree. The hot dry summer has clearly been a problem for the elders around here. The few decent bunches had very few fruit on them and the other were either very small or shrivelled up. Another half dozen, slightly better roach were taken on the berries before everything went quiet. I would have tried hemp on the hook, but as they were somewhat overcooked they didn't make good hook-bait. A change to feeder fished maggot produced bleak, minnows, the occasional gudgeon and chublet. Also a bullhead, a fish I've not had in a while. After 40 minutes of this I decided to try a swim a fellow angler had told me about.

He'd told me he had been given a right run-a-round by some fish, loosing them in the tree roots or near side weed before going on to take some nice roach and perch. Using the same float statics as the earlier swim I took a couple of small dace before suffering the same fate. The fish just crashed about the swim before diving under the far bank trees and not coming back. A few trots later I took a small perch before striking into nothing. On retrieving the rig the hook was missing, bitten off about three inches above the hook. I step the hook length up from 3.3lb to 5.5lb and the hook from an 18 to a heavy gauge 16. After a series of missed bites I again latched onto some lunatic fish which had me all over the swim before crashing through the weeds in front of me. Everything went slack and as I lifted the rig out I felt a bit of a wriggle on the end of the line.  A gudgeon was attached to the hook, none the worse for wear apart form a few scales missing. The hook length had  a little nick a couple of inches above the hook. After 15 minutes of silly bites  and chewed maggots I dropped back to the lighter rig  which produced half a dozen hard fighting perch to just shy of 2lb. A phone call then curtailed the fishing.
















The lost fish were a bit strange. They didn't feel heavy, just fast. I assume they were jack pike as the chub or barbel tend to just plod about and feel heavy and perch normally give that distinctive head shaking sort of fight.