Fishing has been good to me these last few weeks, I have had some good fish that have settled me down a little and boosted my confidence. Confidence is a great thing, it works wonders for your results, what isn’t so good however are mosquitos, I hate mosquito, we have 34 types of mosquito in Britain and I hate them all with a passion. On a recent trip I was unable to keep my repelent topped up on my right hand ( That is the one that I would be holding my fish with, getting the slime on, having to wipe and then using to release the fish back, my guard was washed off and I did not have anymore to replenish with.

In the morning I found that my left hand had three bites, my right hand however had thirteen bites and days later I am  still struggling not to scratch them, hot water compresses do work a treat and I recommend anyone suffering to try them, don’t scratch them, they will get infected, they will scab over badly and they will ruin your week.The moral to this story is to have plenty of repellent to hand, replenish it often and don’t be tight with it!

One Mosquito that has recently decided to settle in Britain is the Asian Tiger Mosquito, it carries twenty three deadly diseases and likes to kill people for the laugh…For the laugh!

That may be pushing the truth of it but it is a bastard of a creature nonetheless, mosquitos and their diseases have killed more people than all the wars ever fought combined, they truly are a pandemic causing bunch of tube faced bastards and I hate them.

 

 

Another 7lb Chub!!

Chub are one of my all time favourite species, they are many things to many anglers , they can be the most cautious of fish yet at times they are utterly suicidal and one of the easiest of all our fish to catch and I like it like that!

I have caught chub on live baits, dead baits, spinners and spoons, luncheon meat, pellets, boillies, paste balls, maggots worms, cheese paste, steak and mince…the list is extensive and exhaustive and that is to do with the very catholic tastes of the chub itself, they are both predatory and non predatory in their nature, they will feed happily on fruits such as blackberries and cherries that are falling into the water and they will smash small fish to bits chopping up into mince with their utterly destructive pharyngeal teeth . I would be very cautious at putting my fingers into the mouth of a chub.

I remember fishing a match at Straight Mile fisheries years ago and getting smashed up with chub taking small silvers from the hook…Chub are an effective predator and make no bones about that.

Anyway back onto the reason I have mentioned chub…Look at the top picture, that is my 3rd verified 7lb chub, it came in at bang on 7lb at about 5.15am , the sun had just started to break the horizon and the light was that superb epic fiery red you only get for about five minutes in the mornings and evenings, the picture would have been stunning but unfortunately the light was on the other bank so I did what needed to be done, I slipped the fish into the Queenford and text messaged the wife to come down and take the shots for me at 7.45, if I had been able to get the red I would have gone with the self takes but I couldn’t get the light so I decided to wait and get a better shot than the one I would have managed as a self take effort.

Tina arrived on time and the pictures were taken as fast as possible because the early morning shift of mosquitoes were just clocking on and we were getting bitten like mad.

Once home I popped a little update on facebook and soon  received a message from Ben Miles at Angling Times, they seemed to be interested in running with the story, they should be, I doubt that there have been many catches off the Trent this season that could match this one in the time frame involved, I hadn’t bored these fish into submission, the entire session was about 14 hours rather than 14 days.

Well the pictures and the story was sent off to AT along with a short write up for Steve Plumb at the Chub Study Group and John Conway the records officer for CSG .

Will it win any prizes?

I don’t know but I hope so, it isn’t often I will get so many good fish in one go, a session so good that I took a picture of a 6lb 9oz fish that would have smashed my PB not so many years ago just laying on a matt instead of doing the whole tripod camera and self timer malarkey.

Sometimes the mosquitoes just take away the need to do anything away from the sanctuary of the deet soaked inner workings of a fishing oval.

Did I mention I hate mosquitoes?

Barbel

Well so far I haven’t really got into gear with them, I think I am on 5 or 6 with no doubles, the best being a lovely looking fish of 9lb 6oz.

The winter was hard and the start of the season with all the rain and high water kind of spoiled my vibe.

I am sure that I will get into them at some point and get my tally ticking over at a reasonable rate of knots…

One thing I will say about getting a good catch together is keep the loose feed small, don’t go banging in loads of big pellets, go micro!

 

On the field

Down on the field the ichneumon wasps are out in force and hunting their victims relentlessly, This one on the left ( Habrocampulum biguttatum, I think) injected its eggs into every single cinnabar caterpillar on this ragwort, they are all for all intents and purposes already dead, they just don’t know it.

They are the living incubators for the next generation of these quite terrifying creatures

and there are thousands of species of them, 3000 species in the UK alone, they are great controllers of the numbers of butterflies and moths that they parasitize.

This however is a bit of a pain in the bum if you like butterflies like I do but luckily ( for them) I also like these nasty little buggers even though they do impact on my butterfly numbers.

Other creatures that I like are bees, bees are tremendous, they work tirelessly, they never stop. We have about 270 species of bee in the UK and 250 or so are what is known as solitary, they are almost as hard to name as Ichneumon wasps but I try to give them a go, this one I think is an Osmia species, it was very small and very busy on my newly flowering wild chicory.

I love wild chicory, it is tall and it is elegant and it flowers for a long time, I had three really nice ones on my field but unfortunately I have lost two, the wet spring that followed a crappy water logged winter.

All is not lost though because I purchased some seed and I am growing it on at home away from the birds and slugs and although I did have one very close shave with a torrential downpour that looked to have pulverised them I seem to have in my possession a couple of hundred really nice young plants that will be going out into the wild late autumn.

Anyway that is all for now, I won’t talk about politics as such this time as I think we have all had enough of that crapfest for a while, my only wish is that politicians were held accountable to the people for what they promise to do but more importantly what they fail to do.

All the best and tight lines

 

speak soon!

Lee