BAILIFFS TOP TIPS

Let's hope the hints you dropped to your loved ones have worked and you get a nice shiny floating line for one of your presents about a weight 5 or 6.

Forget the telly and the 100th repeat of "The Great Escape" and sneak upstairs to your den and stripp-off that nasty sinking line from a medium weight reel, replace it with your nice new floater, finish the job with a 12 or 15 foot tapered leader and now you're ready for your great escape to burn off the turkey and tinsel and go down to one of the lakes. That is assuming you do not want to walk down the river and try for some of the monster Chub or feisty Perch and Pike that sit in the numerous pools. It's a tough choice but someone has to make it.

The Lakes in general are not very deep, about ten feet with a few exceptions such as "Charlies Hole" on Tern and Mallard Pool at Copston which are both over twenty feet deep. We train our fish to look-up, and they are usually not very far down in the water. A trained eye can often see them by the interference their bodies make to the ripple.

You can use wet lines and lures on the lakes (within the international competition size limit) and you will catch fish, but for the purpose of this page and that I have never used such techniques to the point of competence yet alone the level at which to give advice I will keep to the use of a floating or neutral line, the latter to evade the effect of the prevalent wind at Copston and reduce line "bow" rather than to get down into the water, this is quite easily obtained by using any weighted fly and lots of tippet at the end of the leader.

 
So; let's get started. Try travelling light, even the cheapest waistcoats hold enough tackle to start a small fishing shop. Get one that can carry a good telescopic net on the back or modify your own with some type of loop for the job, I have added a long loop of old fly line, it works well and hanging lower that the neck is easier to reach to when wearing a few layers of fleeces etc. Vital equipment would include but not be limited to, a de-barbing device, (mine are circlip pliers and cost 75p from a market stall, they work right down to a size 20) line snippers as collected from the christmas crackers, forceps, floatant, flies, a piece of chamois to dry-off wet flies, a priest, a de-hooking device such as the "Ketchum tool" and spare tippet lines 8lbs to 3lbs in old money, I recommend Rio or Frogs Hair flouropolymer they are a bit more expensive but a crucial bit thinner than the budget ones and a 50m spool should last ages.  The really interesting point on these floro lines is that they are so thin that despite their relative density being higher than water and in theory expected to sink, the weights below about eight pounds just sit on the surface film and will not respond to any sinking agent I have tried. This should in theory be a problem when using dry fly when tradition instructs us to sink the terminal foot of line to deceive the fish, but in practice it has never in my experience been a problem and the secondary effect of sinking that last bit of line is that it tended to pull down the fly as the tippet got wetter calling for frequent applications of floatant!  Time to go fishing. 

At the waters edge keep discreet, tackle up away from where you want to fish as there will be fish right up to the bank. In the winter the trout love to cruise the margins looking for fry or any terrestrial life that falls into the lake. Start with a dry fly every time with either a skinny daddy long legs (DLL) or brown or black midge such as a black gnat. It might not be the best option on the day but it's easier to start this way and go down to a nymph than to do it the other way after scaring-off the fish. This is not a text book but keep the initial few casts short, work in an arc and increase the casting length when and if necessary.