How to improve your chances of success
Anyone who has fished for as many years and as many times as I have will surely have learned some useful tips to improve the chances of success in angling.
Tip one is for those who
tie flies for their own or friends to use.
I love fishing with artificial daddy longlegs (crane flies) and I have more than
once mentioned some advice from the late Richard Walker about tying your daddies
with bright green fluorescent bodies.
Walker also wrote about tying two knots in each strand from a pheasant centre
tail feather to simulate the trailing legs of daddies and he found this such a
tricky thing to manage that he once set on some boy scouts tying the legs as their
bob-a-job task.
Now, however, some of the top tackle firms sell tail feathers with two knots ready
tied in each fibre of the long feather.
Tip two. We are now at the
height of the grayling season.
These fish are lovely to eat (better than trout some say) but often people tell
me that they dislike the need to scale the fish before cooking them. Not so in
my opinion.
Simply dip your gutted grayling in small oatmeal flakes (Ready Brek is good for
this) before frying them in butter.
Then the skins come off easily on your plate with no stray scales to worry about.
Tip three. Cheese is a great
bait for several kinds of fish.
A simple way to use cheese for bait is to buy those packeted slices of cheese
which the fish love to eat, though I’m not so keen on them for human food.
Not ideal for winter use though because the cheese goes hard in cold water.
Tip four. When you are legering
in running water try casting upstream instead of the normal downstream and across.
There are several advantages to this. You scare the fish less. The fish hook themselves
when you use just enough weight to just hold bottom, and no more, so that when
a biting fish causes the weight to move downstream it feels less resistance and
can cause the moving lead to gain the first hookhold after the drop back bites
that you get.
Also upstream leger fishing needs less weight to just hold bottom.