'EMP 'N TARES...

 

     ...'n Wheat, 'n roach poles. Not Poles you may notice, Roach Poles. Poles for catching roach. Nothing surpasses their use for the purpose in my opinion. Sitting there, poised across the knee, waiting for that special submerging quill moment. Poised in all their glossy but now crumb encrusted glory, the left-overs of a failed, spring, bread focussed campaign. Now, once more, Old Marmalade glistens in black banded, mottled cane expectation as regular offerings of hemp, tares and stewed wheat rain down around the float. A delicate, stripped and bound woodpigeon's quill taking four tiny dust shot waits in the breathless anticipation of that occasionally fruitful but inevitable bite. The summer seed fishing season awakes.

     I wasn't really expecting much today, just hoping for a few bites and enough roach on the bank to demonstrate that even though I'd caught very few on bread they were still there in numbers. I've been adding wheat to my hemp and tares now since last season after discovering that it can often add a few decent bream to the bag that hemp never does. In fact it has proved to be a good bait for getting early bites before the roach really move in. Not so much today though as after only getting a couple of small indications, an exploratory switch to tares on the hook immediately produced many more and much better, if still hard to hit, bites.

     Actually, I lie. Bites were quite easy to hit if left long enough, it was my inability to restrain myself from striking until they had taken the bait properly that cost me the most fish. The tiny float would flash under and back up again even before I moved the pole but it was often too late for my over-eager reflexes. Just watching the float disappear and reappear two, three or even four times would eventually lead to its total and prolonged disappearance as the fish swam off with its prize. It wasn't a hundred per cent guaranteed to produce a catch but it usually did and when it did, all that was required was to firmly lift into the fish.

 
     They were a nice stamp as well, nearly all of them being in the three to four ounce bracket with two of eight and twelve ounces apiece putting cherries on the icing. It was all most enjoyable and it was only later on over dinner, as Pete and I reviewed the morning's fishing, that I realised just how much roach fishing means to me, something I had never really considered before.

 
     I consider myself an all round fisherman and indeed my love of vintage tackle means that I fish for many species in many different ways just so that I can enjoy using as much of it as possible. For weeks now, Pete and I have been looking forward to the tench fishing and have even been fortunate to have caught a few, but it is already undeniable that, as yet another swirls at the net, there is some slight disappointment, that it just another tench.

     Roach are far more readily found and caught. In my world they are small, one pound fish being a target and their capture is not limited by the seasons. Yet, I have never felt, as I get my first glimpse of silvery blue scales slashed with those stirring highlights of crimson fins, that it is just another roach. Rudd are glorious to look at and differ only in colour and the arrangement of their lips but their biggest failing is that they just aren't roach. They just don't have the subtle charm, they're just too flashy. It almost feels that my whole angling life has been leading to this realisation. Even as I sit behind a pair of carp rods as I probably will on Wednesday. Even as I trot the streamy Wye for chub and barbel as I will in a few short weeks. I am a roach fisherman at heart and it has only taken me fifty years to realise it.