HEMPING AROUND WITH OLD MARMALADE
It's never long before the Roach fisherman in me claws its way back to the surface. When I was a kid, fishing for them on the Lower Thames was a frustrating pastime. The upper half of the river contained more bleak than water and even a big lead would rarely allow ones maggots to reach the bottom where hoards of Daddy Ruffe and Gudgeon carpetted the bottom. The nearest we ever came to a solution was to fish hemp. Hemp gave us a chance that's all but I came to really enjoy fishing it.
Fast forward fifty or so years and it is seldom used as it was back then. Mountains of it is shovelled in by Carp, Tench and Barbel fishermen and for them size is not the issue; it doesn't have to be big enough to go on the hook or cooked just right to stay on it. For the dyed in the wool Roach angler decent quality, sizeable hemp, once sold as Chilean hemp, has been almost impossible to find for a long time. Just recently however I managed to buy some so-called 'Huge Hemp'. I wasn't expecting much but if I tell you I was using it on a size 14 hook today it will give you some idea just how big it is and best of all it works! For the first time in decades, I didn't have to resort to fishing tares on the hook.
The fish were on it immediately this morning, my first bite coming within less than a minute but I spent most of the morning striving to improve my catch rate. If this larger hemp has one drawback it is in the cooking. It definitely takes longer to split and it doesn't all split at once. I've seen lots of different methods described to speed up the process from freezing to soaking for hours, days even, prior to cooking. None of them have suggested any improvement over the hour and a quarter that it took me to cook them dry and straight out of the bag. I just bring them to the boil and keep as high a heat under them as I can without them boiling over and bringing the wrath of Mrs W down upon my head. I love the smell of cooking hemp; it just exudes that heady promise of Roach to come.
The first improvement came when I abandoned the quest for grains that would clamp themselves to the shank of the hook and switched to piercing the dimple on the end with a needle, feeding the hook into it and out through the split side. Not only did it stay on better, often for the capture of two fish but it allowed me to scale up from a 16 to a size 14 which gave me better hook ups due to the more exposed point. The second improvement came once I had established this better method of hooking and could allow the small fish to mess around with bait without losing it. All those hitherto unhittable lightning fast dips and pulls could be safely ignored while I waited for the float to go under and stay under.
Not having used the pole for a good while I was a bit rusty to say the least but it never takes long to get back into the swing of things and I soon had all working as it should with some nice roach coming to hand. There were no monsters, the biggest was half a pound, but every one was a work of art and the hemp fisherman's quarry are not big fish anyway. If I wanted specimen Roach, then bread, maggots, worms, sweetcorn or even cheese would be a better bet. Hemp is generally a bagging bait in my experience, picking out slightly better fish in the 'barely swingable' to one pound range. Of course on a water with large numbers of big fish that may not be so true but on my waters that's the way it is and today's session ran true to form with most of my catch weighing around four ounces apiece; great weight-builders if you are fishing a silvers match.
Hemp has one often overlooked and very valuable property in today's angling landscape. It is the one bait that predominantly catches only Roach. By-catch is generally restricted to hybrids and the occasional Rudd; Pete had one today as it happens, but even fish like Tench, Carp and Barbel are seldom caught on it despite the fact that anglers fishing for those species frequently use large quantities of it as feed. I suppose that Chub would count as a semi regular by-catch but even so it remains the one bait that allows the Roach fisherman the luxury of fishing light and delicate tackle without being regularly smashed up by big fish. That alone makes it an important and enjoyable bait to fish with and I shall be using it a lot more from now on.
Fast forward fifty or so years and it is seldom used as it was back then. Mountains of it is shovelled in by Carp, Tench and Barbel fishermen and for them size is not the issue; it doesn't have to be big enough to go on the hook or cooked just right to stay on it. For the dyed in the wool Roach angler decent quality, sizeable hemp, once sold as Chilean hemp, has been almost impossible to find for a long time. Just recently however I managed to buy some so-called 'Huge Hemp'. I wasn't expecting much but if I tell you I was using it on a size 14 hook today it will give you some idea just how big it is and best of all it works! For the first time in decades, I didn't have to resort to fishing tares on the hook.
The fish were on it immediately this morning, my first bite coming within less than a minute but I spent most of the morning striving to improve my catch rate. If this larger hemp has one drawback it is in the cooking. It definitely takes longer to split and it doesn't all split at once. I've seen lots of different methods described to speed up the process from freezing to soaking for hours, days even, prior to cooking. None of them have suggested any improvement over the hour and a quarter that it took me to cook them dry and straight out of the bag. I just bring them to the boil and keep as high a heat under them as I can without them boiling over and bringing the wrath of Mrs W down upon my head. I love the smell of cooking hemp; it just exudes that heady promise of Roach to come.
The first improvement came when I abandoned the quest for grains that would clamp themselves to the shank of the hook and switched to piercing the dimple on the end with a needle, feeding the hook into it and out through the split side. Not only did it stay on better, often for the capture of two fish but it allowed me to scale up from a 16 to a size 14 which gave me better hook ups due to the more exposed point. The second improvement came once I had established this better method of hooking and could allow the small fish to mess around with bait without losing it. All those hitherto unhittable lightning fast dips and pulls could be safely ignored while I waited for the float to go under and stay under.
Not having used the pole for a good while I was a bit rusty to say the least but it never takes long to get back into the swing of things and I soon had all working as it should with some nice roach coming to hand. There were no monsters, the biggest was half a pound, but every one was a work of art and the hemp fisherman's quarry are not big fish anyway. If I wanted specimen Roach, then bread, maggots, worms, sweetcorn or even cheese would be a better bet. Hemp is generally a bagging bait in my experience, picking out slightly better fish in the 'barely swingable' to one pound range. Of course on a water with large numbers of big fish that may not be so true but on my waters that's the way it is and today's session ran true to form with most of my catch weighing around four ounces apiece; great weight-builders if you are fishing a silvers match.
Hemp has one often overlooked and very valuable property in today's angling landscape. It is the one bait that predominantly catches only Roach. By-catch is generally restricted to hybrids and the occasional Rudd; Pete had one today as it happens, but even fish like Tench, Carp and Barbel are seldom caught on it despite the fact that anglers fishing for those species frequently use large quantities of it as feed. I suppose that Chub would count as a semi regular by-catch but even so it remains the one bait that allows the Roach fisherman the luxury of fishing light and delicate tackle without being regularly smashed up by big fish. That alone makes it an important and enjoyable bait to fish with and I shall be using it a lot more from now on.
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