Fishing for likes 😀. Social media and what I learnt in 2017.

After a terrible few years, I said at the end of 2016 I was going to start catching more fish.

I am not an expert, or a tackle tart who is buying all the latest and expensive gear, or even a very gifted angler really. But in 2017 I hardly blanked at all and really improved my overall angling ability.

The years success I put down to 3 factors.

1. Great advice from the amazing fishing community on social media.
2. Putting the hours in (and I mean a lot of hours),
3. Not being afraid to go small.

Fishing Community:

When I moved away from Plymouth, my 50/50 split of obsession of boxing and fishing was hit hard. Not being able to get to the sea regularly enough to fish and the availability of live boxing around me in London helped me to launch a fairly successful boxing blog and introduced me to that great community. Last year after Emily had recommended I should many times, I got a licence to fish fresh water and decided to have a go.

Excuse the pun, but I was a fish out of water. I didn’t have a clue about watercraft, baits, timing etc. So I used my smallest lure rod I owned at the time 5-30g to cast out some old lures into the Thames in Kingston and tried a bunch of retrieves over 4 or 5 sessions. This didn’t lead to any fish. What ever happened to beginners luck?

So I lost heart for a while. For Christmas 2016, Emily bought me Henry Gilbey’s fishing encyclopedia. It is a great book covering all aspects of the sport. I read it cover to cover in a week, followed by 7 other fishing books I already owned and 2 books about fish species from the Collins collection. I then turned heavily to the internet and Joined just about every group I could find relating to lure fishing.

As I have mentioned in other blog posts, this is my go to method of fishing. The lures don’t go off, don’t need freezing or keeping alive and I can fit all the tackle i need in a small bag or even in my pockets. This is perfect for the amount of travelling I do.

All of a sudden, I found that the real wealth of information available to me was all of you in these groups. Telling stories, reviewing tackle, sharing methods and locations. I have read so many posts, blogs, watched youtube videos and followed many of your adventures through instagram and facebook.

When the fishing season opened for Fresh water back in March I felt armed with enough knowledge to get back on the river. Started catching fish and my confidence grew.

Through out the season so far(March – November) I have ended up with 17 different species and only 1 of these was caught on bait which was free-lined bread-flake.

I have smashed my PB bass by teaming up with Marc Cowling from http://www.southdevonbassguide.com and soaking up his knowledge and experience.
Putting the hours in:

This isn’t really new to me. As with everything I obsess over including fishing, boxing, work I find it consumes my time and life and even those around me. This year though I have really given fishing a whole new level of attention. Reading and watching I have soaked up so much information transferable to my own fishing and spending time on the river, canal, lake and shore I have learnt from my own experience skills which are transferable between the fishing disciplines.

The perfect example of this is using the retrieves I have learnt in fly fishing to change the speed at which I retrieve lures. This has seriously helped me when fishing with ultra light lures for perch.

Fishing in darkness for seabass is something I have become accustomed too over years of bait fishing, but it was a real surprise to me how succesful night fishing with lures could be. Reading many posts and blogs on the subject and then catching my bass with Marc Cowling, I now have confidence in night lure fishing.

I then started using other lures to target smaller species around Plymouth in darkness and started to catch pollock and wrasse and later on in the season a multitude of LRF species.

The more I have fished and learnt, the more success I have had when fishing.

The confidence that catching gives me has allowed me to try different tactics in the same spot I have caught or the same tactic which was successful on a new mark to seek out fish.

When moving to Ash Vale, I was cheeky enough to have a few casts on the local canal in a spare 20 minutes I had before letting the cleaners in to do a pre-move in clean of the new place.

I used the same Fiish Black Minnow lure that had been giving me so much succes of the Hogsmill river to catch my first Perch from this venue.

I then started using Lunchtimes when working from home to go back to the canal and try different lures, retrieves, methods including dropshotting to get confidence in all of these methods.

The time spent increases the chances of catching but its what you learn in that time that really translates into future success.

Not being afraid to go small:

In 2014/15 and 16 my fishing was obismal. The running joke in my family and friends was that I was rodding and not fishing as I just wasn’t catching fish. I was putting all of my focus into catching a big bass from the shore on a lure without much thought going into it. The same marks time and time again and casting out a big lure out and pulling in very little.

I had once half decent bass and a half decent pollock to show for it.

I kept telling them that if I wanted to catch more fish, I could change my tactics and catch regularly but that I wanted to be successful on the lures. So I did both! I scaled down to lures between 5 and 10 grams and started to pick out the smaller fish. I knew they were there but before I was fishing for that trophy picture fish.

With Owen (my 10 year old) as my regular partner for sea-fishing , (at his request) we also used ragworm for a few sessions and started catching a lot of wrasse and pollock. We then bought some ragworm immitation lures and tried dropshot and jighead tactics and kept catching so stuck with the lures going forwards.

On the rivers I scaled down from the big heavy lures I was using to smaller patterns and started catching perch and had a fair few chub follow the lure right to my feet. Unfortunately the chub on lure still evades me.

On the local canal, once I moved, I used small spinners, soft plastics and even tiny micro fry lures to catch many perch and my first pike and then in November I bought an lrf rod and started really scaling down to 1g jigheads to catch mirco species in the sea and have some real fights with the bigger canal fish I have managed to hook up with.
Evaluation:

Learn from your mistakes, your successes and everything you read and watch. Don’t be afraid to ask for help or advice.

For years I have though it a joke when people say speak to the guys in your local tackle shop as I was unlucky enough to have a found a bad few shops where the guys were miserable areseholes who give you the stock line of try for a mackerel here and there and point you to the spots which he knows will be overcrowded by anglers, kids tourists etc and doesn’t really help you progress with your fishing.

I must say times are changing and the tackle shops I visit now are run by friendly helpful people who want you to succeed in your fishing. After all success brings you back to buy more tackle, surely?

I have learnt to love trying new methods, searching out new species and the value of scaling down my tackle when times are tough.

Through reading Marc Cowlings blog religiously I have learnt all about marks, tides, light vs dark etc and hope to put all into practive for next seasons bass fishing with all the lovely new lures the future Mrs Russell has bought me.

The main thing I have learnt this year is that the most important thing about fishing is having fun. I don’t need to be up at 4am on the rock every day chucking a 30g piece of plastic into the deep in the freezing cold and getting that trophy photo to enjoy fishing.

Up until I caught my amazing bass with Marc I was having a great night and just enjoying the fishing chat and sounds and smells of the beach not knowing if I would even catch a fish.

Oh and then this happended…….

70cm of solid silver. Enough to put a jaw aching smile on my face for days to come. What a fish!

If you want to find out more about catching UK fish on lures, I strongly recommend you try this great book here which provides info on everything you might want to know about lure fishing in the UK and how to catch a huge variety of species