First competition of the year!

I keep rambling on about how I'm getting back to my saltwater roots this year, only to find myself floating around in the fresh stuff. Trust me, it will happen!. However, last weekend saw me back on.... ummmmmm, freshwater, hey ho.

The competition had been organised by my good friend Ian Harris in a location that must remain secret I'm afraid. I was told that it held predators in the shape of Pike and Perch, with the water holding some very large Perch, potential record size. Ok, I was hooked. It was also to be an invite only competition with many notable names appearing on the list. I'm still very much a learner with regards to freshwater angling, but I persevere.

I was out of bed by 0330 on the morning of the competition and parked outside the house of another good friend, David Morris, by 0500. Two hours later we'd arrived at the secret location!. The competition wasn't due to kick off until 0900 (earlier would have been nicer), though it provided a luxurious amount of time to rig the kayaks and to catch up with the multitude of kayak anglers that were milling about. Faces both old and new.

The launch was quick and uneventful with all anglers keen to get fishing.

I think that there was 29 kayaks afloat with almost half of those being Hobies. It's interesting to watch the Hobie brand grow here in the UK. It's been well established overseas for a long time. Though if I look back three years or so, there were only a handful of anglers fishing from Hobie kayaks here in the UK, that is changing very quickly now.

I'd decided to take three rigged rods to fish, trolling, spinning and dropshot. I'm still not a big fan of the latter method, though it's caught me fish in the past when all else has failed.

I have a couple of fish measures that I use, my favourite being the Hawk Trough as it's lightweight and easily stored. Though it's limited to fish of 75cm which is far from ideal when there's the chance of catching larger fish!. I decided to do a 'hack job' and extended the Hawg Trough by cutting a length of another I had spare. Drastic perhaps?, but it worked. I used some mitre glue for the join, with some re-enforcing plastic added to the rear for additional strength. Here's the result...

The centimetre and inch scales obviously don't align along a measure so I had to choose one or the other to use when extending the measure. I went with centimetres. I used a 'Dremel' tool to modify the numbering on the extended portion. It's not perfect, but it's very useable. It now measures up to 125cm accurately, though I've lost 1/2" (see the 29/30" mark), so the inches scale won't be used after 29", if at all.

Anyway, back to the fishing. The competition started promptly at 0900 and I went directly to a small feature along one bank to cast a few lures. Now I'd been using 30lb on that particular reel the previous week, though I'd re-spooled with 20lb the night before. Not really thinking I cast out and looked in amazement as my lure flew effortlessly into the distance. By the time I 'hit the brakes' my lure was parked in a tree!. A superb start to the session. I actually had to exit the kayak to untangle the mess, say no more.

Despite the number of anglers on a small water, I was still able to troll in several areas. Within 45 minutes I'd landed my first fish, trolling a small Rapala diving lure running at around three metres. At just over 56cm I think it's the smallest Pike that I've ever caught!!, though as the competition was for overall length (max 3 Perch and 1 Pike) they all counted.

It's always good to catch quite early on, or to even just get a bite or two, as it boosts one's confidence no end. With no more fish coming to trolling over the next 30 minutes or so I decided to swap over to the dropshot.

I rigged up with a small reflective needle tail lure running about 12" above the weight. Due to the breeze I was using a weight of around 18g whilst drifting in 4-5m of water. Frustratingly, the bed of the lake was clearly soft mud, with the weight sinking into the mud almost immediately. A lighter weight was marginally better, though caused the line to lift far to much for my liking whilst drifting. I put up with the heavier weight, lifting it out of the mud ever few seconds. Far from ideal, but I persevered.

I actually didn't have to wait too long for a solid hit and hook up. It was clearly a Perch and it was soon visible a couple of metres beneath the water. As ever with Perch, I only risk a smile once it's slipped safely into the landing net. With the fish safely aboard it was simply a case of measuring and returning it. At just over 42cm it was a very respectable fish and from what I'd seen and heard around the lake I was fairly well placed at that time, though there were still several hours of the competition remaining.

Despite there being 7 hours of the competition remaining, that turned out to be my last fish of the day. Despite trying several different lures, trolling, spinning and dropshot, I didn't get some much as another bite!

There was the odd fish being caught around the lake, though it was slow. That said, the quality of some of the Perch that were being caught was simply outstanding!. Here's a couple of the larger specimens that were caught during the day.

This is Charles Halliday with a fish that was 49cm and weighed in at over 5lb!

Here's Dane Wood with another Perch of 5lb, these are really cracking fish!

I persevered at the fishing as I was aware that no one had more that two fish to submit by mid-afternoon. Though it was utterly dead and I was struggling to remain motivated. I did in fact doze off for 30 minutes when the sun came out and warmed my dry suit up a treat. I was still holding my drop shot rod just in case!

Despite the quality of some of the fish that were caught that day, I somehow managed to secure myself 5th place and walked away with a Hobie H-Crate. Bizarrely, if I could have picked a prize from the lineup, that's the one I'd have picked!, lucky me.

Of course it always nice to win a prize, though the main enjoyment has to go to the social side, meeting faces both old and new. Plus it was a new venue, that's something that I always find exciting. It's not all about the fishing, far from it.

Many thanks to Ian Harris for organising the day, it ran smoothly and it was certainly on par with some of the better competitions I've fished over the years.

Hobie World Championships 2014 (part 2)

With the navigation day completed the next event was Practice Day. Here we had a few hours in which to fish the water and try as many techniques and lures out as required. Again, I certainly found the sheer size of this venue so daunting, just where does one start fishing?!.

Well my game plan was to keep it simple. I’d taken a fairly small selection of lures out on the water with me, some shads, spinner baits, blades and a handful of small crank baits. I had three rods rigged ready to fish (minus lures), these were a light, medium and heavy spinner. Some of my lures were pushing towards 100g in weight, others as light as 10g, hence the variety of rods. A collapsible landing net was provided as well as a large measuring board to ensure that even the largest of Pike could be effectively measured.

The competition would allow anglers to fish for three species of fish, Pike, Zander and Perch with permitted lengths of 45cm, 42cm and 25cm respectively. One fish per species per day was the maximum sized bag (3 fish total max) with total length used to put together the leader board. Methods were cast-and-retrieve only,  with trolling, live baits and dead baits not permitted Only artificial lures and flies were to be used during competition.  Drift fishing was allowed, though anglers could only drift up to 50 meters between casts.

All qualifying fish had to be photographed using the supplied measuring board with the anglers ‘token’ being visible. It was the photographing of the fish (should I catch one!) that worried me most, failure to photograph it correctly would result in that submission being disqualified, something that did unfortunately happen to some competitors over the three day competition.

The weather forecast was extremely poor, with strong winds expected allied with frequent rains showers. It was one of those rare occasions when the weatherman got it right, or perhaps even unstated it somewhat!

The Pro Angler 12 kayaks were all outfitted with a Lowrance Elite 4 HDI fish finder/GPS. I currently have the Elite 7 HDI rigged onto my Outback so I was pretty confident in being able to get straight into using this unit as the menu configuration is almost identical. At first I found the smaller screen a bit of a step backwards, but it’s surprising how quickly you adjust. The screen is considerably taller than my previous elite 4 DSI, though it’s needed on this combination unit that can display up to a triple split screen.

 

The units were loaded Insight Genesis mapping information gathered from boats used prior to the Championships. This proved invaluable as Navionics online provided no useful information for this venue. It’s  highly detailed providing the user with a very accurate underwater picture of the venue. If that wasn’t good enough, the individual kayaks recorded sonar information each day and the Lowrance representative updated the map sets daily so the available information was continually improving!

So did I have a game plan?. I planned to fish noticeable drop offs as well as areas with patchy weed in the hope of primarily finding Pike with a good chance of a Perch. The Zander were going to be difficult and were likely to be found in the deeper water. As they were expected to be very difficult to catch I placed them bottom of my wish list, placing Pike at the top followed by Perch.

I worked my way around a few of the suggested marks with Ian Harris and tried this and that, with little success. I eventually found a piece of water that was holding some Perch, though despite being small, at least I had started to catch some fish. I caught around ten small Perch during the session, though all were under the require qualifying size of 25cm, hopefully I’d find some bigger fish when the competition was finally underway.

I eventually hooked into something far better, perhaps a big Perch or a small Pike, though I’ll never know as it threw the hook after a good tussle lasting but a few seconds.

The weather conditions had began to deteriorate and the ever increasing wind had began to produce white caps across the lake. I decided to head back in and took the shortest route directly across the lake, taking me over the deeper water. Yes, it was choppy and rather uncomfortable, but it was perfectly doable and I was making decent progress. Looking over to my right the sky darkened and thunder and lightning made an appearance and was heading all too quickly in my direction!. Before I knew it a squall came down the centre of the lake and I was getting pounded by large breaking swells. I pretty much lost control of the Pro Angler at one stage, though I managed to get it turned into the waves and swell where I intended to ride out the weather. Unfortunately I heard some shouting over the sound of the wind and rain and I soon found myself heading over in the direction of a capsized kayak. To say it was an exciting few minutes going across the swell is an understatement, though thankfully the angler and his kayak were safely recovered, no harm apart from some dented pride no doubt.

I was just happy to have made it out of the weather, finally taking a more sheltered route back to the start line via the more sheltered ‘canals’ that went around part of the lake… interesting times!

I think it’s safe to say that the fishing during the pre-fish day had been rather difficult, though there were some decent fish caught as can be seen below.

So with pre-fish out of the way the three day Championship was ready to commence. So who was the favourite to win?, well that honour was bestowed upon my friend, and current Hobie European Champion, Daniel van der Post. He certainly catches one specimen fish after another and is an extremely experienced local angler, though I’m not so sure that I’d like to have that pressure placed on me… though I can’t see that happening anytime soon!

With a whole evening to ourselves, what do you do?…. socialise of course!!

Part 3 will see me fishing the 3 day Championship itself.

Tweaking the Hawg Trough

I try and use the Hawg Trough fish measure when photographing fish for competition entries. It’s a tough lightweight measure that cradles the fish from the nose and provides an accurate size ready to be captured by camera.

However, it’s not perfect!. One thing that does annoy me is the scale itself. The numbers are black on a yellow background, that part works a treat. Though the graduations are raised and the same yellow as the background making them very difficult to identify at times. This is far worse when using flash photography and at times you have to zoom right in or adjust the contrast to have a chance of seeing the graduations.

Below is a photograph taken yesterday of a mackerel. The graduations aren’t exactly jumping out at you, that said, I’ve taken far worse pictures.

What I decided to do was to highlight the graduations to make them very clear in all conditions. After a little practice I found it best to use a wide nib permanent black marker pen. Don’t try and draw down the marks in a traditional manner, it’ll look awful (trust me!). Lay the marker pen over at almost 90 degrees and draw the side of the nib down the raised lines. The results are quite pleasing and result in a measure that’s far easier to interpret at a glance.

With Flash (above)

Without Flash (above)

So there you have it, a quick and easy modification that should last pretty well and it’s easily re-applied as required.

Fish measures

Last year I found myself having to use a Hawg Trough fish measure when fishing the Hobie World Championships in Texas. It’s a plastic measuring device available in yellow or white. The special design cradles the fish and holds it steady for accurate measurement.

I store it at the rear of the Outback, though on more than one occasion I’ve forgotten to pack it!. I’m starting to enter more competitions and am part of a team for this years Kayak Wars. All fish under 55cm must be measured, so forgetting the measure can result in being able to submit a catch.

I looked around the various UK tackle shops online in the hope of finding an adhesive paddle measure. I know that they are available in the US so I looked on Ebay and quickly found a Rapala measure that fitted the bill. Even with delivery it was cheap enough at around £6. It measures both metric and imperial, max length is 36”/91cm. Fitting was simple, degrease the paddle shaft and put it on. I used a cloth to ensure that it went down evenly and without air bubbles.

It seemed well adhered to the paddle shaft, though to ensure a long life (hopefully!), I sealed all edges with 3M Edge Sealant, masking it off as required to ensure a neat job. I used a scalpel to provide clean cuts around the shaft centre joining point and the holes for altering the blade angles. Again, all edges were carefully sealed.

The paddle on the Hobie see very little use due to it being equipped with the Mirage Drive. How the Rapala measure will endure is yet to be seen. I dare say that it may well wear quicker on a paddle that’s in constant use, how it will fair on my underused Hobie paddle remains to be seen. However, should I forget my Hawg Trough in future I’ll always have a decent fish measure ready to hand.

FOLLOW UP – please read!!!

Ok, as much as the Rapala measure was carefully fitted and edge sealed, within 10 minutes of being afloat it began to peel off!!!!!!!!. I ripped it off in disgust. Hence I deem it unsuitable for fitment to a paddle, no matter how careful you are!