Gotta love gudgeon

I like small fish, which the less charitable of my fishing companions might, with some justification, say is "just as well", because they're mostly what I catch!

 

Of all the small fish my favourite is the gudgeon, although being mostly a stillwater angler these days I don't catch the prolific numbers of them that I did as a boy.

There's lots about the gudgeon that commends it as a worthy little fish- they bite readily, they look like barbel in miniature and they give a pleasing "thump" on the rod tip, when fished for with a light match rod and fine line, for a fish of such humble proportions. Chris Yates, so I'm led to believe, once had an infatuation with them, which considering he was the first angler to capture a carp over 50 pounds from UK waters says something (although I'm not quite sure "what") about their appeal.

 

Perhaps I like them most because they remind me of boyhood fishing. As a boy I sometimes fished a tiny stream in Berkshire, the Emmbrook, from which I pulled many minnows, a fair number of dace, the occasional chub and hoardes of voracious gudgeon trotting maggots under a wire stemmed stick float. In places the Emmbrook was only inches deep, in other spots four feet in depth, but was almost always narrow enough to jump over.

 

 

 

I also caught lots of gudgeon from the river Loddon, where it was a favourite tactic (which I nowadays wouldn't recommend) when nature called to drop the float and maggot baited hook into the margins of the river, do what nature demanded behind a bush, and on returning there was almost always a wriggling gudgeon that had impaled and hooked itself while you were absent.

My first experiments with a self-invented "bolt rig" also led to me catching a netful of gudgeon. I was fishing the Thames at Caversham in winter and the river was "high", coloured and not "particulalry handsome", and despite the fact that you could usually catch some quality perch by floatfishing, I was struggling. After a couple of fishless hours, remembering how the Loddon fish always hooked theselves, I "invented" my own bolt rig before I'd ever heard of the real thing; I fixed a large "coffin lead" (remember them?) a few inches from the hook, fixed by a leger stop either side of it, figuring the gudgeon would take the maggot and hook themselves against the weight of the lead. They did.

 

 

Most of last season was spent fishing either for crucians or perch, but I did catch a couple of gudgeon (admittedly stillwater gudgeon, which doesn't quite feel right), and as I eulogised about them to my son, who couldn't quite understand why dad was getting so excited about such tiddlers, especially as he (my son) had just caught a decent personal best rudd, I was transported back to my own childhood, when at times I was so keen to catch gudgeon that I deliberately targetted them by flavouring my maggots with garlic, having read an article in the Angler's Mail in which Ivan Marks cited garlic as the ultimate gudgeon additive.

 

Happy days, and although my big ambition for this season (as it was for last) will be to land a 2 pound crucian from my favourite estate lake, I do hope that, at least once, I pluck a gudgeon from its watery home ....... gobio gobio- a true princeling among fish.