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.

 

 

 

 

 

"Sounds like a plan ..."

Today was a case of mixing "business" with "pleasure."
 If you were to ask me what three things define me as a person and really "float my boat" they'd be my faith, my family and my fishing. Faith and family are pretty well integrated both at home and at church, family and fishing isn't too bad (my daughter used to fish until she discovered make-up, clothes and boyfriends, while my son remains my most regular fishing companion, and I try to fish with my brothers and nephews every year despite the distances between where we live), but I've never really "cracked" integrating my faith with my fishing, which was why I drove the 60 miles this morning to get together with Stewart Bloor.

If you've never heard of Stewart Bloor check out his website (Stewart Bloor's Angling Journal) which has an enormous following and is updated weekly. Stewart is a well known and respected personality in Black Country angling circles and has a number of sponsorship tie-ups with fishing manufacturers, and, unlike me (I should be far better at it considering I've been fishing for over three decades!) he's a highly accomplished angler. He's also, like me, a minister of a church.

We met to talk about the possibility - which following our conversation was upgraded to a "must do"- of setting up some kind of Christian Anglers Organisation here in the UK.

We were thinking websites, forums, social media and some kind of regional or local presence with the potential for fishing retreats, get togethers and the like for Christian anglers, or anglers who want to explore some of the bigger questions of life and faith.

So far we're only in the earliest stages of talking, but are looking to get a few other like-minded contacts together to try to steer the idea from vision to implementation.

An impossible dream?
I don't think so- after all, there's good precedent:  look what Jesus managed to pull off with a small bunch of motivated fishermen!