What with work commitments; a lot of working away / weekends etc and of course keeping my two boys entertained, my time spent on the reel end of my fly rod has been minimal to say the least. Infact in 2007, other than several trips Pike fishing early & late in the year, I think I managed just two fly fishing trips, both of which were to Thorpe Vale Trout Fishery. So by my calculations that makes it over a year since I’ve fished at Toft Newton.

It only feels like a few short years ago that I was there twice a week without fail. At that time you’d be greeted by a great big Alsation named Guiness, and his owner and bailiff Jason Foster. The fishing was always great. A good stock of fish and always a good chance of a 3lb+’er. For whatever reason several years ago Jason left and the fishery slowly suffered. I remember with great fondness in the height of summer Jason would let you fish until an hour after sundown (when he’d signal the all out time with a floodlight), which meant fantastic fun between 10pm and 11pm when out of the blue you’d be covered in caenis and the trout would turn a glass calm lake into a boiling couldron with their frantic evening rise to the anglers curse. Not to say that you’d fill your boots in minutes, far from it, they don’t call these gorgeous little fellas the ‘Anglers Curse’ for nothing. But whatever you did, fish or no fish, it was spectacular fun! Happy Days :0) After Jason left though there was a whole new regime instigated (obviously a money saving exercise) and the boats had to be off the water at 8pm. I never witnessed that kind of late evening action again. Not just that, the whole place and staff seemed to take on a less than positive atitude and as a result it declined in popularity and I should think profitability too. The difference was Jason ran the place as if it was his own. He cared. Everyone ever since has just been staff. Eager to get off home asap and not really giving a toss.

So what with doing a bit of pike fishing recently, and a mate mentioning that Toft was open to course & pike fishing for 3 weekends in January, imagine my surprise when I phoned up toft to book a boat and Jason answered the phone!

We went and had a day. Fishing Toft with a spinner was an opportunity too good to miss! No pike, but 12 1.5lb trout landed was good sport. The coarse anglers had a good catch of trout as well, but even me fat mate Bov could catch a trout or three fishing Toft with maggots! Your chance to coarse fish the reservoir has gone for this year, but fly fishing for trout opens on February 1st.

In short I just wanted to say Welcome Back to Jason Foster, I hope you can get this good fishery great again, and please please please can we have the option to fish that incredible late evening rise once again!!

You can visit the new Toft Newton website (including discussion forum and weather webcam) by clicking here

I haven’t cast a line in search of Pike for nearly 20 years now, so when the invitation came for a few hours wobbling a dead bait one early morning I thought yeah why not, it will make a refreshing change from trout. We met up in Brigg and fished the Old Ancholme from a spot just a side street from the precinct in Brigg.

A very simple setup of 12′ Carp rod, 8lb Maxima, 18” wire trace and a wobbled smelt accounted for my first little Pike of around 3lb above.

And not long after this 4.5-5lb’er below.

Not bad for a couple of hours, frosty morning work!

I’ve been thinking for a while now of trying out some form of lure fishing with a small or single handed multiplier reel. Inspired mainly by Rex ‘Yibbida Yibbida folks - Thank your mother for the rabbit’ Hunt, watching him single handedly flicking lures from a boat towards some sunkissed Aussie coastline. I thought that’s one style of fishing I’ve never tried and I really fancy a go at.

So I’ve been on the look out for a decent multiplier reel and a suitable rod. I think I’ve found a good reel in the Team Diawa Viento I managed to get from an American tackle shop via e-bay. Not an easy job as you might think as the Yanks seem to prefer right hand wind reels, but eventually I was lucky enough to win a bid on a left hand wind one. I’m still undecided about which rod to go for. I’d like something that will handle a BIG pike and cast lures big enough to catch big Pike, but it would be nice to have something a little versatile that could throw a smaller lure should if I fancy a spin for trout, perch or even a spot of harbour fishing, Rex Hunt syle, while on holiday. The rods that I have found so far include:

The G.Loomis Mag Bass

The Greys Prodigy Jerk Bait GPK 050

The Greys G100 Spin GHR 030

David Lumb Power Plus-X

Fox Predator Piker Jerkbait

I think I need a bit of experienced advice for this decision, so right now I’m off to check out the Pike Forums to see if there are any helpful souls in there who can put me on the right line. And hopefully, in the not too distant future, I’ll be armed with my own Pike outfit and posting pictures of some monster fish!

After an entire day of editing, cutting, pasting and adding sound tracks, my first attempt at video production is complete!

The video is of this years trip to Ladybower Reservoir and covers the 3 days of our fly fishing competition. Starring me, Gaz, Bov and Willie (and several trout), with footage from 2 different cameras, my Canon mvx10i and Gaz’s JVC. Filming by me and Gaz with a nice shaky bit in the middle courtesy of Bov.

It’s hardly an epic at 17 minutes long, but take my word for it, that’s long enough for your first attempt at production, especially using the editing software for the very first time. It was edited using Adobe Premiere 6.5, like all Adobe software it’s nigh on the industry standard and has features that I’ll only be finding out about sometime in distant future! Even so, the basics are fairly easy to grasp and that’s all I’ve used to produce this video. My thanks to Wez who gave me a brief tutorial on how to use Premiere and got me started. Wez produced his 5 minute movie ‘Playback’ for the local Meniscus Film Festival using Premiere so he’s a bit more familiar with it than I was. You can download Wez’s film here. (38.4MB - .ram file - Real Player required)

Anyway, enough plugging of Wez’s shoddy workmanship, it’s time to check out the newts’s masterpiece! Are you sittting down? Good because the file is HUGE :0( It’s been trimmed down as much as reasonably possible to make it downloadable but still watchable quality. I’m afraid its gonna be a 7 hour wait if you wanna download this film over a 56k connection. If you’re on 500k broadband it will be with you in 47 minutes, and if like me you’re on NTL’s 600k broadband you’ll be watching it within 39 minutes.

I called it ‘Escaping the Dragons in search of the Monsters’. I hope that needs no explaination!
It’s a .rm file so you’ll need Real Player to watch it. If you don’t have Real Player you can download it for free here.

Escaping the Dragons in search of the Monsters —> [171MB - .rm file]
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