This is a very good early season pattern, not just on small but also larger stillwaters. It is suggestive of numerous little beasts that can be found at this time of the year at your local fishery. The pattern fishes best on the point of a two or three-fly cast. It’s best fished on a […]

Tench (tinca tinca) Weight: Any tench over 7lb is a specimen and a double figure fish is the fish of a lifetime, with only a few caught each season. It’s said that to work out the size of the biggest female in a water you can double the size of the biggest male. British record: […]

European Grayling (Thymallus thymallus) Weight: Small fish of between 8oz and 1lb are often taken by anglers fishing the upper reaches of Britain’s rivers for roach and dace. A grayling over 1lb is seen by many as a good fish, and a 2lb-plus fish is a real specimen on many venues. However there are a […]

Pike (Esox lucius) Weight: Small fish up to 1lb are caught often by accident with fish weighing between 3lb and 8lb normally providing the average sport for predator anglers. On venues where there’s a constant stream of food fish, pike will grow to 20lb and on venues such as trout stocked reservoirs the predator will […]

Perch (Perca fluviatilis) Weight: Shoals of small perch of a few ounces often pester anglers and a fish taken between 1lb and 2lb is seen as a good catch. On venues where there are large populations of small species like minnows, gudgeon and small rudd, specimen fish of 3lb-plus are seen as a real specimen […]

Crucian Carp (carassius carassius) Weight: Due to tendency to hybridise, the crucian record list has been ‘purged’ and only two waters in the UK are accepted as having true crucians by the British Record Fish Committee. These are Marsh Farm at Surrey and Summer Pit at Yateley in Hampshire. There are certainly plenty of other […]

Common (Bronze) Bream (Abramis brama)Weight: Younger fish of up to 2lb are silver in colour and are commonly known as skimmers, but once they mature they take on the familiar brown colouring. Fish between 5lb and 8lb from both stillwaters and rivers is seen as a good catch with low double-figure fish a bonus. Bream […]

The Life Cycle Spawning GroundsBarbel are odd as British coarse fish go. They lay their eggs in gravel, perhaps even digging a nest like a salmon or trout. They produce quite big eggs, 2-3 mm in diameter, like a trout and twice the size of a carp egg. Each female (big fish are always female) […]

Gareth Purnell, TCF editor, gets out his braid as he goes in search of a bag of Ferry Meadows bream and skimmers. My first brush with Ferry Meadows Lake near Peterborough was probably 15 years ago. Back then, working on Angling Times, we had an annual challenge and that’s how I got to know the […]

With flanks of soft burnished gold and blood red fins, the rudd is surely one of the most strikingly beautiful fish in the UK. But sadly, like the crucian carp, it is far less common than it once was. Stocking policies geared towards carp have seen rudd pushed out of many fisheries; thankfully, however, there […]

Rudd (Scardinius erythrophthalmus) Weight: On venues where there are large shoals, the fish tend to become stunted and rarely grow to above 4oz to 5oz in weight. On larger British waters, such as gravel pits, the average can be over 1lb with a fish weighing more than 2lb being regarded as a specimen. The odd […]