Gone to seed.

I have had some vac packed casters in the fridge for a while now, and some pva friendly hemp, again vac packed and have been thinking about the roach on the fading blue lagoon. A lot. Has a lot of draw for a water the size of a good football pitch and perhaps the pole would be a good way to hold  a bait just on or just off the bottom?

Couple extra bits purchased and the hedge mostly cut it was on the nice level platform swim with a good ledge just in reach of the really old glass LERC 6 metre jobbie. Line trapped with a length of silicon tube (mistake). Not sure if a flick tip or whip set up, one is to hand, the other just the depth and a short line meaning shipping several sections to net. Anyway, I had enough depth to go just longer than the penultimate section and unship the butt if required.

A 0.6g pole float, 0.5 g olivette stopped with a micro swivel and dropper on the hook link with  a #16 micro barbed Kamatsua hook . I can just about see to use a No.8 shot as a dropper as long as the cut is deep enough but fear I am near No. 6  territory now. Which does make a difference with such a fine bristle. You see so much of what is going on with the bait when you go that fine.

Caster doesn't weed out all the small stuff but certainly catches the eye of the better fish.

I did lose an eel when the hook knot slipped  (another casualty of failing eye sight even with the hook tier) but don't think I would have won  anyway given the vertical nature of the pole tip bend downwards. Then another sharp pull next put in and the whole rig had gone in a flash  I had only used one silicone tubing instead of two.. Lesson learnt. Must have been a tench or a mud pig.

This certainly helped with this hard pulling hybrid of well over a pound.

A very different head down fight this with this one and I knew straight away I did not want to loose it. 1.02 and a lovely last fish. Do think I might go for ready tied hook links for this sort of fishing when being accurate is much more of an advantage.

The boy done exceedingly good.

Probably my last trip up the A47 and the A6 to Loughborough, for a while anyway as middle Bureboy has only gone and done a 1st  in Chemistry. Well worth the extra hour stuck on the South Brink between Wisbech and Guyhuirn in a monsoon like deluge. And with a broken coil spring that I nursed there and back and then to King's Lynn the next day.

He's off to Sheffield  for a year to get his teaching qualification next. Best get the Charabanc back on the road for that. 

Down the  A140 and A12 today for a lovely lunch with my parents and brother, who has adopted the Gerard Depardieu look it seems.

Latitude schmatitude

The Bureboy Diaspora had all returned to the sacred earthen hearth for the weekend  but given a slough of despondency caused by the marsh ague it fell to me to collect the eldest from the station and 4 of us least affected headed eastwards (Suffolk) for the day. Passport control navigated we took the usual 6 hours to drive round Lowestoft and off the A12 at Wearham towards the home of Adnams brewery and distilleries.

Wherever you are in town the lighthouse is always looking over your shoulder it seems. No big brewery stack like the East End Truman chimney but sleek and elegant pipes from the distillery.

Would have been our early lunch choice but no room at this inn, even early doors. Wonder how long a rival Greene King pub would last before the dirty tricks and sabotage started?

This  bay had a certain sativa like quality about the leaves. Cook's little helper perhaps?

Now, this looks  like some likes like plastic flowers in a window box, low maintainence gardening and all that but they did move in the wind in a very realistic way. Perhaps they were made by a 3D printer. Or I had had some of Cooks' little helper. Purely for medicinal use Officer.

After an average lunch we took a tour of the charity shops and Southwold's only book shop. Amongst the yummy mummies and chinless husbands I had noticed several strangely attired women, all with wellies (brightly coloured of course) and tear drop eye make up and face sequins.  Ah, Latituders who had just popped out for a bit of shopping, that glamping stuff being so infra dig these days. Why glamp when you can rent a town house?

Not sure this street is particularly well represented at the polite festival happening just down the A12. Certainly not glampers anyway. Miserable gits.

Ah, a bit more like it and indeed, why consider life's complexities when the leather runs smooth on the passenger seat..

 Down to the pier, and probably one of the nicest piers there is. The bass were in too.

Stunning view either way Yes, the lighthouse is still keeping an eye on you.

Imagine exercise being so easy and pleasant.

It is quite tongue in cheek some of this stuff and the better for it I think.

Just time for a quick toe on the water and then home to the sick bay.

Schoolies

Day trip to Southwold yesterday.  Couple of chaps taking advantage of the rash of schoolies about. Most bites missed but they still had several little bars of dashing silver and spiny fins.

The long and winding road.

Took the slow road westbound the other day. Makes a change from the shorter and faster A148. Swung off just past Letheringsett and along the long flint wall bounding the parkland and the dammed Glaven that runs through  the Bayfield Estate. Home to an avenue of gunnera.

R

The dam that Bailey wrote he sat on just a few hours after a long and ultimately fruitless battle with a massive unseen Mediterranean conger.

Looping  round the Glaven flows under the red brick bridge at Wiveton before making it seaward at Cley next the Sea which it hasn't been for a long  time.

On the A149 and wending through the summer bottle neck that is Stiffkey, one time parish of the Vicar of Stiffkey who made it his education to ahem, save the souls of London's fallen and gin sodden women of the night. He was eaten by a lion in a cage eventually. Stiffkey is also the home of the Stukey Blue cockle. And divided by the Stiffkey River. which like the Glaven is one of Norfolk's 9 chalk streams.

Norfolk pastoral. Gorgeous when that little river leaves it's banks each winter too and spreads over the flood meadow. There are avocet on the scrapes downstream too.

Norfolk particularly is the home of flint, red brick and pantiles and of course the hollyhock. And the screamimg swifts.

Past Wells next the Sea (which like Cley isn't next anymore) and we are running along the miles of Norfolk red brick walls bounding the paladian and feudal servitude that is the Holkham Estate and with the inland Burnham's it's the start of miles and miles of Boden clad Bray Villes. One day TT the glorious North East diaspora will rise up and smite them to the ground...

A good place to start the Great Insurrection would be Burnham Overy Staithe TT. The man seen industriously scrubbing a mooring buoy heartily agreed with my observation (based on his tirade of invective and spittle) that he wasn't feeling the Range Rover Evoque load of ladies who lunch exercising their massive hounds in the creek.  He's one of the advance guard softening them up for when the Great Rage falls on the land.

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Just above the tidal confluence of another Norfolk chalk stream, the River Burn is divide round and under Burnham Overy Lower Mill.

Not much to see through the Polaroids in the main pool. Composing the abstract below in the main flush I caught a flash of mahogany and creamy white.

Time for some serious looking now and on with the CPL filter. And yes, spots and that useless adipose fin.

 Browns and at least two really serious rainbows

Back on the road and into serious BrayVille land as we hit Brancaster and it's Staithe.

 Found this classic North Norfolk Poppyland tableau just outside the Boden enclave. Truly stunning. Running red with the blood of the braying class come the Glorious Day.

Hunger called but baulked at the cost of an artisan burger in a yurt. What the feck are stealth chips?

Made do with some rather nice mackerel pate. But sea bass? Wild or not you are on the list for that heinous crime Mr. Fishmonger.

We are yet to determine what this is from. Very long..

Nice table. But £350 though.

As we hit nearly sunny Hunny we are into the distinctive carstone construction that marks an outcrop of the honey coloured rock that straddles the higher land  looking down on Lynn and the westward Fens and the Brecks. They are for future road trips.

Tail like a paint brush and those teddy bear eyes...

Fancied a tinca or two so set off  to the very local water. Which didn't take me long to get to being as it is so very local. Pigeon conditioner and hemp and sparing dribbles of corn to get them nosing about for the golden grain. As opposed to the Trumpmeister's golden rain Ruskie trap. 

You have to take what comes until those needle bubbles give the game away, though some may be the two or three larger bubbles of a bream or eight.

Eventually the larger fish will muscle in and  send up those tell tail signs and as hoped for  a couple of tincas did pay a visit to the pan net. The very local water doesn't throw up large tench but they are beginning to show some signs of filling out a little. Probably slightly heavier than I thought on reflection. But not by much.

Who could resist those teddy bear eyes?

And at a push you could paint your bog door blue with that paintbrush tail.

Got that odd purple tinge to the belly this one. And a bigger tail with a corresponding power in the fight. Does look as if it might have recently spawned. It has been a stop start and extended spawning season for several species this year. 

One of the more usual long thin fish from the very local water, again with a distended vent and a lovely yellow belly.

Decided on an early retirement as wine o'clock beckoned and the mist was starting to rise wraith like. What a lovely water this is. Have I mentioned it is very local?

Can you see what it is yet?

I thought this might have been  an aileron at first but would have to be a very long wing indeed.  A mast for a large,  sleek racing catamaran perhaps?

Nature red in tooth and signal claw

Can't pass by without turning down the track for a look see. Chub have long since beat it,  think they are getting  hammered down the side stream now. Anyway, slashing smash and grab from a pike hiding under the reed cover.  Big old signal cray makes a getaway looking all the world like a scalded lobster with banded claws.  I do love this bridge. And all I see from it.

Caught in spite of the tackle

"Nostalgia for an age yet to come". Buzzcocks, Penetration and probably someone else before.

There is a huge yearning  in the brotherhood of the angle for a melancholic past and plenty of corduroy, tank tops and flat caps to be seen over (and this is the hipster driven irony) the various social media platforms. The worst must be from Fennel's Priory, a man who noodles on about writing in fountain pen ink and has one of the most active media savvy social media marketing presences I have seen.  Why have a vintage and mortgage  money centre pin for trotting and have to pull the the line off the reel with  a heavy, expensive mortgage money  hand made float on a fast flowing, shallow grayling run? Yes. I do like my old Cardinal 155's for their aesthetic looks and wish I had had the money for the infinitely better 55 variants back in the 1980 day. Yes, I still have and use rods from then. But mostly because I have always been broke and too lazy to buy new till very recently. My point is?

Fished for a few pleasant hours yesterday evening away from the DIY on a creaking Stage 2 on the very local water. It took a while for the hemp and pellets to work and though not a cauldron of bubbles plenty to go at and 5 bream and a few bits was a pleasing result.

It really is lovely playing a fish on a centre pin. It is lovely having an old rod that does what it says it should. But here is the but. Casting or better put swinging  out  a float is haphazard and limiting on distance. You can't cast past and wind back to sink the line. So the float might go anywhere and the line catches the surface drift. The rod is great for hand sized fish on the drop. not keeping decent fish out of lillies.

Horses for courses. And don't be lazy and swap the rod and reel to suit the method.