Freshwater fishing.... i cut my teeth as a young 'un course fishing pond, lake river or canal, i used to do the lot and enjoyed it too, along came girls, motorbikes and beer and i stopped fishing,had my interest re awoken and started sea fishing, recently fancied hitting the freshwater again, i need to get some tackle as mine all got given away... I bought several mags, courese fisherman, anglers mail and the angling times, to have a look at what was about...

The world has gone mad... pellets, pellets, pellets and more pellets..

"when i were a lad..." the bivvy divvys were using boilies to catch wet carrier bags but it seems that most people are using them for much of their fishing, barbel, chub, bream... what happened to maggot, worm, sweetcorn and bread... fluorescent, glow in the dark, exploding pineapple crush pellets ...i just dont get it...

It would seem that these pellets have spoiled many waters for real baits these days... shame... i had a rose tinted memory of trotting maggots under a stick float

Am i getting old..

You don't have to use pellets or boilies. I use bread, worms, meat, corn, maggots, etc. and still catch more than my fair share (as well as lures). In fact most of the barbel and chub on my local river come out equally to bread or meat or pellets. I can't get on with pellets myself but no-one's told the fish that the "old" baits and methods don't work

The only problem is finding a nice pond/lake that hasn't been carpified! Or rivers that haven't been taken over by bivvied-up carp anglers ... sorry ... "barbel" anglers.

I'm lucky where I live ... got a nice quiet stretch of river. Plenty of room to rove.

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Cheers,
Lawrence

No need to use pellets I fish rivers and you always see the pellet brigade , they catch fish no doubt but so do I , difference is I spend most of the day mid river with my pin , maggot or worm .
Fishing every little glide and pool I can reach I travel lite catching everything Dace ,Roach, Trout ,Chub, Barbel (the odd big one ) Grayling and even Sea Trout .
On rivers they seem to be like Carp anglers but they are just after Barbel
If its what you like fair enough but like I said no need to use them to catch if like me you don't want

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I wind about, and in and out,
With here a blossom sailing,
And here and there a lusty trout,
And here and there a grayling,

And here and there a foamy flake
Upon me, as I travel
With many a silvery waterbreak
Above the golden gravel,

And draw them all along, and flow
To join the brimming river,
For men may come and men may go,
But I go on for ever.

-- Alfred, Lord Tennyson

Tony http://timebytheriver.blogspot.com/

No...your not getting old. I too grew up coarse fishing and used to love it. Still love trotting in winter with a stick and maggot. Very satisfying watching a float.

You all have a point though. So many pellets out there. I fished this winter with a buddy of mine who is an out-and-out coarse fisherman. One trip to the river and it had him packing his pole, elastic, pellets away and itching to get more fish on the stick. Not sure he'll ever take up fly fishing fully, but he's had a go.

I guess one mans **** is another's cake and all that...but for me, just can't see the attraction in pellet fishing.

Pellets actually got used many years ago - trout pellets from when commercial trout farming started up. The widespread "pellet era" has passed me by too - mainly because I never got into the commercial carp fisheries from where it originated on a larger scale. I rarely use them, but most of my coarse fishing these days is just fun chubbing on my local small river, roving with bread, cheese, meant, prawns etc. If I do have a dabble at carp, nobody seems to have told them that they should only eat pellets - they still seem to like corn, meat and bread. To be fair though, I think we're all talking about pleasure fishing. Match fishing is a bit different as numbers are obviously critical and its all about have an edge, which pellets gave at one point, but probably less so now. My mate has returned to match fishing this year and is winning a fair bit of money (at Makins mainly)....but he has had most success on bread! (popped up crust). It comes full circle....

I think pellets are on the wane a bit now - as soon as everyone starts using them the fish start wising up and they lose their edge, so the "thinking" anglers try to keep one step ahead of the sheep by using something else.

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The constant diet of high protein pellets is certainly making the fish bigger, especially those with the ability to hoover up bottom food like barbel. We never had so many double figure barbel twenty years ago.

Whether or not there's a side effect on their health, or behaviour, is not yet known.

regards,

Doc

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www.doctor-fly.com

We never had so many barbel 20 years ago full stop! I can't really believe the big barbel catches we see now are down to a diet of pellets are they? some of them are from smaller rivers that I didn't think got hammered so much in that way, but I could be wrong. I think its also partly because more people are specifically targeting them too nowadays. All records keep going up though don't they? bream, tench, perch, carp, even pike (no pellets for pike!) -all at weights we would never have thought imaginable years back. Is this because the fish are bigger, or just that anglers have become better at catching the bigger ones, or a bit of both?

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coarse fishing , likr fly fishing has evolved. We don't still fish with the same flies as we did 20/30 yrs ago (on the whole), nor do we use the same tackle/bait. Mr Crabtree's (rose tinted)world has long gone. I use pellet/maggot/anything that will bring best results under any given venue/conditions.

You may as well say "what happened to toothpaste?" or "what happened to washing up liquid?" As with pretty much everything else the marketing people got hold of it and decided there was cash to be made from flooding the market with new products ("Our Best Ever", "New, improved" and so on.) When I was a child I seem to recall that the choice of toothpastes was between brand names - Colgate, Aquafresh, Macleans. Now it is Colgate Ultra Whitening, Colgate Sensitive, Colgate Total, Aquafresh Ultra Clean, MacLeans Tartar control... It's just mind boggling.
Fishing (and that is all forms, not just coarse) has gone down the same road. The marketeers know it.... if something is new it must be better...
I once read a tale (not sure how true it is, but it is apocryphal) that KFC reduced the price on one of their burgers and it sold less... they put the price up and advertised is a "New Price" and sales went up.
There is money to be made from bringing out a new Pineapple & Anchovy boilie because more people will buy it than the old Anchovy & Pineapple Boilie. People want to be seen to be up and to date and modern. The old principles of "if it ain't broke, don't fix it" are fast disappearing.
As for Coarse fishing... I still really enjoy a few hours trotting, or a few hours float fishing on a country side canal. Sweetcorn, maggots, worms, casters.. they all catch. My biggest carp was on a bunch of red maggots whilst all around the boilie & pellet boys were blanking. Mind you I couldn't actually see them, not with all their camo gear.

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Jon
Always time for one last cast...

but...tackle has improved no end. When i was a kid we had 2 choices for a decent reel. A mitchell 300 or an abu cardinal. ABUs were way out of my league pricewise. The mitchell was also expensive, but not quite as dear. Today you can get a good reel for a whole lot less, with a decent drag. Rods are lighter, longer, more responsive etccc...