New kids on the Block

After last weeks poor catches I pulled out the floattube again today and went to the outskirts of a lake not to far away.
I was out with LW, who could do with a bit of fishing after a few months with other obligations. The spot we went to wasn't topnotch scnenery-wise but we had a fair chance of hooking up with a few resident pike.

Strange bird

Well, to cut a long story short:
I didn't catch a damn thing this weekend.
After sailing through a storm and impressive showers yesterday, I went out to a small lake today where I usually fish for perch during the summer. For some reason I never went there to fish for pike. Until now that is...

Back to school

Everybody who's ever lost his/her Fish-of-a-Lifetime please raise your hands!
Do you know exactly what is the most effective way to land a fish ?
Well, yesterday, when I was out pikefishing at a spot were I lost a Big One last year after a pretty darn long fight, I figured that I didn't...

My new Toy

It took some patience and persistence but here it is: My new toy!!!
A CTS Affinity X 9ft. 8-weight. I bought the blank from Martin de Vries who lives nearby and imports the blanks into the Netherlands these days.

Slippin'and slidin'

..so, I decided I REALLY needed a switchrod for my Asp-fishing on a big river. More so, my live would lose all its meaning if I didn't get one fast. So I build a rod, made a few shootingheads and this started the whole doublehanded thing for me.
All in all switchroddin’ has been great fun from the start but while fishing I have to strip a large part of my shootinghead inside the rings to fish a piece of river efficiently. That poses me with an interesting challenge: How do I cast the line out to the horizon without as little effort and as quickly as possible. For this I made up a sort-of Tongario-rollcast mutation to at get the entire head out of the rings but it was far from pretty. And it was noisy to! Not good...
There had to be a better way to get things done and let you me tell you all, there is! A friend told me about this cast and I thought I'd share it with you. The cast has been invented by Juergen Friesenhahn and he calls it the snap-slip-spey.
Watch the inventor cast and give it a try for yourself...

Battle scars and the first signs off fever

Ever made the best of plans and when you look back, you wonder why almost nothing of it has actually been done. Let me tell you a bit about this week when I really, really wanted to go fishing. With my girlfriend away from home for a few days nothing seemed to stand in the way of a big fish-fest. I had talked a bit about maybe going here or there with some friends but in the end all this was a dead-end street. So I decided to stay at home and really max out my fishing time. Fishing during the day and the evenings would be spend behind the vise, tying like a mad professor.
The reality? Well, you probably get the picture….
But yesterday it was all about to happen. After breakfast I dumped all my gear in the car including my floattube and headed for a nice little lake not too far away. Big pike live there and they’d better be ready for this man on a mission.
After being checked for my permit twice and a bit of off a discussion about how to interpret the regulations I finally got myself into the water. There I was, floating around like a big rubber duck. It had been a bit of a struggle but the scenery, a gasp of fresh air that felt like it only feels in the fall, it had been worth it…. And look, the small depth finder mounted onto my floattube even showed fish and a few nice bumps and holes in the bottom of the lake. Filled with expectations I made the first few casts, but nothing happened. When I had worked this part of the lake for about 15 minutes without anything happening I crossed the lake my streamer trailing some 15 meters behind me, crossing the deep part of the lake. I’ve caught fish paddling like this from one spot to another, so who knows. I might be in luck after all. When I looked at my depthfinder when I was halfway across the lake instead of the 25+ feet I expected to have underneath me, my little digital friend told me it was only 13 feet deep here. Perfect! And it stayed that deep for the rest of the way over to the other side. I must have discovered some kind of narrow ridge, I thought, might be something nice to remember. When I had fished the first half of this side of the lake I was a bit surprised to see another ridge, 13 feet deep followed by a 15 foot hole with a flowerbed in it and two fish I realized I had been playing the depthfinders demo-program nonstop for the last hour or so….
This was an omen and I decided to move to another lake to see if the fish were biting over there and after all of this, luckily they did.

I caught a nice 80+cm fish on my second cast. A few nice German construction workers were very surprised when they found out I was going to release the fish.
When one of them explained how nice a “hecht” is when you cook it on the grill the fish jumped out of my hands back into the water, leaving me behind with some battle scars, because when your fingers touch the gill-covers, you bleed.




After this I caught another, smaller, fish and while I was fighting this one a really BIG pike completely leapt out of the water a few meters away. Off courses I spend some time trying to hook this biggie as well, but without any success. When it got dark I got out of the water with cold feet, a runny nose and the first signs of Big Pike-fever….

Ide and the IJssel-river

...a few pictures from spring 2009; Ide season on the IJssel-river and some other spots.

Some old pictures

I dusted off the archiveboxes and stumbled upon these....

Get Up!!!

...a picture showing why it isn't hard for me to get up early during the weekend.

We were fishing the IJssel-river near Zwolle last sunday, fishing for asp.
Besides one foul-hooked bream, which put up a fight that would make his father proud, we had lots of castingpractice....

If the waterlevel rises soon, we might have a shot at catching an asp. If not, we'll have to wait untill next spring.