Spring is here!

Isn't it funny how things just seem to come into place like one big jigsaw. at the start of the week I was contemplating going down the canal on saturday morning for a fish spotting session and possibly to do a bit of spinning for perch (My favourite fish) I checked the weather forecast and it looked good, sunny but cold which is better than it has been for the last few weeks. Then in work I was approached by Kristian (or Krystian or christian?) about swapping shifts, so i swapped his thursday with my saturday ( which I despise) so the weekend was looking good, however there was some things that needed sorting out on saturday morning so an afternoon's angling was organised on my local canal, know as the Sankey canal that runs from Widnes to St Helens via Warrington. The section running through widnes holds carp up to 36 pounds (or so I've heard) but they are not my target ,yet, what interests me are the large shoals of bream, masses of roach and schools of perch that swim in the depths. Also further down the canal where arge beds of reeds have created small laggoons there are pike ranging from the very small up to about 15 pounds or so, more on these later.

Saturday 5th april
After everything that needed to be done was done My Dad dropped me off at the canal for about 2.00pm, there was a number of anglers fishing the canal, including a load off kids and what was probably thier Dad, there were also 3 carp anglers bivvied up abut 10 feet from each other, I don't like fishing near lots of kids, some of them are alright in fact I fished alongside two young lads for most of the summer and they were decent, but you do get the occasional bad lot who make loads of noise and take the piss out of and you cant exactly impale them with your bankstick so I usually try to avoid them like the plague. So i decided to walk further down and try my luck in the lagoons, so I gradually made my way down the canal, running a lure through the lagoons to see if their was a stray perch waiting in ambush near the reeds i then came to a swim known as the apple tree, the name coming from the large overhanging tree that looks like a badly decorated christmas tree with all the flots and line snagged on it. I spent some time in this swim flicking the lure out just for the fun of it , I cast parralel to the bank as that is where i find the majority of perch, hiding in the bank, when i hit something solid, at first i thoughtI had hooked the bank but the swirls on the surface told me different, it was a pike and my first one at that.
Dissapointedly the pike didn't fight at all and came in easily, I lifted it out of the water to find it was only small, probably a 3 quarters of a foot long and 4 or 5 pounds but it was a nice fish and one to be proud of, unfortunately I had forgotten my camera in the rush to get down to the canal but it probably won't be the last pike I catch down there. As for the perch, well I never did catch on but I may return with some maggots and worms and attempt to catch some on saturday. Watch this space.
Heres to a productive spring.

Keeping up with the times!

With all the recent hype about Myspace and Facebook I thought it was time to get with the times and start a blog, far from bieng a purely social blog where i post my idiotic comments and pour my heart out over the keyboard, this is a serious blog about Hunting and Fishing my two most favourite past times. This isn't a blog for puffs or girls this is a blog for real men who do real stuff....like err...well shooting.
For those who may find it interesting I am 17 (eighteen in july) and a keen angler and hunter but due to college and a part time job those hobbies have taken a back seat over this last year or so, but that is surely to change over the next few months as the weather starts to warm up i will be squeezing in some fishing on my Local canal and i am yet to put the Cometa 200-s air rifle i got for christmas to proper use so beware the Local bird and rabbit population. Plus I will also be taking charge of some new ferrets when i can find a suitable pair and introducing them to my 1 year old lurcher Flash.
How i am going to fit all that in with a part time job and A-level exams i don't know but it makes life interesting which hopefully will make for interesting writing.