Notable Captures & PBs

It has been a tough old winter for all of us and to end a run of blanks I had been toying with the idea of a day’s grayling fishing however in the end I decided against the easy option of going trotting for small grayling and thought instead I’d target some perch. The conditions really seemed to be favourable for perch so I took the day off and headed to the River Derwent, where most of my biggest perch have come from.  It was a cold start, with a heavy shroud of fog, but just before the sun burned through it, about 11.30, I had a typically hesitant run and struck home into a good, chunky perch.  As soon as I saw it I knew it was a ‘three’ and when the scales registered 3lb 4oz, I reckoned it to be my largest since summer 2010.  Having checked my records when I got home, it has turned out to be an even more significant capture than I thought because it’s actually my biggest since I caught my PB way back in August 2007!  It’s my seventh ‘three’ but my first on bait as all of the others were taken …

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New Years resolution:  Update my blog more regularly! Three-quarters of the river season has already flown by since I last wrote, which is extremely slack of me, but hopefully there are still a few people out there interested in reading, so I’ll update on how my Summer fishing went and then I plan to do a small post on what I’ve done since (unfortunately not many fish to write about since November!), by which point I should be back in the habit of writing on here more regularly. The good news is that the fishing I did over the Summer was generally excellent!  I concentrated on a single river, the Derbyshire Derwent, and on a single species, Barbel. The regular rain certainly helped this Summer, keeping the levels topped up and keeping the barbel feeding confidently.  So many times in the past 4 or 5 seasons, I’ve heard anglers moaning – on the bank and on the internet – about the low river levels making barbel fishing difficult.  Personally, I never moaned because I still managed to find a good few fish, but I must say that sport was definitely better this season with a bit of extra water and …

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I really enjoy fly fishing. I don’t do enough of it, but when I get the chance to go, it’s great fun.  When it comes to using double-handed fly rods and targeting the magnificent Salmo salar, that sentence is all the more true. I’d only ever had one salmon fishing trip, which was a day and a half on the upper Tweed, almost a decade ago. I had such a great time there I’ve been wanting a follow-up session ever since. Incidentally on this trip, despite various calamities (including setting off my lifejacket inflator on a tangled cast!), I managed to land my first Atlantic Salmon, which was a very respectable 15lb in weight. The full story, which I shall one day have to tell, will inform you that despite being a complete salmon novice, I managed to land this fish alone, without a net. The angler I was fishing with had wandered a few hundred yards upstream from me and out of earshot. He had the shared net, so I had to improvise and tire the fish before beaching it and scooping it up in my arms! It was one of the proudest moments of my life! The great pretender in the …

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I managed to pick a couple of days break in the early-May rain, to fit in a 24-hour session with Shane Calton.  We visited Derbyshire’s Higham Farm Lakes and tackled up primarily for tench, but with the head of carp, bream and other species in there, we knew it would be difficult to target them solely. Higham is pretty local to me, so I used to fish this place quite regularly for the carp when I was 15 to 18, but I worked out that I have only been there once in the last 12 years! I was field testing a fair bit of Cyprinus night fishing gear, including a bivvy, a memory foam bedchair, a 3-5 season sleeping bag and a tackle barrow, which all performed superbly (Reviews on FishingMagic.com here). Before I arrived Shane had already landed a few bream in the 4-5lb bracket and as I was setting up he landed a tench of exactly 5lb, which was a very promising start. It was to be the last tench we had between us, but we each notched up carp overnight and I also had a bream and a strange fantail brown goldfish-cross thing, which I should have really taken …

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Footage of wels catfish being caught whilst fishing on the River Ebro at Riba Roja d’Ebre in Spain, including underwater footage shot with a waterproof camera. Read all about the exploits of me, Shane Calton and Dave Newby-Thornley in my articles: Alternative Ebro Part 1 – Zander, Roach, Barbel & Carp and Alternative Ebro Part 2 – Catfish, and also take a look at the River Ebro catfish video Shane shot during our trip.

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I haven’t posted a “true” blog post for a while now, I seem to have been abusing this blog and using it mainly as an interactive advertising board for other things I’ve been up to. My own fishing has been very disappointing lately (more on that later), and I turn 30 in a couple of weeks, so I’m in quite a reflective mood and thought this was an opportune time to fill in on how 2011 was for me in fishing… 2011 started off very slowly for me. A multitude of reasons have left me spending far less hours on the bank than I would have liked to, but thankfully most sessions I’ve made the most of the time I had and caught some reasonable fish. I only had chance to fit in one session before March, but then managed a couple more river sessions before the season ended.  The only fish I landed during this period were a few pike, topped off by an 18lb 13oz beauty, which I blogged about here. Once the rivers closed, my fishing mainly went on a self-induced hiatus. Buying my first home became the priority and despite ours being a relatively straight-forward purchase (so we were assured by the estate agents!), …

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Fishing on the River Ebro at Riba Roja d’Ebre in Spain, courtesy of Shane Calton. Watch as we get a treble hooker on the catfish rods! Read all about the exploits of me, Shane and Dave Newby-Thornley in my articles: Alternative Ebro Part 1 – Zander, Roach, Barbel & Carp and Alternative Ebro Part 2 – Catfish, and also take a look at the underwater Ebro catfish footage I shot during our trip.

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Just posted on FishingMagic today is an article about my recent predator session, where I managed to bag a trio of Pike, Eel and Zander, all after dark:  https://www.fishingmagic.com/predator-fishing-andrew-kennedy-nets-a-hat-trick/ (I’ve since also shared this post on my website here: River Predator Hat-Trick) I was testing out a new specimen unhooking mat from Cyprinus and the review of this well-made mat is also on FishingMagic here:  Cyprinus Beanie Mat Review

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So, you knew I was going, but how did I get on, over on the Ebro?  Well, I’m going to keep a little bit back for articles (which I’ll post the links to as soon as they’re online), but we had a brilliant week with Carl of Rio Ebro Angling and we did catch plenty of fish!  Although the catfish took a lot of convincing to feed and the “Charlie Boorman” tactics were almost resorted to!  But, as with all the best stories, it all came good in the end… Between us we caught 11 catfish, several zander and – in just one afternoon – over 50 quality roach to specimen proportions.  We fished for 6 days using baits & lures from boat & bank, so all in all there’s a lot for me to write about! The related articles will be in two parts, the first covering the zander, roach and carp fishing (Alternative River Ebro part 1 – zander, roach & carp) and the second covering all things catfish-related (Alternative River Ebro part 2 – catfish cannonade).  The articles should be appearing in the December 2011 & January 2012 issues of Angling Star, with “director’s cut” extended versions appearing on FishingMagic …

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This post has been an awful long time coming, but finally – on a train on my way to a stag weekend in Liverpool – I’ve found time to patch together my account of a terrific day I had, doing something I do too little of these days; fly fishing. I received an email from Secretary of Errwood Fly Fishing Club, Ian Gould, offering the chance of “smashing your trout PB on fly gear”, if I joined him in the Spring for a day on the club’s venue, Errwood Reservoir. After taking a quick look on their website – www.effc.co.uk – at the quality of the scenery and the fishing on offer in the hills above Buxton in Derbyshire’s Peak District, I could not resist a visit! Ian emailed me again towards the end of March, informing me that the season had kicked off well, with some very large fish coming out, so I got down there as soon as I could. The week previous, Ian – who I believe still holds the venue record with a trout of over 14lb – had caught 3 double-figure trout the week prior to my visit. It turned out that I managed to pick the hottest, sunniest April day I …

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