Fishing Trips - The bonus Gudgeon

Actually Catching Something.
Advice for Parents of Young Anglers

Fish Suppers for Sailors
A guide to fishing for yachtsmen.

It's nice to see perch again.

The last few years have seen a welcome return of perch to the river. There was a period of about twenty years when they were scarce, due to disease we were told.

There they were. The textbook signs of perch. Scatterings of minnows and small fry erupting from the water as they were attacked from below.

If you can get them the very best bait for perch is a minnow. This time I set up a simple undershotted float and fitted it with a #10 hook. The hook was baited with a tiny pill of bread, the tiniest ball of white that could be impaled on the very point. When this was dangled in rhe margins the minnows attacked and pretty soon one was hooked. Without handling it I swung it out into the middle where it was taken within two seconds. The perch, the first of half a dozen or so, came in fighting hard and I popped it into a keepnet.

If you return perch to the swim straight away they dash off and take the shoal with them. Half an hour in a keepnet calms them and they quite often stay in the same spot when released so you could catch them all over again if you were so inclined.

Those perch were easy to catch and went up to about a pound and a half. It was much harder to catch the minnows. Eventually I scared the shoal and went to return the rest.

I had a bonus. There in the net was a gudgeon. Now I hadn't caught any gudgeon but there it was, swimming happily around in the bottom of the net, bright and undamaged but the only way it could have got there was inside a perch. The lucky gudgeon must have been coughed up by its captor.