The Gasper Lake Pole Experiment

After joining the Salisbury Club I was persuaded to join the match angling fraternity on a more permanent basis and began fishing the local club matches and also the inter club matches. I started to do fairly well and made friends with a couple of other young anglers called John Stephonson and Brian Duckett. They were very good to me and taught me a lot about match fishing. These matches are to be the subject of my adventures later on in my memories. This chapter is about one particular fishing trip.

Brian and John were really up to date on the match angling scene and informed me that many matches around the country were being won by large bags of small silver fish. They were being caught in great numbers using the new innovation of the Angling Pole. I had never heard of pole fishing and I must admit that I was a complete sceptic regarding the worth of this type of method.

I considered myself to be quite fast regarding catch rate providing that I had plenty of fish in front of me so I challenged Brian to a contest. It would be rod versus pole. John agreed to fish with a rod as well so we could ensure that if I did not have the fish in front of me, Brian would still have him to compete against. The problem of course was to select a venue which would suit the match. We needed a lake which had a really good head of silver fish to ensure it would be a fair test.

Fortunately, Brian knew of a lake which suited us both our methods. It was situated just outside Warminster between the Longleat and Shearwater Lakes. The lake was about a couple of acres and was quite shallow. The important thing is that it had a large head of small silver fish such as roach and bream. The largest size was around a pound, but for every pound fish you would catch 30 around the 2-3ounce mark.

You could still get the odd tench but they were few and very far between. Once your swim had been filled in with about six or seven large balls of ground bait, it was one a chuck, providing you kept the loosefeed pinkies going in at regular intervals. Using light floats at the depth of about two and a half feet, which was just off the bottom, we literally filled our boots with mostly “snotties”, which were small silver bream and slightly bigger roach.

 In five hours it was possible to get between 20 and 30 pound of these silvers.

 They were called “snotties” or “skimmers” because of the slime which seemed to come off them and get everywhere after skimming them across the surface into the hand and then being unhooked and dropped into your keep net.

We found 3 swims that were side by side and seemed quite equal. We gave the swims about half an hour of baiting up before the match began. I fished between John, on my left and Brian on my right. I used my 12ft float rod, as did John and Brian used his new pole. We fished out at about 35ft, which enabled Brian to fish with a long line, swinging in fish straight to hand.

It turned out to be the perfect place to try the experiment and the venue could not have been fairer to either of us 3 anglers. Being close together we could see how each of us was doing at any time. This would give us the opportunity to note each other’s methods and to calculate each other’s catch rate. The only thing we couldn’t control was the individual weights of the fish we were catching.

The end product was that we could not keep up with the catch rate of Brian’s pole when there was little or no wind. We gained a bit when the wind gusted and picked up a bit, as using the rod and sinking the line, we could present the bait better and got more bites. In fair conditions however we just could not compete with the pole catch rate. In the end, although we had twenty pound bags, Brian weighed in a clear 5lb more than John and I. 

I think that after that we all realised the worth of carrying a pole as part of your tackle and that it was well worth using in the right conditions. It must be noted that the poles around that time were only about 22ft in length and quite thick and heavy.

We were to see that in the next ten to twenty years the advent of much better pole material which was thinner, lighter and almost twice the length. This would pave the way for using poles on a very short line, improving bait presentation out of the control of anyone fishing with a rod. These days most anglers use the pole as their main weapon.

The other side of the coin is that some of the lighter, longer poles can cost thousands of pounds. The price of a fishing rod, however, has tumbled and they are a lot cheaper than they were in my day. In line with poles, the rods have also become much lighter and stronger to use. This helps me as I have arthritis in my wrists and fibromyalgia in my arms and shoulders. If they were heavier I would have had to give up angling years ago, so let’s celebrate angling technology. I did get a pole but I never did get to grips with pole fishing and I use the humble rod for all my fishing these days.