I have found a little aid that allows me to switch from an 8mm to an 18 mm boilie, a 8mm soft hooker pellet, a couple of grains of sweetcorn or a small piece of luncheon meat, instantly and in the dark, as required, without faffing about with those nasty spikey baiting needles or those fiddly boilie stops.

These are small metal barbed spikes that tie on to the end of the hair in the place of that difficult to tie small loop. They come in four sizes: 5 mm, 10mm, 13mm and 15mm and in two thicknesses of wire, the thinner wire usually only has one barb where as the thicker wire and longer varieties have two. Be aware that the 5mm size is more like 8mm in length!

The second one down in the picture below is the finer wire and only has one barb, I would worry if I was casting a large boilie a long distance with this one but the double barbed variety really hold all but huge baits well.

I find these especially useful when fishing small boilies that the baiting needles usually split and they enable me to fish small soft hooker pellets on a hair without encountering the same problems. You can also switch to a couple of maggots or casters when using the fine wire versions. The 13mm spike allows even greater variations such a mixture of real and pop up sweetcorn to achieve different buoyancies or an 8mm boilie with a little piece of rig foam to get the same effect. I am even going to try using a plastic caster to hold various sizes of worm on the spike.

There is only one disadvantage I can forsee and that is the effect of the weight of the spike on a small bottom bait which might prevent the bait being picked up by a lightly browsing fish but this could easily be overcome by using a slightly larger spike and a small piece of buoyant material such as rig foam to overcome the weight of the spike.

I have never seen these in a tackle shop but if you search for “bait spike” on Ebay you will get several types and sizes.

Be careful when putting the bait on these as they often have a very large barb or two and would be difficult to pull out of a careless finger, I never let my less experienced students use them – or barbed hooks for that matter.

Many modern publications are little more than the work of advertising copy writers who happen to fish and I have been a little guilty of this here at times.

Recently my attention was drawn to a quote from someone who is amongst the greatest angling writers of all time.

The artifice of fishing is displayed not only in the delusion of the fish, but to some extent in the delusion of the fisher also. Let him but have the power of persuading himself that the boy in him has never grown up, or better, let it be so without his knowing it, and the world is his oyster.

H.T. (Hugh Tempest) Sheringham (Coarse Fishing)

Oh, how I wish I could write like that!

The fishing was hard due to the frost the previous night and instead of a bite every cast we had to settle for three fish all day.

This lad will remember his first fish – a two and a half pound perch.

As I netted this fish I looked behind me to see that the considerate angler mentioned earlier was also playing his first fish of the day and he agreed to a group photo. His fish weighed three and a half pound so this brace totals six pounds – not something you see every day!

One of the earliest EA backed events last summer was the annual Sparsholt open day when their excellent lake is open to potential students and then the general public for free coaching sessions. I have attended this event for the last few years and as usual was unfortunately far too busy to take photos. The coaches involved were also allowed our own day’s fishing during the college holidays – this is the stamp of carp it is possible to catch on the float.

Another regular summer event was Staunton Park near Havant where StreetSport organise a series of coaching days for local young people. This is about the fifth year I have been coaching at this venue, here is a group we refer to as “the usual suspects”, some of whom I have been coaching from the begining.

The carp was the first we have caught from this venue during the coaching sessions and took a single red maggot on a size eighteen hook to a two pound hooklength fished on an elasticated four metre whip. It took my student and I fifteen minutes to subdue and for ten minutes of that I was playing him and the fish.

I am still working with Slough Council and have had some new students this Summer, all of whom have started well.

I really am the luckiest man I know.

We were due to meet a group of Nick’s mates who knew the river well and we had booked in to the hotel on the golf course which owned the fishing. On our arrival the first thing we did was walk the river, but so early on in the season all the banks were totally overgrown and very steep, we couldn’t see most of the river and didn’t know where the paths down to the water were. We decided to wait for local knowledge to arrive in the person of Nick’s mates and so we went to register in the hotel, sort out the tackle and discuss tactics.

When we returned to the river everyone had arrived, picked all the best swims and cut paths down to the river and we were left with a couple of less than ideal pegs. Whilst we were walking the banks looking for likely swims we were called over by another angler who produced a strange herring like fish from his keep net. He demanded that as we were both coaches we should identify this mystery fish. I suspected it might be a member of the migratory shad familly and with the judicisious use of my blackberry I was able to show him a picture of an Allis Shad which left him impressed. It was the first one I had ever seen in real life, they are becomming quite rare and are only found in a few rivers in this country but when I suggested the reason it was dead might have something to do with it being kept in a keep net, in slack, shallow water and in full sunlight, I lost another potential disciple!

We caught lots of dace and chub but only one barbel, which despite me spending most of the two days float fishing finally came to a maggot feeder. Another river added to my barbel list.

I will return to this stretch of the river later in the season – forearmed with a little more knowledge, a lot less tackle to carry and a pair of chest waders – but not his year.

It was a delight to get back to to my beloved river Kennet where over the next few weeks I was able to catch a number of barbel around the seven pound mark on a float and centrepin. Despite the low water levels which were to plague my river fishing all summer.

North of Watford! That was the plan. It’s always raining up north, Yorkshire people are even reputed to have webbed feet it rains so much up there. They must have some flow in their rivers.

A trip was arranged with Weller of the Yard, who now lives so far up north he calls Yorkshire men southerners, to meet up for a couple of days of fishing around the Boroughbridge area. I invited Graham Walker who lives near York, a fellow PAA coach and also my accountant, as he speaks the local dialect even better than I do (during my army service I served almost exclusively with Yorkshire regiments – although there is nothing exclusive about Yorkshire regiments) .

We ended up fishing the river Swale and guess what, it was low and clear with hardly any flow. On the first day we fished a narrow stretch which had a little more flow than the rest and caught an assortment of dace and small chub but on the second day we went to a wider and deeper stretch on the recommendation of the local tackle shop. Here I was able to fish a large stick float with a little more finesse and although there were not so many bites I did catch this chub.

As you can see from the photo I was able to wade out and feed straight from my bait apron, my favourite type of fishing.

After a couple of hours of constant trotting and feeding I was getting tired and decided to fish the same line with a maggot feeder while I had a bit of a sit down. The result was this barbel which fought well above its weight and nearly straightened my hook.

Another barbel from a different river.

I liked the look of the river Swale and I would like to fish it again when it was carrying a bit more colour, shame it isn’t a hundred and fifty miles further South.

The moral of this summer could be whilst some barbel fishing can be very scientific and technical and float fishing for them is fun, if your life depended on catching one from a strange water, a maggot feeder is probably your best bet!

I usually start my spring campaign after crucian carp at Marsh Farm and this year was no exception but all I could catch was lots and lots of small to medium sized tench – not that this was much of a hardship, but I am still looking for my first four pound crucian.

In May I moved to Wylies Lake at Thatcham to continue my tench fishing and after a couple of medium sized tench over as many sessions I found myself in one of those early season tench fishing dilemmas, a swim like a washing up bowl, full of bubbles but unable to get a bite. I had started at Wylies with red maggots in a block end feeder fished as a bolt rig, with a short hook length and plastic maggots on the hook. This method had caught me most of my tench from Marsh Farm and is a good method of searching a water as it doesn’t involve ground bait which attracts the crayfish, I had also tried my favourite long rod and centrepin float fishing with a pole float and paste as bait. Both methods had already caught me a few tench at Wylies that season but everything failed to produce a bite on the day in question.

A fellow angler told me that everyone else had had the same problem that week so, in desperation, I replaced the ball of paste with a large lob worm on a size six hook. The rod I was using was a Harrison S/U stepped up float rod and a Grice and Youngs Avon Supreme that I had inherited from Roy loaded with eight pound line, I was fishing heavier than usual due to the heavy weed growth.

The result was this beautiful tench at eight pound three ounces, my second best ever.

This page will explain my enthusiasm for Peter and and his company. Whenever I see a new item in my local tackle shop with his name on it I always think “this must be good, what’s it for?” in that order! Mr Drennan doesn’t sell any rubbish and his new website maintains that standard.

I am an enthusiastic river angler (as some of you may know) and my favourite area of the website can be found under the articles section. Here you can find descriptions of various floats, their designs, evolutions and uses written by the man himself, who was part of that evolution and design process. Here is the man who wrote the book, produced, directed and starred in the film and designed and printed the T shirt!

This site is already top of my bookmark list, there is lots more content, including videos, so go on, have a browse.

Back in the early nineteen eighties I had just completed my two or three year transition from soldier to policeman with all the upheaval of family life that this involves and was settling down to a much more stable lifestyle than had been possible before. Luckily this meant more time for fishing and it is during this period that what ever skills I have started to develop.

In those days there was a total closed season for coarse fish on both lakes and rivers, so if you wanted to go fishing between the 15th March and the 15th June trout fishing was your only option. Some clubs stocked their waters with a few token rainbow trout and everyone carried on as normal using coarse fishing methods and tackle but saying they were fishing for trout, if challenged. I chose to learn to fly fish for the trout on more heavilly stocked fisheries that specialised in providing trout fishing.

It was during one closed season that I met Roy Meincken. He worked in an office on my beat at Heathrow and we started fly fishing for trout together. One day, some months later, I called in to his office for my usual cup of tea and he showed me a reel that his mother-in-law had bought him, thinking it was a fly reel.

It was, as you can see a very fine and expensive centrepin reel made by a firm called Adcock and Stanton, but I soon discovered it was not the sort of centrepin I had known as a boy, this one ran on ball bearing races and was as smooth as a pint of Dublin Guinness.

I had to explain to him what it was for and a week or so later found us on the banks of the river Colne at West Drayton where I showed him how to trot a float with it.

I don’t remember what effect the demonstration had on him but I do remember the effect it had on me – I was captivated and I wanted one of these for myself. Also on this day I think I became a confirmed river angler!

Shortly afterwards I bought a replica Match Aerial, a traditional centrepin (but I now know, not a particularly good example) and whilst this was fine for legering and trotting a big float on fast water for barbel, it would not perform as well as the Adcock and Stanton with a lighter float on a more gentle stream. I just did not have the spare cash for a better reel and of course, there were not so many being made then, they had yet to become fashionable, John Wilson was unknown and most people would ask if it was a sea reel or a fly reel when you used one in public.

A year or so later, after the breakdown of both our marriages, Roy and I fished together a lot more ( I caught two hundred barbel, including my first double, in the season after my divorce) and became much firmer friends. Roy had found a new partner and I was filling my spare time, between work and fishing, by rebuilding a boat. Roy offered to help financially as well as all the hard work and advice he had put in but I refused because he had done enough. It was on this boat on the river Thames that I really needed a free running centrepin but had to make do with the aerial.

At that time we were doing a lot of barbel fishing and Roy was looking for a second hand Graham Philips barbel rod and I managed to find one for sale in the Anglers Mail. He made the arrangements by phone to collect the rod the following week and told me that the chap selling it also had a second hand Adcock and Stanton for sale. I immediately expressed and interest but Roy said he wanted another one.

A few weeks later he invited me and my youngest son to Silverstone for the Touring Car Championship and when we arrived at his house he produced the newly aquired Adcock and Stanton to show me. I was a bit miffed to say the least until he told me to turn it over and look at the back.

I now have more centrepins than I am prepared to admit to but this reel was my first good quality reel and was the start of my enthusiasm for trotting a float on a river.

Shortly afterwards his health began a gradual decline, starting with a double hip replacement at the young age of thirty eight and the time we spent fishing together became less and less as the years passed. We remained very close friends but the physical demands of our sport just became to great for him. Yet you will see from his comments on this blog that he still loved fishing.

He was a really gifted chef and Jan and I spent many New Years Eves at his dining table and he would often pop in for a coffee on his way home from work when we lived in Shepperton.

We said goodbye to him last month at the age of fifty three after a series of strokes and he will be missed by many more people than just me. He was a big man, both physically and in his effect on those who called him friend, he will leave a big gap.

Last weekend his wife Jane asked me to sort out and dispose of his fishing tackle. Much of it has not been used for over ten years and as I loaded it into my car the memories tore at my emotions with each new discovery. But there was one piece of equipment that I found that will help me remember him to the end of my days. The original Adcock and Stanton centrepin reel that started it all.

Yesterday I went to the Farnborough tackle sale just for a look round and to renew some aquaintences when on a stand manned by Angling and Outdoors I saw a centrepin reel called Ikonix.

This reel, as far I can tell, is the same as the Marco Cortesi Signature Centrepin reel which I had gone to the Dragon Carp Direct stand to see but was told they had sold out.

The Ikonix is a well made reel compared to some of the cheaper reels I have seen and when subjected to the pointless spin test (when does a reel need to be able to spin for such a long time in normal angling use?), it spun until I got bored with watching it. There was a little growling sound from the bearings but that did not seem to detract from the operation of the reel and I will certainly lose no sleep over it.

The reels is 4.25 inches in diameter and the spool is 3/4 in wide, it is certainly comparable with any of the Okuma centrepins I have handled but the price asked was £35.

Yes, I bought it. It will be ideal for my up and coming young river anglers and less of a worry for me than allowing them access to my children …er, I mean other reels.

I took it home and compared it with my favourite Bob James Lightweight and it was not ten times worse as the prices would suggest. I noticed that it was stated on the Ikonix box that the reel weighed 219 gms. I was horrified – the BJ reel weighs 218 gms and its main selling point is its lightness and this justifies it’s £350 RRP. However when I weighed the Ikonix it was actually 257 gms, naughty! But it is still lighter than the new Adcock and Stanton which I was told by the manufactures was 305 gms. and retails at nearly £400.

The weight of a reel is important, particulary for trotting, as the heavier the spool the more force it requires to start it turning and keep it in motion. This means that the less force needed the slower the current you can fish with a lighter float and the less inertia it has whilst in motion which can cause over runs.

All in all, well worth the £35 I paid for it, I can recommend it to any one considering taking up centrepin fishing. The guys on the stand tell me that they have lots more in the shop back in Watford.

On our next outing I took him to Twynersh Fishing Complex to fish the little river Bourne that flows through the complex. It is only twelve or thirteen feet wide at it’s widest and no more than three feet deep unless in full flood but it holds a good head of roach, dace and chub and has been known to produce the odd barbel. On the day it was quite low but still carrying a tinge of colour after the previous week’s rain but to my pleasant surprise the management of the fishery had done a lot of very sympathic bank clearnce and had opened up a lot more swims. Well done, Paul!

I set up a twelve foot through action rod and a centrepin loaded with three pound line (not a big fish venue when it’s not coloured), the float was a small wire stemmed stick and the hook a size eighteen. Whilst showing him how to set the tackle up I started feeding a few red maggots and a little hemp every couple of minutes or so. I then showed him how the float was set up and without bait on the hook demonstrated how to trot the float through the swim, increasing the depth each time until it just started to drag under with the current.

After a few practice runs we put on two red maggots and he started learning about float control and the vagaries of a centrepin with the line wound on backwards.

He got in a few tangles but was soon catching fish, his first dace and his first gudgeon. We then moved downstream after our first swim died and he caught several good roach and this fine chub.

I think I have another confirmed river angler on my hands!