THE ULTIMATE ANGLING BUCKET LIST

The char in Coniston spawn in deep water in the early spring, while elsewhere in Cumbria they are
autumn spawners at the mouths of small shallow rivers. All that is except for Windermere, which for
some inexplicable reason has populations of both spring and autumn spawning char.
So you can see how complicated this is, and how far from being completely understood lake dwelling
arctic char as a collection of discrete populations are here in the British Isles is, which strongly impacts
on angling in terms of where you can find them, and when you can fish for them.
My first encounters with char were at Windermere around the Low Wood area. This looks out onto
some very deep water within shore casting range and used to turn up quite a few pound plus fish early
season to anglers fishing worm on the bottom for brown trout.
Unfortunately, there were never a lot caught. So I turned my attention to Coniston, where a chap I
worked with said he knew 'X marks the spot' for catching numbers of char, particularly if fished for
from a boat, which I just happened to have.
The spot in question was the Brantwood headland on the eastern shore, which had both incredibly deep
water close in and a small stream cutting across it where the char would come to spawn in March.
Being green, we didn't fully appreciate the spawning side of things back then, even though all the fish
we caught were beautifully coloured up with crimson red bellies. That was the way they were shown in
books, and as far as we were concerned, that was how they always looked.
So, using a big bag of rocks to anchor the boat in the soft bed substrate just beyond shore casting range,
we would catch dozens of the things on small hooks and paternoster rigs with either pieces of worm or
caddis grubs as bait.
Not nearly so well though as some of the more unscrupulous elements fishing with maggots, both on
the hook and fed in as freebies, which due to the trout being in season from mid-March onwards and
the coarse fish being out of season, was a banned bait.
As soon as a bailiff in a boat came anywhere near, the maggots all went over the side and the evidence
was gone. Later in the day, these people would then hawk the fish around the local hotels.
Is it any wonder then that the powers
that be both sought, and were
granted, a change in the season for
catching char to open on the first of
May, curing at a stroke the cropping
of spawning fish, which to an extent
I suppose I was guilty of doing
myself without realising it. It needed
to be done, and thank goodness it
was.
This pretty much brought about the
total extinction of char angling at the
lake, with just myself and a few die
hard friends keeping the practise
alive. But no longer with the bait
fishing techniques of old.
Char in breeding livery
May the first was a date chosen because it was assumed that by that stage, all the char in Coniston had
completed their breeding. This would see them off the spawning beds with a more general distribution
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