THE ULTIMATE ANGLING BUCKET LIST

across the lake, and would therefore render bait fishing pretty much ineffective, which has proved to be
the case.
A new strategy then had to be found, which we took from the traditional plumb-line commercial char
fishermen who I spent time with, watching and chatting, then adapting their approach to suit
conventional rod and line fishing.
Plumb-line fishing employs a large bamboo cane out-rigger from each side of a boat which is slowly
rowed over the deeper parts of the lake. Each pole can work as many as a dozen spinners spread out up
the heavy main line which is weighted by a couple of pounds of lead to give good water column
coverage.
To better understand the technique, I spent a day with Coniston based plumb-lining experts Jeff Carroll
and Bill Gibson, shooting a historical video on this rapidly dying art both for YouTube and for the
Ruskin Museum.
This demonstrates the technique and talks through some of the related problems far better than I could
explain here. There is also an audio interview with the pair on the whole history of char fishing and its
techniques, from its origins, right up to present times.
Having trailed their boat all over the Lake District and Scotland demonstrating plumb-lining, which as
a traditional art they are trying to keep alive, Jeff and Bill have a wealth of char knowledge the likes of
which it would be rare to find again in any one place.
But the use of multiple lures and huge leads has no place in rod and line fishing, so what we needed to
do was adapt the basic principle to suit our particular angling needs.
The most valuable piece of kit in all of this was an echo sounder. With it, we were not only able to
locate the char, but also pick out patterns with regard to depth of water favoured within newly
discovered holding areas, and more importantly, how high up in the water column they were feeding
on any given day.
Earlier I mentioned thermal stratification. This is the process of the upper layer of the lake warming as
the summer progresses, forming a layer known as the epilimnion, which because it's less dense, floats
on top of the colder water below which is known as the hypolimnion, separated by a short band of
rapidly changing temperature called the thermocline.
During the winter and spring, none of this exists, leading to total mixing. At such times, char have
access to the entire lake, and as a result, in early May before stratification kicks in, I've come across
fish not too far down from the surface, and have on occasions even managed to catch them on a fly we
devised called the 'Char Lady' which had a gaudy red body with silver tassels fished on a lead core
shooting head.
More generally however, what we were finding was that most of the fish would be between twenty and
forty feet down over around sixty feet of water.
Obviously then, that was where we needed to be presenting our spinners, which were being offered
singly, weighted by drilled bullet leads on the line stopped by a bead and a swivel, the amount of which
we really had to work at to accurately determine.
To do this, we decided that rather than rowing, we would use a four horse power outboard motor on
tick-over to slowly push the boat along. So all our experimentation was based on that. Starting with one
ounce of lead on the line, we ran the boat in to the shore until the treble hook snagged bottom. We then
went back out until we had a vertical line down to it and sounded the depth.
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