Nam Pla fish sauce review

I had a mate who used to swear by this stuff. He put it on his baits - not his noodles. Honest.

I've been using it to jazz my baits up this season, after ages when I haven't bothered with things like oils, flavourings etc.

Some reckon they give you an edge. What I noticed was most of your hard-earned floats away in a great big slick.

This stuff is made of fish essence - not oils diluted with other oils that end up smelling nothing like fish.

If all else fails, it seriously sexes up a pot noodle. Even if it makes your rucker smell like a Sumo wrestler's jockstrap if you don't put the top back on the bottle securely. 

Well oil be...

Check out the oil slick from this bluey. Awesome or what..?

Sump thing sure has changed

The first run comes minutes after I get the last rod in. A screaming take from a 3lbs jack. As I drop it back, another one's off. 

A plan was forming, as I loaded up the car. I'd try a pit I haven't fished seriously in years, where a stretch of bank offers a gentle increase in depths from a couple of feet to the deepest part of the water.

The idea was start in the shallows and move the rods into deeper water until I found the pike. This lasted until I got out there and found most of the swims were too overgrown with alder to fish.

Water levels were down to the lowest I'd ever seen them too, with barely a trickle of water through the outfall. This meant there was enough exposed bank on a corner which was usually underwater to get the rods out over the reed fringe, so I decided to give it a go there.

I like corner swims, because you can cover a lot of water. I put one up the margins on either side of me, in five or six feet of water,  and one out into the deeper hole. First the right-hander goes, followed by one cast along a reed line as I'm returning the first fish.

Two jacks becomes three almost as soon as I get the rod along the reed line back out. I recast and one takes it almost as soon as it hits the water, but comes off as I bend into it. I miss two further runs, one after another.

All the action's on the reed line. Or rather it was, as the swim dies on me.  Six runs in an hour adds up to a pack of jacks. This is the part of the pit where you used to find the bigger pike in the winter.

For the reed-fringed corner hides a secret in the shape of the sump - an area dug down to collect the water while the pit was being excavated. When it gets really cold, this is where the pike get to.

But it's not really cold today. It's as mild as anything. The westerly's lost its wrath overnight and it must be 10 degrees by 10am. There's a mackerel sky forming, like I haven't seen in years.

When I twitch a bait, it fouls. I reel in and find it covered in Canadian pondweed. Bright green Canadian pondweed - not the black, rotting stuff you sometimes collect on your hooks on gravel pits in the middle of winter.

The alder bushes behind me are in bud. When the next fish takes the bait, the penny drops. I sweep the rod back and find something slightly larger on the end. Not quite a jack, not quite a double - a jouble maybe.

It's one of the most vividly-marked pike I've seen in ages, so I snap a quick picture or two. I'm struck by the line of scales behind its eyes. This is no young eight pounder. I'm guessing it's a slower-growing male pike, few of which ever get to weigh over double figures.

This is so that during spawning, when they swim eye to eye with the female, their milt reaches the eggs as she sheds them. Male pike usually gather before the females arrive in the areas where they spawn.

I return it and when I get another run half an hour or so later, it's the same fish. Up the road on the Norfolk coast, there are daffodils already in bloom. An idea forms as I slip it back for the second time - is the weather now so out of kilter that the male pike on this pit are already gathering ready to spawn.

Ride 'em cowboy - NB not his real name

Fuggin' 'ell - what you doing here, says the figure hunched under the brolly. Blast me, it's the Midnight Cowboy. 

I clocked his van in the layby on the BTEAB drain. That's Blank to End All Blanks drain, between you and me.

Wotch'a doing Midnight Cowboy..? Blanking mate - wossit look like..?

Midnight Cowboy - not his real name, by the way - is a bit of an enigma in these parts, mainly because he seems to pick the hardest waters and keep fishing them regardless.

I have a lot of time for Midnight Cowboy, which isn't his real name, because of this. Midnight Cowboy does his own thing. He's been doing his own thing on this water two days running.

Trouble is you could be miles away from them on here, I say - adding a hefty shot of realism to the conversation. 

Hunkered down behind the only bit of undergrowth for miles, he's sure he's going to catch - despite the westerly tearing down the drain that's rendered one or two nearby waters virtually unfishable.

"Get your rods out then," he says. "You can't catch if you h'int even got a bait in the water."

I look at Midnight Cowboy (not his real name...). I look at the drain. The waves are starting to crest, rolling over into white horses. My rods stay in the car.

Midnight Cowboy - who wasn't called this by his mum and dad - says he might fish on into dark. I fancy this as much as I fancy a cabbage water enema.

Today had grim written all over it from the word go. Got up late, people in the swims I fancied on the first couple of waters I looked at. Gave the river an hour and needed three ounces of lead to keep the float still against the gathering gale.

Went to a nearby drain in time to spy a couple of this country's newest inhabitants packing up with the perch they'd just killed in a carrier bag. I looked at the new water I fancied trying and there were people everywhere.

"Someone had a thirty out last week," one explains, when I ask why there are people everywhere.

I checked out somewhere else, on my travels. Litter everywhere - beer cans and vodka bottles topped off by a bike someone had obviously hauled out of the drain.
 
Midnight Cowboy - which I stress is not his real name - is non-plussed by all of this. Conditions are almost perfect in his book.

The wind' s howling down the BTEAB drain. Midnight Cowboy (whose birth certificate carries a different name...) shrugs: "I don't care if the bobbins in't dropping off every minute. You just got to keep trying."

I decide to do just that. As in keep trying. As in tomorrow.

An evening with Mick Brown

Here's one not to be missed. Mick Brown's doing a talk at King's Lynn PAC at the Burt Club in West Winch on Thursday, January 26 (7.00pm).

Decisions, decisions - where to go..?

I have a feeling I might catch something tomorrow. Mainly because it's my first day out fishing for a week thanks to work.

The weather looks like staying unsettled and windy for the next few days, with temperatures drifting down a few degrees and rain on the way. This is no hardship, bearing in mind we had snow to contend with this time last year.

There's a new water I can fish if I can be bothered to cut the kit down to a couple of rods and minimal bits and bobs in the rucker. It's a fair old hoof to the spot where the pike might be.

Then again I might head for some pits I can fish out of the car which seem to have fallen off most people's radar this winter for some reason.

There's a drain which has been fishing well, but it's been in the local papers, so will probably have been caned.

Decisions, decisions.

Whale I'll be - a Norfolk forty

As in a forty foot long sperm whale, washed up on the beach at Old Hunstanton. I went along to get a few pictures for work and joined the hundreds marvelling at the size of a creature that roams the seas unseen by most of us, except on the rare occasions one turns up dead on our shores.

It's the first I've seen in several years, since I walked miles with a photographer to find a much larger whale which had washed up dead on a remote stretch of beach at Thornham. We got caught in a blizzard as the tide turned and it was seriously hairy picking our way back through the mud and marsh creeks as they began filling with water.

Click here for a bit on that whale.

We got more crabs than Cromer in the Fens

Rings appear around the blob of orange sitting on a flat calm drain. When it falls flat, I pick the rod up, wind down and connect with fresh air.

I use big baits and from time to time, I fail to connect with what's on the other end. Usually, this means a small fish has picked it up by the head, avoiding the hooks.

I recast to the same spot and the same thing happens. This time, I leave it a few seconds longer, but bend into nothing again.

Checking the bait, it's clearly been damaged but the slashes in its flank don't look like teeth marks from a pike. A zander's front fangs weren't responsible either, because it was only marked on one side.

I've seen similar on the Ouse and Middle Level, which have both been colonised by Chinese mitten crabs. I am a long way from both and even further from the sea, but suspect the crabs have now made it to this part of the system.

Something tells me this isn't good news. These things are capable of travelling a considerable distance upriver from the sea as larvae, living in freshwater until they migrate back downstream to breed.

First found at Denver Sluice, in around 2005, they are becoming more numerous. Matchmen have caught them when their claws have become entangled in their feeders. Some now count their fingers after mixing groundbait.

The as-yet unanswered question is what impact they're going to have on the ecology of our rivers, where coarse fish already have cormorants, increasing numbers of other fish-eating birds and otters to contend with.

Crabs eat fish spawn. Some believe they are partly responsible for the decline in schoolie zander on the Middle Level and lower reaches of the Ouse. I have no idea whether this is true, but one thing's certain. Looking at how efforts to eradicate the American signal crayfish have failed, these things are probably here to stay.