Tring Resevoir's

[Red Creel]

I will admit straight away that i have never actually fished these famous old stillwaters but with former british records of bream,catfish,tench and now the holder of the perch record there can be few waters with a better pedigree across a multitude of species.

My one and only glimpse of the resevoir's was at the end of a mornings fishing on the ajacent Grand Union Canal at Marsworth trying to tempt a carp or two, that was back in the days when small carp were still a novelty and not a nuisance!

Wandering down the towpath my father and i climbed up the embankment to look across the expanse of Marsworth and Startops.If i thought that was impressive that was nothing until we had driven the short distance down to Wilstone which was where the really "hardcore" specimen hunters hung out.Even more remarkable was the fact that somebody was fishing, we wandered over for a chat and during the course of our conversation he mentioned that he had been there six days but was yet to recieve his first bite let alone hook a fish!.. i think i came away with the impression that life was too short to waste my precious angling time on these lakes.

[Bluedun]

Yes, I'm no fan of long stays when nothing's happening. Prefer multiple shorter trips, though if fish take excessively long hours to catch I'm happy to give it a miss.

I once had the opportunity to fish the reservoir in which Bill Penney caught his record roach but since no one ever caught much there at the time I never got round to going.

[Gurn]

Wilstone was one of the first places I ever fished. My father used to take me pike fishing there in the winter. Talk about a baptism of fire. They are wonderful fisheries and I would love to have the time to do the place justice, for time is what you need on the 'ressies' to catch the quite incredible fish they still hold.
I'm reminded of the words of the great Tring angler Alan Wilson..."Wilstone reservoir, I had a three inch lift earlier. Think I'll stay another few days."....says it all really.

[Sandgroper]

I can't remember how I first got to Tring Reservoirs, but I guess it must have been on a push bike. I had been fishing the canal at Pitstone and although I had only been fresh water fishing for about a year, I knew from what I had seen in the Angling Times that there were much bigger fish than I was catching in fresh water and I wanted some of them. (On reflection, it was by push bike, I suddenly remembered the hill between Pitstone cement works and Marsworth). Anyway, I was told that there were much bigger fish to be caught in Startops reservoir and after reading as much as I could about ledgering and the use of a swim feeder, I went to try my luck, because in those days my fishing results relied entirely on luck.



This was where I began my fresh water fishing.

I soon began to catch bream up to about 2lbs; I felt that I was progressing and I was more than a little happy with what I was catching. Indeed, I was doing better than any of my pals and I began to think that I really was becoming a better than average angler. What I never realised was that the pale, thin and very slimy bream I was catching were not growing fish and they were unlikely to grow very much bigger than those I was catching. Still, I was happy and I spent many happy hours at the reservoir in between extending my horizons on my push bike, or by bus, or with friends whose fathers had cars. It was all very exciting and eventually, after starting work, I managed to put the money together and got a Royal Enfield 125cc motorcycle. Come to think of it, that was pretty traditional, it had a hand change gear box!

While the motorcycle made more waters available to me I still went to Startops and Marsworth reservoirs and I continued to catch small bream. However, one day at lunch time, I went into The Old Queens Head, (now The Angler's Retreat) and was astonished to see some bream bigger than I had ever dreamt of in glass cases there. I asked the landlord about them and I then heard the story about the huge bags of bream caught there in the 1930s. I was overwhelmed by the thought of so many huge fish in one session and there and then, I decided that I would be the one to have the next huge bag of Tring Bream.

From that year onwards, my Tring visits had a different purpose and although they weren’t the only waters I fished, they were always in the back of my mind, and my visits there were always part of a plan and not just a trip to catch a few fish. I didn’t have much idea of how to go about achieving what I wanted, but I continued to catch bream in both reservoirs. I even spent a few sessions in Marsworth chasing catfish which, I had discovered, had been introduced to the water at the same time they were put in a Woburn Abbey lake by the Duke of Bedford many years earlier. Unfortunately, I enjoyed no better success with them than I was having with big Tring bream. At that time, I still hadn’t realised that the fish I was catching were not the healthy growing fish I would need to find if I wanted a bag of the quality I had set my sights on.

As time passed, I became fixated on bream and although I had caught a number of five pounders, I could not get one over 6lbs nd I was beginning to realise that specimen bream were not easy to catch. I had been hearing about Wilstone Reservoir but it wasn’t until I got a more powerful motorcycle capable of carrying a passenger that I first went to fish there. Again, I caught plenty of bream, but still nothing like I was hoping for.

In the early ‘60s I was talking to Peter Frost and discovered that he too was interested in big bream and that he reckoned that Tiddenfoot Pit was a place to try for them, so we launched a campaign on them and fished there every weekday evening for several months. We had bites, but not one of them connected and gradually the dream of a really big bream, or even a six pounder from that water began to fade.

During the next few years I had other matters and fish to attend to and Tring Reservoirs received only minimal attention until 1969 or ’70 when a friend of mine at work and I decided to hire one of the boats on Wilstone Reservoir. We had no bites on the first day, but on the second, we had one bite each, the strikes connected and we had a bream each. Bob’s weighed 6lbs 12ozs and mine weighed 6lbs 10ozs. The size of them was very satisfying, but what excited me was that they were a beautiful bronze colour, thick across the shoulders and were carrying very little slime. They were growing fish, just what I needed if I was to realise my ambition.



The fish that finally put me on the right track.



Beautifully proportioned and conditioned



These fish were not skimmers

It was time to forget about Startops and Marsworth Reservoirs and concentrate on Wilstone instead. Unfortunately, it is not easy to find friends who are prepared to participate in a dream as nebulous as mine appeared to be but in 1971 I met Rod and Mick Lane who, after hearing my story and seeing the pictures of the bream Bob and I had caught, felt that they would like to be involved in the hunt and so we started booking the boat on more frequent occasions and trying to search out the fish we wanted. I suppose that our first contact with the better fish was accidental, but one morning Rod and I took out the boat, anchored and baited. We didn’t have long to wait before my float slid away and very shortly afterwards, Rod slid the net under a beautiful fish of over 7lbs. We both had several more of the same size and we were very excited by the time we packed up. Both of us had caught the best bream we had ever caught and at least on that occasion we had managed to locate a shoal of them.



They were getting bigger!

The next season was even better and our catches were attracting a bit of attention. Bernard Double would ask us how we had got on each time we had fished and it would have been churlish not to have told him. The fish were weighing over 8lbs by this time and I invited Fred Taylor and Dick Walker to join me for a session. Unfortunately, as so often happens, we drew a blank on that day which I really wanted to be productive. However, Gerry Hughes, the assistant editor of The Anglers Mail asked if he could join us one morning with the intention of doing a centre page spread for the paper. Rod and I agreed and crossed our fingers. I booked both boats, Rod and I had one and Gerry had the other and moored up in a position from which he could photograph Rod and I. Things went well that day and Rod and I caught a number of bream the majority of which weighed over eight pounds. A few weeks later, Fred ‘phoned me one day and told me that he had a boat booked and said that he couldn’t kake it, but Rod and I could have it if we wanted it. We did, we anchored it in our usual spot and were immediately into bream all of which were over 8lbs. Fred turned up later with Roy Westwood of the Anglers Mail and fished from the bank. He also had a good bag of bream of around 8lbs which was duly recorded by Roy. Obviously things were going as we were hoping and all through the next season (1975) Rod, Mick and I continued to catch good bags of good bream, but we could not get one of 9lbs or more. Fred and Dick were doing other things that season and anyway, they did not share my dream and so we never saw them at Wilstone that season.

The winter of 1976 was dry as was the spring and the levels of the reservoir fell lower than I had ever seen it. I was delighted by this as I felt that it would make the bream easier to locate. From what I had learned over the 18 years since I had been fishing the reservoirs, I figured that the beginning of the season was going to give us the best chance we had ever had, and so Rod, Mick and I moved into top gear. We bought a lot of stale bread from bakeries at give a way prices and we gathered buckets of brandlings from the Aston Clinton sewage farm, (the manager there was pleased to have us take them) and we began baiting three swims two weeks before the season opened. We booked both boats for the first two days of the season and tried to avoid letting too much be seen by those who were watching us from the bank. As the season grew closer, the dry weather continued and my confidence increased. I was writing for three news papers at the time, and the week before the season opened, I wrote an article for the Luton Pictorial predicting that we would realise the dream I had held for so many years. I had also been invited to give a talk on fishing at Eton College and during that evening, I made the same prediction. Everything was looking good, and on the Sunday before the season opened, we took a boat and had a look for the bream. What we saw took our breath away, we saw a huge shoal with numerous bream into double figures and we could hardly wait for the opening morning. Unfortunately on the 15th June, Mick ‘phoned and told me that he wouldn’t be able to accompany Rod and I. It was a sad shock, he had worked and paid for the groundbaiting, but it couldn’t be helped; Rod and I were fit to trot.

We left my place at 3:00am, drove to Marsworth, picked up the key from Bernard’s garden and parked at the boathouse a little before 4:00am. As we walked to the swim, it began to rain! It was disappointing but not disasterous and anyway, it stopped after about 30 minutes. We got to where the boat was moored, but we decided to fish from the bank that morning, some distance from where Fred had caught his bag of bream. We settled into the swim we had baited and fished the lift method while using pieces of peacock quill as floats. Disappointingly, our floats remained motionless and there seemed to be nothing in the swim, however, I happened to spot a bit of surface disturbance about 20 yards along the bank. I kept watching and saw more – and more. Eventually, I crept along the bank and flicked my bait into the area in which I had seen the movement. The float never had time to settle before it slid away. I struck, felt a powerful surge and and my 4lb.b/s line snapped like cotton. I quickly retackled with 6lb b/s line and cast out another bait. That was taken instantly too and after a good fight I netted a beautiful bream that was obviously my best ever and which weighed 9lbs 8ozs. A brilliant start to the season! Once the fish was in the net, I cast out another bait and instantly I was into another fish; another good one and that too went into the net. Rod then decided to abandon the baited swim, join me and from then on it was the thing that dreams are made of. Every cast resulted in a bite from a big bream and most of them were landed. Rod had one we estimated at over 11lbs slip the hook at the net and by about 10:30am we were exhausted, physically and emotionly. We had accounted for 46 bream with an average weight of 8lbs 4ozs (total 373lbs I believe) and with four of them weighing over ten pounds. The fish were still feeding and goodness knows how many more we might have caught had we continued to fish or if Mick had been with us. Enough was enough though and so we packed up and drove to the Anglers Retreat to recover a little before we went home. As we reached the bar, we saw that Bernard Double and Gerry Hughes were already there and they asked us how we had fared, we told them and as I read out the weights that I had scratched on the bottom of a tobacco tin I saw the looks of incredulity on their faces and I began to realise that I had achieved the ambition I had set myself at that very bar some 18 years earlier. The day was a bit of a blurr after that. My wife called Dick Walker who told Angling Times about it. Gerry Hughes told Anglers Mail about it. I called Fred Taylor all about it and somehow one of the London radio stations heard about it and broadcast a report. We had the boats booked for the next day and Mick was able to join us, but sadly, although conditions were almost identical, not one of us had a bite that day.



Here is part of the bag. No weighing mats in those days. We
had to work quickly to get the fish weighed and returned.

The fishing I wanted was never easy at any of the Tring Group, indeed, it had become obvious as time passed that I was wasting my time at Startops and Marsworth, I spent many hours fishless and, indeed, biteless on many occasions, but I had a belief that I was sure would eventually come to fruition, though there were times that it definitely wavered. Although I wasn’t aware of it at the time, that was the last June 16th on which I would ever fish Wilstone Reservoir as before the end of that season I was en route to Australia.

I last looked around the reservoirs in 2004 and was stunned to see the changes there. I saw two anglers in adjacent swims in Marsworth fighting carp of over twenty pounds at the same time. I saw bivvy boys camping at the waters edge in Startops and was told that they have their Giro cheques sent directly to their swim. I saw notices in the car parks warning of of the dangers of thieves breaking into parked cars. I saw empty cans that had held strawberry flavoured luncheon meat and a host of other things that were quite alien to the fishing I remembered. However, there was one small bright spot, Bernard told me that there had been a cat fish caught in Marsworth a few weeks earlier. It only weighed about 6 ounces, but it proved that they are still in that reservoir and so perhaps one day, someone will catch one there that will match – or beat – the 44 pounder that came from Wilstone in the 60s or 70s.



This is definitely not my kind of fishing. Indeed, Charlie Double and
then Bernard would never have allowed it in my days there.




Although they eat fish I always like to see them. They are far more
welcome than cormorants

[LuckyLuca]

Wow, what a facinating tail from a great time to be an angler!

Thank you.

[Dave Burr]

I've always admired bream anglers. So many people regard the bream as little more than bait robbing vermin but to catch a really big one usually takes dedication and great persistence, Gurn's quote says it all. I grew up reading about the exploits of driven men fishing Tring for bream, tench, roach etc, its a place of legends and broken souls.

Thanks for the post Sandgroper, very enjoyable read.

[Mark]

A lovely post and pictures there Ian.

[WindJammer]

A cracking little slice of history Ian, thanks for putting that up.

[Julian]

Superb report Ian - from yet another fairly local water to me.

[Azur]

What a great story Sandgroper! Thanks