Michael Gerold Sand Casting Pirks

Back with Micheal Gerold for another superb video showing the basic technique of sand casting lead pirks, this is making video at its best.

Pickadoll Lures

Although this video is in Swedish luckily for us David Wikberg the lure maker realized that fart jokes need no translation.






https://www.facebook.com/pickadoll.lures

Metal heads, making skull jig heads

Prototype Skull Jig Head

I should be a little tidier but it is not in my nature, yesterday I lost a little skull I had made from polymer clay using a toothpick for the finer details. It was about the size as my fingertip and will probably turn up while I am searching for something else I have lost. So I started again and this time set the camera to video and hopefully if the special silicone I have ordered turns up before I lose the new model I may get a video out of it and some tin jig heads. I don’t know why I should need a skull jig head, maybe I need all the Voodoo I can get my hands on to lure some monsters.  

Shifting a bit of weight

Image Above: Phox Minnow with internal magnetic weight shift tube.

Some bits and bobs of pipe finally turned up with this afternoon’s post and I got to mess around trying to put together a weight shifting tube for the Phox Minnow. Like most lightweight balsa lures the Phox suffers from a bit of tumble on the cast, so I decided a while ago to design a magnetic weight shift. At the first opportunity after dinner I quickly bent up a new wire configuration to incorporate the tube and then carved out a balsa body. Externally the lure will look exactly the same it is only internally that things have changed. There are four balls, one external to the tube then a magnet, plastic spacer and another three balls which will hopefully pull away from the magnet with the force of the cast and then roll back when the lure dives to be held in place until the next cast.

This is all untried as far as this lure goes but fingers crossed I should get to try it out in water  in a couple of days. 

Polyurethane Blank Fishing Lures (hanging to cure)


It was back to work today, if you can call making lures a job. Over the last week or so I have been trying to speed up the process of making my casting spoons and today’s quick turnaround creating blanks seems to prove that the new methods are working.

A little bit of Pike Action

I started out making a film about one thing and ended up with a film about something else, sorry about the junk. The music was composed and performed on a Gameboy by a friend and film maker Ewan Brown., what a guy. Cheers Ewan

Five of Jacks

Image Above: Mist on the water, Pennington Flash

The sun was low enough to burst through the bankside foliage and cut in amongst the mist that had risen overnight. I padded along excited to be at a new water and a little in awe of the surroundings having spent too long fishing in an inner city park. The lake or “flash” as it is known sits in a hollow rather than a valley and owes its existence at least partially to mining subsidence. This is flood land and there is a dampness about the place that reaches far beyond the banks. In the distance I traced the low arch of a Pennine ridge that seemed familiar but the name escaped me. The landscape was still in that process of naturalisation, its industrial past had been softened with spoil heaps weekly shrouded in scrub and sun bleached grasses. The lake is something special as all large bodies of water are, we can build roads, pave earth and manicure landscapes but a lake will always have something unyielding in its nature.

I set up quickly and made my first cast with a wobbler which slid through the air trailing a thread that settled out like gossamer as the slap of wood on the water broke the silence. The water was not deep and the lure tugged at weed snatching stems, I watched mesmerised as it rolled into view its rear end flicking like a spark of life. I worked the banks casting from gaps in the thicket of shrubs that lined this part of the lake. The weed was becoming a problem; I held my rod high making the wobbler run at a shallower depth but it wasn’t the easiest way to fish. I moved again and hitched on one of my hybrid casting spoons in the knowledge that if I kept a steady pace it would run just below the surface out of the weed. The lure ate up the distance between access points leaving little out of reach. In the clear water I could watch it react to every jerk and nod of the rod as it swam and flickered almost with a searching action, when the rod was still it settled back into a side to side roll, spooning its way over the weed.

Just off a reed bed, my first pike stopped the lure in its tracks and then set off for cover, I wound as fast as I could hoping to prevent a scramble through the reeds to retrieve them. In the end the fish came in parallel to the bank with his head buried in a mop of weed almost as if he was having a bad hair day. At about three pounds it was a good start to the day and having only a single treble to remove meant he was back in the water without too much messing about. Unfortunately I had run out of bank as fishing is only permitted on certain stretches of the shore and I wasn’t keen on casting in amongst the carp fishermen I had passed. I headed back to the car to drive over to the far side of the lake.

The sun had stirred up a breeze that chaffed through the reeds and pushed the surface of the water up into wavelets. This was obviously the windward side of the lake a green film of algae clung to the margins but beyond this it was almost clear water. I took another jack in the first few casts unhooking it in the water and before moving along the bank.

A little later and far out in the lake I felt a tug on the lure and then nothing, I cast again but misjudged the angle required and ended up far from the mark. The next cast was a little better and I found the tug again which had come from a seven pounder. I had hopes for something bigger maybe into doubles but seven pound was nice and heading in the right direction.

I took another two pike over the next hour, not of any size but it didn’t matter I was catching fish on a lure I had designed and produced myself, maybe the testing is over. 

Image Below: Jack pike on a Hybrid Casting Spoon.

A Leak In The Lake

Image Above: Some new hybrid spoon lure colours

I left the lake shortly after the workmen arrived. They had come to fix a hole; a hole that had opened up twenty years earlier and dropped the water level by four feet. Only last week I spoke to a fellow angler about the leak in the lake and he said, “They (the council) would never get round to fixing it, especially in a recession.”  

It hadn’t been a great a morning. Only yesterday on a day tip to Wales I had been stood on an almost perfect beach staring out over the breakers and thinking about bass. This morning it was back to the puddle at least I had hooked a pike although I lost it. By way of compensation I snagged a lure I had lost a few weeks back. Pedro (see prev. posts) a small spoon lure was returned to me all be it missing and eye and the varnish I had hastily applied. 

 I trudged home wondering whether the lake would miraculously refill before my next visit and if the island would return to being a true island instead a patch of raised ground surrounded by mud.  

At home it was back to coating lures and more photography for my website which seems to have been under construction for far too long.

Image Below: Nefyn Beach, North Wales

Making lead fishing weights in wooden moulds

Another how-to video. The exciting world of lead smelting.

Pendulum Casting

Image Above: Pollock on home made feathers

Sunset has made its way into the afternoon and an hour’s fishing before dinner has become a race against the light. Today I was trying distance casting from my favourite rocks at the northwest corner of the island. I hand been out in the boat a couple of days ago fishing over a reef which runs parallel to the shore about 90meters out and taken a mixed bag. Getting out beyond the reef from the shore would take a bit of doing with a lure so I opted for a string of home feathers and lead bomb. Having never really fished in places where long distances where required I thought I would try out pendulum casting. It took me a while to remember the stance and swing from a DVD I had found in a charity shop but it wasn’t long before I was completely emptying my spool which was carrying about a 120 meters of braid. Once in the deeper water over the reef I hit into a shoal of juvenile coal fish and Pollock. Getting them back over the kelp covered reef wasn`t easy but I think the cleanly tied rig helped.

I was hoping some larger fish would venture in from the sound as the light dropped but it wasn`t to be. I headed back to feed the cows before it got completely dark.