Denis White at Sally Walshes Dam

Maver Barnsley Blacks legend Dennis White is without question one of the most famous and respected match anglers in the country having been winning at the highest level for more than forty years and despite the passing years and self admitted dodgy shoulder he is still a name to be reckoned with. Fishing4fun.co.uk joined him on one of his favourite venues Sally Walsh’s Dam for a session after the venues huge shoals of skimmers and bream.

Venue Intro

Sally Walsh’s Dam was dug back in the 1880’s to supply water firstly for a now long gone mill and later the mines that were once numerous in the South Yorkshire area. It gained both its name and its fame from one of its most famous resident, Yorkshire’s biggest carp, ‘Sally’, who after passing away of old age now resides on the wall of a local pub with a last recorded capture weight of over 49lb. Although still a renowned carp fishery, operated on a syndicate only basis by venue owners Barnsley and District, it also offers superb roach bream and perch fishing to both pleasure anglers and match fishermen on a day or season ticket basis.

A three hour evening match earlier this year was won with a massive 56lb of bream and pleasure anglers regularly catch ton plus bags of slabs in the warmer months with the feeder being the favoured approach for the big bream and the long pole for bags of skimmers. Caster and hemp regularly produce twenty pound plus bags of roach and small perch are plentiful on the maggot with occasional bigger stripey to over 3lb livening things up when they put in an appearance.

This year the carp syndicate anglers have recorded carp to over 30lb, catfish over 40lb and tench and bream into double figures. There has been a tale of a 3lb plus roach caught on an 18mm boilie by a carp angler and although a picture of it taken on a mobile phone show it was clearly a very big roach no verification of its actual weight has been made. The syndicate is open to all but is limited in numbers so to secure a place you need to get in early.

However it wasn’t any of these leviathans but the huge shoals of skimmers and bream that Dennis was interested in when we joined him on an unseasonably bright and warm late September day at the far end of the dam wall.

Tackle choice

It’s a very unpredictable time of year this with the weather changing on a day to day basis and the threat of the first frost due any time you never know quite what to expect. Yesterday was dark, wet and miserable all day yet today it’s like the middle of summer, I’m going to take it very easily today and feel my way into the session to see how the fish are feeding before putting too much bait in and potentially ruining the peg.

In the summer I’d probably set a feeder rod up but today I’m going to rely on the pole. I use a Maver M57 which although not a cheap pole is a fantastic one. I’m going to plumb up carefully and if it is reasonably flat I’ll fish my skimmer line at a comfortable 11 ½ metres where it is about 10ft deep as well as feeding hemp and casters short at 4 to 5 metres for roach. I fished here a couple of months ago and had more than 20lb of good roach and perch close in but it might be more difficult today with the photographer on the bank.

Maver pure latex No.5 elastic should be about right for the skimmers while a No. 4 will do for the roach and perch on my short line.

Floats and rigs

As you might expect being sponsored by Maver I use their tackle, however I have to say that to be able to compete at the highest level you cannot use tackle that isn’t exactly right so if their gear wasn’t up to scratch I wouldn’t use it. I have helped with the development and trying out of a lot of the ranges so I know it is good.

In this depth of water on a big lake drift and tow can be a problem so I’m using a round bodied float with a wire stem for extra stability and to allow me to hold the bait still without the float riding up if I need to. I don’t like fishing with a moving bait on still waters.

Because I expect to catch the bream on the bottom I use an olivette as a bulk weight a yard from the hook with three number 8 shot spread out as droppers below. With bream and skimmers you get a lot of lift bites as the fish tip up to pick the bait up then right themselves with the bait lifting the last shot. For this reason I don’t mind using what may seem like big dropper shot down the line because I want those lift bites to register clearly.

On my hemp and caster rig I’ll fish with a ½ gramme float with the shot spread out because I would expect the fish to come up in the water to intercept the loose feed and I want to present a slow sinking bait.

Hooks and line

Genesis Smart is my choice of line for all my pole fishing and I’ll use a 0.14 main line to a 0.12 bottom on my bream rig while the 0.10 direct will do for my short line. If it were colder or I wasn’t getting bites I’d go finer but I don’t think it is necessary at this time of year.

A size 16 Katana series 4 hook, which is a light pellet/carp hook, is my choice for pellet fishing for skimmers and bream on the bottom while a much lighter Maver Fine Pole 1161 pattern is needed for fishing on the drop for roach, because I’ll be using casters or hemp on the hook I’m going for a size 18

Feed and feeding

I had a chat with the fishery bailiff, Geoff Poucher, who is here every day and knows everything that’s going on, who told me that all season pellets have been doing the business with the skimmers and bream and not being foolish enough to ignore good up to date info pellets will be my bait for the long pole line. I use 4mm hard sinkers for feed, I don’t know what brand they are as there isn’t a label on the bag and I’ve had them in my bag a month or two now. What I do feel is important though is that you soak them before using them. Hard pellets swell up when they get wet so if you feed them dry and they get eaten straight away they are going to swell inside the fish. If a fish fills itself up with dry pellets and they swell up some serious damage could be done. I believe it should be a rule on all fisheries where pellets are used that they should be pre-soaked before use and even if it is not a rule I believe everyone should soak their own before chucking them in.

For hookers I’m using a mixture of 4mm Ringers and Dynamite expanders which I simply soak in water to soften them. I use the two different kinds because they are slightly different in colour and sometimes they’ll prefer one over the other.

I’ve got half a pint each of hemp and casters and a few tares for my short line but I’m hoping not to be fishing it too much as if all goes to plan I’ll be catching skimmers all day. Let’s see.

Time for action

I’m going to start by cupping in a big pot of soaked pellets at 11 ½ metres to get some bait down straight away. I try to spread the feed about a bit rather than tip the whole lot out in one spot. I want the fish swimming about to feed rather than being able to eat 20 pellets without moving and if I want to catch a big bag I need a big shoal in the peg which won’t all fit on a pole cup sized area of the bottom.

Geoff told me it can take some time for the fish to get onto them so I’m not expecting bites straight away. I’ll loose feed hemp and casters regularly as well just to see if they will come in close with all the bankside activity.

It has taken nearly three quarters of an hour to get my first bite and I haven’t fed again since the first cup full, there’s no need as obviously that first lot is still there. Now I’ve had a bite I can start thinking about feeding again as I know there are fish eating my pellets and whittling down that initial pile.

I missed that first bite but made no mistake with the second a few minutes later and connected with the first skimmer of the day, a nice fish of close to a pound. I started catapulting a few pellets in each put in to try and get the fish feeding more confidently. I caught two or three more in the next half an hour or so but the bites were slow in coming. I’d have expected them to get better as the day progressed and more fish came to the pellets but so far it is not improving at all, in fact if anything it is slowing down as I haven’t had a fish for the last quarter of an hour.

I fed another big cup of pellets to try and spark the swim into life and decided to have a go on my short line for the roach and perch. Although I caught quite a few small perch the bank side activity had clearly put the quality roach off as I suspected it would and I only managed a single 4oz fish.

After half an hour or so I went back onto the skimmer line and had a fish straight away followed quickly by a much heavier fish that stayed glued to the bottom as I unshipped the pole and let the elastic do its work. It was a very solid, bulky bream that must have weighed three pounds. Holding it up for the photographer it kicked and fell back in, I’m glad it wasn’t a match!

Fortunately after another skimmer I had another good bream that looked like it could have been the same one that hade made its lucky escape a few minutes earlier. Another skimmer straight away gave me great hope that I was finally going to get amongst them properly but a blank half hour put paid to those hopes. It was going to be one of those days.

And so it proved with fish coming in ones and twos followed by long blank spells. I couldn’t get the roach going at all and with hindsight perhaps I should have taken into account the fact that the photographer was going to be clumping about and fished for them a bit further out. After almost four hours with no signs that the fishing was going to improve quickly, although Geoff did promise they’d go mad late afternoon, we decided to call it a day.

A look in the net showed nine or ten skimmers, a dozen or so small perch, a single roach and that one bream for 10 to 12 pounds. That other bream the photographer cost me, I’ll slap him later, would have taken the bag to close on 15lb which although not as much as I’d hoped for is still a good bag of fish that shows the potential of what in my mind is one of the best wild, natural fisheries in the area. The other great thing about it is that no matter how cold it gets you can always get a few bites and decent bags of fish from the deepest water by the dam wall so it is a good one to have in mind when you might be struggling everywhere else and need a bit of a confidence booster.