Whatever happened to rudd? They have disappeared from so many venues across the country, but there are still fisheries where conditions have enabled the species to continue to thrive. Roger Standen goes on the trail of our most beautiful coarse fish 

IT WAS 51 years ago when old man Winchester’s green and black saloon trundled down the dirt track to a dew pond on the edge of an oak copse. Two excited 11-year-old boys with the father of one of them pulled their tackle from the boot; whole cane rods and center pin reels with flour and paste squeezed in an old tobacco tin.

Springfield Pett was a place of beauty where yellow bunting nested in the bank on the edge of the field. The pond was shallow, barely three feet deep, but lovely shoals of rudd with golden flanks and bright red fins could be seen swimming just below the surface. It was 16th June 1950, the first day of the coarse fishing season, a day I shall remember for the rest of my life.

It was my first fishing trip and on it I caught my first fish, one of these beautiful rudd. Not a large fish - 4oz perhaps – but it’s capture would leave a mark on me forever and rudd will always have a special place amongst the species for which I fish.

In that classic book Mr Crabtree by the late Bernard Venables rudd were a fish of the autumn, and indeed this is a good time of year to catch them, but rudd can be caught throughout the year.

Sadly, the small pond where I caught my first rudd is now all but dried up and other small ponds dotted around the countryside have suffered a similar fate. Still more have been enlarged to be stocked with carp, which have muddied the water, leaving the rudd shoals struggling to find food. Estate lakes have gone the same way and the marshland drains, which once held good stocks, are run off so low that all the fish are struggling to survive.

Amidst all this bad news for the would-be rudd hunter, there is some good news. We still have gravel pits and reservoirs, some of which hold enormous rudd approaching 4lb.

For example, a gravel pit virtually dug on the beach in East Sussex held some huge rudd in the eighties and two friends of mine caught them to 3lb 13oz. At the time very few anglers fished it, but Pat Sweeney and Mick Kobylka had been given full run of the place by the owner. The water is more like a series of drains and bays, rather than a large pit, but they are all linked and the whole area covers about 80 acres.

It took some time for Pat and Mick to locate the rudd, first catching them just over a pound, then 2lb and finally over 3lb. Their method was simple, yet unique, they freelined pieces of bread flake with a double hook rig. They took a length of 4lb line around 3ft long, doubled it, tied a loop to join onto the reel line and tied their size 10 or 12 hooks to the other two ends, making sure that one hook was an inch or two above the other to prevent tangles. When the wind was too strong for casting they fixed a shot on each hook length. An indicator was hung on the line between the reel and the first rod ring.

They used to groundbait and when possible did so the day before fishing with bags of crumb-based groundbait purchased from the local tackle shop. Fishing always started either just before of at first light, but often the fish didn’t start feeding for a couple of hours – sometimes, just before starting to catch the rudd could be seen rolling on the surface as they made their way up the channel towards their baits. The best catch was made my Mick who caught fish of 3lb 13oz and 3lb 3oz, but some years later Pat caught six big rudd to 3lb 8oz.

The water is no controlled by a local club, but so far nobody has caught a rudd anywhere near the sizes landed by Mick and Pat, so whether the water still holds fish of that size is unknown.

Another gravel pit covering about 120 acres also contains plenty of rudd, including some of the lemon variety. The smaller fish are easy to catch with float-fished maggots, caster, sweetcorn and bread, but the larger fish are few and far between. Usually these better fish are caught by accident and while these are not monsters, they are in pristine condition and I do not think I have ever seen a better example of the species.

Unlike the other pit which is coloured, the water in this one is gin-clear, which is probably why the bigger fish are so difficult to catch. However, ones chances are increased considerably by fishing either very early morning – just as dawn is breaking - or at last light and beyond. A shoal of better fish will often appear out of the blue when it is barely light enough to see your float. Perhaps a couple is caught, and then they are gone. This is in the summer, but in the winter on the milder days it pays to fish a couple of hours after dark.

A friend and I discovered this while fishing for pike. On those days when the wind drops away with the gathering dusk, rudd would appear rolling on the surface. We found they could be caught on swim-feedered maggots, or even on a straight lead, once the light had completely gone. There was no need to fish with small baits either, a bunch of six maggots on a size ten was readily taken.

Fishing during the day was largely a waste of time and often while pike fishing, I would set up a quiver tip with a swimfeeder and maggots which wouldn’t be touched all day. I tried this on lots of occasions and only once did a reel in to find the maggots had been sucked. So on this water it was early mornings and evenings during the summer, or after dark in the winter. Although I stated earlier that it was on the mild days during winter that the rudd fed, there were exceptions, and on some evenings they could be caught when the ground was rock-hard with frost.

It was also during the winter that friends and I caught lots of rudd from a local trout reservoir – not that you couldn’t have caught in the summer, but because coarse fishing wasn’t allowed until 1st November. Nevertheless, many large rudd, which were thought to have weighed up to 4lb, were caught on flies during the summer and spring. However, none of these were properly weighed and witnessed, so we will never know for sure just how big they were.

Interestingly, these captures, which were generally taken by boat anglers, varied considerably. As you would expect, some were taken on the surface with dry flies or just below with nymphs, but others were hooked on large white lures fished deep with sinking lines. Of course, there is nothing to stop anyone from buying a day ticket and fishing for rudd with a fly. It would be an expensive days fishing with a ticket costing £15 and a boat another £10. Also, if you happened to catch six rainbows you would have to bag up, for that is the limit.

The water to which I refer is called Powdermill at Selcombe in East Sussex, where a fish weighing 5lb was recently found dead. However, when it’s pharyngeal teeth were subsequently removed for examination by the Environment Agency, it was found to be a roach/rudd hybrid and not a true rudd.

Powdermill is a lovely water of 56 acres, nestling in woods and unspoilt countryside, and while the dam and a few swims at the sides can be fished from the bank, much of it can only be approached from a boat.

When the trout fishing stops, the Clive Vale Angling Club of which I am a member, are allowed to fish it on certain days, and this is generally when the rudd are caught.

Some winters they are particularly difficult and very few are taken, with catches being mainly made up of perch. However, last winter was exceptionally wet and the lake coloured up from the two streams that feed it. The water remained thick throughout the entire winter, a phenomenon I cannot every remember happening before. The consequence of this was that the rudd few well throughout and more were caught than ever before.

Even so, singling out the better fish was largely a matter of luck. The average size of the fish was in the 12oz to 1lb class with a sprinkling of better fish from 1lb to 1lb 8oz, a few between 1lb 8oz and 2lb, plus the odd bigger one. There seemed to be a gap with no fish at all in the 2lb 4oz to 2lb 12oz class, but there were bigger ones. I friend of mine, Mick Errends, caught the biggest rudd last year – a fish of 3lb 6oz, while I caught one of 2lb 14oz.

Although anglers experimented with baits, maggots and sweetcorn were the only two, which really worked well. Worms generally produced a perch and bread attracted the trout. Most anglers believe that worms are the best bait for trout, but I can tell you they are not. I have fished lots of trout reservoirs in the winter for coarse fish, and without doubt bread flake catches more trout than any other bait. In fact, unless I think there are very few trout in the water, I will not use it. The last thing I want is a trout charging up and down my rudd swim.

The strange thing about rudd in this water is that they are usually a long way from the bank, and often in water 15ft deep – so much for them being surface feeders! Seventy yards cast if often required, and to be sure of at least some bait landing where you are casting, we generally fish with a feeder. In some cases it was a straight maggot feeder, though sometimes it was either an open-ended groundbait feeder, or a cage feeder.

Clearly, if a maggot feeder is used then you are restricted to feeding with just maggots, but an open-ended feeder gives us the opportunity of fishing with crumb mixed with maggots and corn. In turn this gave us a choice of baits to match the feed.

I fished with either 3lb or 4lb line straight through with a size 12 Super Specialist Drennan hook loaded with four or five maggots, though sometimes I replaced the maggots with corn or caster. A combination of maggots and corn, or maggots and caster was also tried. They all catch rudd and there didn’t seem to be anything which worked better than anything else – neither did there seem to be a bait that sorted out the better fish.

Deep water and long distance were the two overriding factors, which made the difference to either catching, or not. The two actually went together, for the further the cast the deeper the water.

As an aside, it is interesting to note that Powdermill contains only rudd, perch, and a few roach, there are no carp to muddy the water and bully the other fish, and there are no bream to hybridize with.

There is no doubt Powdermill Reservoir is home to some huge rudd and is probably one of the best rudd fishing lakes in the country. With any luck I shall be back there again next winter. In the meantime any rudd fishing I do will be in gravel pits, unless I can find an old pond somewhere, which has escaped the infectious carp stocking. 
 

This article was first published in Coarse Angling Today January 2002