Poor Fishing from the Alex and River in General.

I have Just signed up.

thinjk i have already done it but did it again in case i hadnt..

Hi everyone
I''m reading loads of complaints about the crap fishing in the river, and we're all suffering from this; and, as I've said before, this has to be the worst Cod fishing season in the Mersey in living memory! When I was night fishing, recently, off the Brunswick knuckle,(Marina Lock entrance), I noticed a couple of boats cruising up and down around our side of the river: I suspect that they were illegally trawling! Couldn't see for sure in the dark, but I can't think of any other reason why they were running up and down the tide!

If I'm correct, I think this is why the fishing has been so bad for the last year or so! these guys are scraping everytthing up off the river bed! A couple of weeks ago, I posted a link to number 10 Downing street, asking everyone to sign up to a petition to ask the government to really crack down hard on illegal trawlers; however, when I checked the petition today, I see that out of our entire club membership of around 100 (?) members, only around half a dozen have bothered to take the trouble to sign up to the petition!

Those that haven't yet signed up to stop illegal trawling can still do so, and have until, I think the 10th May, before the petition close date! So, get your fingers out fellers! To end on a more positive note I'm pasting another link below, that gives really useful information about using different knots: shock leader, Uni knot, Bloodknot, Dropper, etc', etc'. This is a really clever site, as all these knots are animated presentations, and you can hold your cursor over each stage of the actual tying of the knot, and see every step of how it's done, and practice tying them yourselves. Here's the URL pasted below.

http://www.animatedknots.com/indexfishing.php?

Best
Ian