Perch and roach under Talša's ice, from first freeze to late winter

01First ice: perch along the weed

The first fortnight of safe ice gives the best perch fishing of the year. The fish are still feeding hard after the autumn, the water under new ice is clear and bright, and they hunt along the outside of the weed beds in two to three metres of water. I drill a line of holes from shallow to deep, five or six of them ten metres apart, and move along the line every few minutes until one of them produces. Once a hole gives one perch, there are usually more beneath it.

For this I use a small vertical jig or a balance lure, a little fish-shaped lure that swims in a circle when it is lifted and dropped, on a short rod with line of about 0.14 mm. The action is a sharp lift of twenty centimetres, a drop, a pause, and then a few small shakes just off the bottom. Perch hit it on the pause. Most of the ones I keep are the length of a hand, with the odd better one that makes the rod tip bounce.

02Deep winter: short windows

By late January the ice is thick, snow often lies on top of it, and very little light reaches the water. The weed dies back, oxygen in the shallows starts to fall, and the perch drift out to the deeper water in the middle of the lake. They still feed, but in short windows: the first hour of light, sometimes a burst around midday on a bright day, and the last half hour before dark. Between those I can sit for two hours without a touch.

In deep winter I scale everything down. The balance lure goes back in the box and a tiny tungsten jig goes on, the kind called a mormyshka, with two or three bloodworms on its hook. The line drops to 0.10 mm and the rod gets a spring-steel nod on its tip, which shows bites the hand would never feel. Fish often take on the way down or while the jig is held still, and the nod simply stops moving or lifts a little.

03Roach are a different game

Roach on Talša move around in schools and sit close to the bottom in deep winter, often in the same deeper areas as the perch but a little further from the weed. They are shyer biters than perch. A roach bite on the nod is a twitch of a few millimetres, or a slow lift as the fish picks up the jig and rises, and the strike has to be a small lift of the wrist, not a sweep of the arm.

A pinch of ground bait helps to hold a school: breadcrumb, a little soil from the lake shore and a few bloodworms, pressed into a ball and dropped down the hole once. More than that and the fish feed on the ground bait and ignore the hook. Roach go back more often than perch do. I keep a few for the pan when there are plenty and release the rest at once, straight back down the hole rather than laid on the ice.

04Late winter, and what goes in the box

In March, as meltwater brings oxygen in along the shore, both fish move back towards the shallows and feed hard again, which is exactly when the ice starts to fail. The March entry from Rėkyva is about that trade. The box itself hardly changes over the season, and a small one is plenty for a walk to Talša. Everything in it fits in one shoulder bag, which matters on the walk home when the fingers have stopped working properly.

• Two short rods, one stiff for balance lures and one soft with a nod.
• Spools of 0.10, 0.12 and 0.14 mm line.
• Tungsten jigs of 2 to 4 mm, in black, brass and silver.
• Two balance lures and two vertical jigs, nothing more.
• Bloodworm in a small box inside my jacket, where it will not freeze.
• A scoop for slush, a hook disgorger, and the notebook with a pencil.

05What five winters of columns show

The notebook matters as much as the rods. Every entry has the date, the hole, the depth, the time of each bite and the air temperature, and over five winters those columns have told me more about Talša than any conversation on the ice. Most of it is not surprising, but it is useful to see it in my own handwriting rather than believe it because an older man on a bucket said so.

On Talša, about two thirds of my perch bites have come in the first ninety minutes of light or the last hour before dark. December and early January give more fish than February by a wide margin. Roach have been steadier through the day and less bothered by the cold than perch, and a sharp drop in air pressure has meant a quiet morning more often than not. None of this would stand up as science, and all of it decides when I set the alarm.