Pike Takes My Bait

With the rivers still not a comfortable height, for me, to fish and reports of pike taking fish as they were been brought in, I headed to a, small, local pit.  I'd also been told it was rather full as the places you would normally plonk a chair now had up to 18" of water covering them. It also meant the margins were deeper than normal which would help my plan for the day.

This should be dry land

Arriving at my chosen swim, which has a couple of nice feature either side and a good command of the bar out front. In order to attract a few bait fish  I tossed in some roughly liquidised sweet corn around the feature and out to the line normally fished by the float anglers. The other advantage of this swim is it can be seen from all the other swims which would assist in my first course of action, which was to drop a sprat in around the features in the other swims. A small bob float and a single hook rig had been tied on the night before and I set off to the corner swim with the intention of fishing each feature for about 5-10 minutes. I'd used this tactic in the past and while it normally produced the odd jack here and there, it did occasionally throw up larger fish. One  problem soon manifest it's self though, the margins were full of debris especially silver birch branches. In fact twig fish seemed to be the order of the day as I made my way round.

Popped up Lamprey section

I eventually arrived back at my kit, fish less, and tossed the bait close to a fallen tree, but it failed to cock despite the depth. a slow pull with the rod showed it had snagged a sunken branch. A bit more pull and it came free but the bait also came free and slowly fluttered from view only to disappear amid a large swirl as a pike shot out and grabbed it. I quickly impaled another sprat on the hook and cast it back from whence it came. Despite fish at different depths and free-lining a bait, there was no sign of it wanting to eat further. In the meantime I'd cast a popped up lamprey onto the bar.

There must be something in here to entice a Pike

I moved the float fished bait between the three nearside swims and continued to toss in some of the sweetcorn with out any action. At various points through the day I twitched the lamprey, throw lures about and wobbled a roach with out any success. At one point I did latch onto the largest twig fish of the day with a deep diving plug, which at least put a bend in the rod.

Giant stick fish

With rain forecast for all day tomorrow it looks like the end of the river season could be a wash out.