Still Not Ousing With Pike

I spent the weekend looking at the levels of the steadily rising rivers and was quite pleased that the Ouse didn't seem to be rising that quickly and seemed to top out at just over 2m. This was a reasonable level for the area I intended to fish for pike. Monday morning I arrived at the river to find the path flooded. This was odd given the height on the gauge. Another look at the phone and the truth of the matter jumped out at me. I'd been looking at the wrong gauge. I'd had one further downstream set on a shortcut and had not noticed despite the number of times I'd looked at it. Still, I was here and there should be enough slacks to fish in. After all the bait fish move into the slacks and the pike follow.

The first thing I did was have a wander about with the lure rod. It was obvious which swims had been fished over the weekend by the muddy patch at the top of the bank. These were also the swims with nice slacks in them. Some swims that appear to have nice slacks need to be seen at low water to see why they weren't fished. One superb looking slack I know to be above drowned brambles, nettles and shrubs. A great place for bait fish to take shelter, but extracting a pike from it would be hell's own job. After an hour of throwing lure with not even a flow I set up the dead bait rods in one of the larger slacks. This nice thing with the river at this level is that you can sit at the top of the bank on level ground instead of having to descend down a steep slippy bank.

Basically the day went like this. I would occasional move the baits to different areas of the slack. Inject them with oils. Swap them for different baits. Allow one to drift about. Have a wander with a lure rod or dead bait rod. What didn't happen was for any fish to show. Not even a dropped run.I was beginning to think Ouse pike don't feed on Mondays, after last weeks blank as well. I did have a couple of dropped runs last time though. As the sun was beginning to disappear from view I had one last go with the lure rod. On the first cast as I was about to lift the lure out of the water a little jack made a lunge for it, grabbing it's tail and missing the hooks. Despite several more attempts, giving it a rest and try different lures there was no more sign of it. A few chucks elsewhere failed to produce anything despite my hopes it was feeding time. By now the first signs of darkness were showing and as I had no desire to battle flooded paths and slippery steps in the dark I packed up.

 

One thing I have noticed is that my phone doesn't seem to be able to focus when I zoom in. I'm currently assuming I'm doing something wrong and it's not a fault with the phone, but we shall see.