At Least The Weather Was Nice

With the river peaking at 2.7m on Thursday evening and not expected to drop below 2m on Friday I decided to fish the gravel pit again on Friday. I'd hatched a cunning plan, I was going to fish from first light until dark a period of 12 hours. I don't normally fish sessions that long these days, but armed with a new gas canister, a couple of pot noodles and plenty of tea bags I thought I would just about manage to survive. I awoke on Friday to a lot heavier frost than I'd expected. Despite the thick layer of ice on the car windows it wasn't as cold as it looked. Arriving at the pit I found the water  had crept up another  six inches since I was last there. This may be the highest I've seen the water in years. This meant a lot of the bankside debris was now drifting about the water.

I started in the first swim I came to. A trout went out in front and a small roach fished on a paternoster was placed near some tree roots. After an hour or so I moved on to the next swim. I was surprised nobody else had turned up, but it did give me the chance to move to the next swim. In fact nobody else turned up to fish.  This gave me the chance to fish all the nine swims, and blank in them all. I didn't have so much as a dropped run. I tried swapping baits. Smelt, sardine, roach, lamprey, eel, mackerel were all tried. I tried pop up baits. Drifting them about at various depths, when thee was enough breeze o allow the float to move. One lad that had done quite well earlier in the month popped down to see how thing we looking. He told me nobody had caught all week as far a he knew and was thinking of giving it a miss this weekend as the pit had seen a lot of pressure this year.

 

Hopefully the river will have settled by next week and I give that a go. There again I seem to be picking the days pike aren't really feeding, but they're my days off so I have to make the best of it.  The weather was nice for sitting by the water though, so can't complain.