M'thud Fishing

 I'd decide some time ago to give the local still waters a go over the Easter holidays rather than battle the traffic to get to and from a trout water, especially as warm sunny weather was predicted. Arriving at the lake around 8:30 I was surprised to be the only one there. I'd expected other to have already arrived. Maybe they thought it was going to be crowded and had given it a miss. 

I selected a corner swim as I knew where the feature was that often attracted bream, my target species. I intended to fish method feeder on one rod and float fished maggots on the other. Despite owning several method feeders I'd never actually used them so this would be something new to me. First order of the day was mix up the groundbait. I'd been advised that a 50:50 mix of pellets and groundbait worked well here. I don't own one of those fancy branded mixing buckets but I do have a rather splendid blue two gallon bucket of considerable vintage. I believe it's getting on for fifty years old, but it's not been heavily used. I even know which shop I bought it from, or where the shop was more precisely. For bait I had a selection of pellets and some small bollies in various colours, flavours unknown. 

After a few casts to get the correct distance I clipped up and proceeded to fish. Recasting every three minutes for the first half hour to get a bed of bait down. After half an hour I was leaving the rod ten minutes, so with it resting on the squawk box I set up the float rod. This didn't go well. As I was threading the line through the rings I dropped it and broke the tip just above the next guide. It was still useable, which was a good job as I only had the one float rod with me. Actually I did have another, but it was a specimen float and way too stiff for flicking out a little 3BB insert waggler. After a spot of plumbing three balls of groundbait and some loose fed maggots were dropped on the chosen spot.

With the alarm on the phone set to go every fifteen minutes for recasting the method rod I proceeded to fish the float rod as well. Initially the signs were good. Fishing double maggot I managed to get every third bite and soon managed a dozen small roach before getting bitten off by a little jack that grabbed the maggots as I wound in. As I replaced the hook length I remembered I'd brought the keepnet so set that up, hoping for a nice bag of roach. This was not to be. I was then plagued by a string of unmissable bites. Single maggot didn't get any bites, but bites on double and triple maggot rarely contacted with anything. Meanwhile the method rod failed to elicit a bite. I'd changed the hookbait every hour, but nothing was to the bream's liking. Three more times I was bitten off by small jack pike. I ended up a few roach, a perch and a couple of hand sized skimmers.

A couple more anglers had turned up for a few hours both taking a few roach. There was quite a lot of alder beetle about and a tree creeper kept tormenting me by waiting long enough for me to get the phone set to camera mode before hopping round the back of the tree. The toads were also about, playing piggy back rides, but sinking away before i could get a photo. I did manage to snag length of spawn which took a bit of removing from the hook. It's incredibly sticky stuff.