Thursday was a fine autumnal type day. Sun with a chill wind. Too warm for a woolly, too cold for a t-shirt. I'd ventured down to another deep stretch that's kind of defeated me over the years, apart from winter pike fishing. Others do well on it with some nice bags of roach. Some of us, though, tend to spend our time scratching about for the odd fish here and there. The swim I choose, for no good reason, was around twelve foot deep. With 1 fifteen foot rod I could have fished a fixed float, but a breezy day and high bankside vegetation can make casting such a rig awkward. I, instead, set up a 6g Dave Harrell slider float. For a large rather bulky looking float it is remarkably sensitive.
Having had a few trots down with out any bait on to see if there was any snags of whatever. I then lobbed in a few balls of groundbait laced with maggots and chopped worm. While I left the swim to settle I had a cuppa. I then had a couple of casts with a maggot feeder to get some maggots in the swim. I'd misplaced my bait-dropper and this was the only way of getting them down to the bottom with out the minnows and bleak intercepting them.
First few trots through produced either small gudgeon or tiny roach. I then took a small bream. The next cast I had a similar sized fish but after a couple of turns of the reel handle it was snatched by a pike. New hook length and out again. Every half dozen or so trots I tossed the maggot feeder out to get more bait down. After this the fish would arrive in twos and threes then things would go quiet. By afternoon I was get a lot of unmissable bites that I couldn't hit. A change to caster produced less bites but these were hittable. I did try worm, worm & maggot, and worm & caster on the feeder rod but only got a few rattles.
As usual things hadn't gone as well as I'd hoped. Thirty three fish, plus a few minnows, for five hours fishing. I will get the better of this stretch one day.
One day!
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