Session 55 – In Which Steve Is Pleasantly Surprised!

Ok… so today – Thursday 17th October 2013 – was spent at the ‘tench’ pool after seeing, on my session at another club pool on Tuesday, a lot of carp activity and another angler on the far bank catching well too. Although I blanked there myself – I was actually deadbaiting for pike mostly with a bit of lure fishing thrown in. Anyway, water temps at that pool had seemed good too at a constant 11.9C all through the day.

Anyway, as I say, that determined that I would return to the chosen pool of today… but I almost didn’t go after popping out yesterday for bait and sandwich materials and suffering the heavy and cold rain. But on returning home I checked the BBC Weather web site and it reckoned that the day was to brighten up at 1500 … and that today WAS to be good … so sandwiches and flask made, bait and tackle loaded and away I went this morning. And it did turn out to be a good day – a couple of 1 minute showers were the worst of it … otherwise warm and calm.

So… I arrived at the pool at 0800 to find someone was already there! :) And this solved one query for myself… With all the rain yesterday I thought I may have to park on the hardcore car park at the bottom end of the pool as the grass track up to the far end gets easily waterlogged and often I’ve had trouble getting back with wheel spins, etc. And if I did park on the hardcore car park, I had 2 options available really…. fish peg 1, the nearest peg from the car or to load the tackle on the tackle barrow and push it up to peg 11 my current favourite swim. However, the guy already there was in peg 1, so it removed that from my thoughts … and the ground was actually fine to drive over so drove directly up the poolside and hand carried the tackle the last few yards to the swim.

OK … tackled up … 2 rods … one laying-on with a float, 6lb line, 16 hook, and the other rod a straight leger setup again with 6lb line, 1/4oz bomb 12″ from hook and size 6 hook. Baits used were maggot and worm on the float rod and a large prawn on the leger setup. ‘Predator Plus’ dip was also used on the baits.

I started fishing and whilst awaiting the first bite of the day I thought over the situation – the heavy cold rain of the previous day would have cooled the water quite a bit I imagined (measured temp actually 10C) … and then thought that perhaps I’d not chosen the best end of the pool to fish as the pool is stream fed at that end, the water exiting at the other end. Thus, the water at my end would most likely be the colder… So I immediately discounted any great chance of catching tench but thought I may get some decent perch, bream or barbel and carried on in a positive frame of mind…

First fish landed was a small perch of a couple of ounces, and I was getting quite a few lift bites and nudges… and next fish I hooked into was a quite hefty fish and I was thinking large perch or barbel until I netted a 2lb 15oz golden tench – a new PB beating my previous best 2lb 11oz, also from the same pool back in June 2013 :) …. and then a little later I had a 1lb 15oz tench … and then another tench of 3lb 10oz – which equalled my PB caught from Trench Pool, Telford in the 1979/80 season … so well chuffed! One new PB and one PB equalled :) And ended the day with another capture of a small perch. And when I packed up at 1530 I was still getting a bite a cast almost….

All fish came to the float rod, but I did have a few tweaks on the leger rod and the prawn whittled down early on and a bit later a few short 12″ tugs in quick succession but nothing came of it.

Water temps: 9.9C rising to 10.3C over the day
Air temp: 11.8C at 0800, 15.8C at 1530

Air Min: 11.5C Air Max: 23.5C
Water Min: 9.9C Water Max: 10.3C

Pics of the day: