stevetheangler

Thursday 2nd January 2014 finds me back at the pike pool full of all the optimism one gets at the start of a New Year. OK, it is ‘just a number’ really and no physical reason at all for that particular time to be any different to any of the preceding times – but psychologically it does open up a new start, a refreshed and relaxed new beginning, and a spring in the step towards what lies ahead…

Unfortunately though, for me,  it was a continuation of the dearth of pike getting attracted to my baits that I’ve suffered since the start of the pike ‘season’ – which for me runs from 1st October until the end of March these days – in older ‘closed season’ times of course the season ended on the 14th March.  And even this season is of my own personal making – there are no restrictions on pike fishing nationally or club restrictions on the waters I fish – I just like to look forward to ‘the first day’ and, in fact, most of the other fish species are still active and thus prefer to target those and move towards the piking more and more as the temperatures drop over the winter months, the other species tail off and the pike come into their own.

Anyway, this session of yesterday’s….

I arrived at the waterside, tackled and baited up and rods were in the water at around 0900. Reading a recent article in the journal/blog kept by Stewart Bloor – a local respected angler who has done a weekly angling blog since 2003, look him up on the ‘net by searching for ‘Stewart Bloor’… and he has a fair few videos on YouTube too – he talked about using a predator groundbait (in sea fishing terms this is effectively the shark fisherman’s ‘rubby dubby’) created by mashing fish entrails, heads, bodies in a food processor along with breadcrumb to bind and additional fish oils to add extra attraction – and so I’d prepped some which I fed around the baits in the water and slightly upwind too to allow the ‘trail’ of attraction to be carried down over the baits.

I started off the day with  two rods, both fishing half mackerel (one with the head and the other the tail) with one placed just on the bottom slope and the other on the level bottom. Then over the course of the day I moved location of the baits, twitched, etc and eventually for the last couple of hours I switched one rod over to a sprat suspended at various depths between half depth and 2′ deep and drifted over the corner of the pool I was located in and also along the margins.

However, as the title of the blog suggests, none of these manoeuvres was very successful and not a single sign of any interest was shown at all by the species that is Esox.

I finally gave up at around 1430….

There was one other guy on the pool who managed to get one pike of around 6lb.

Still, as always, a day enjoyed being out on…

Temperatures over the day:
Air: started around 3.5C, rose to 10C and dropped back to 7.5C
Water: started at 5.2C, dropped to 4.7C, recovered to 5.0C

Plans for next outings are away from the pool… hoping to do some lure fishing (pike/perch/chub) and bait fishing (for whatever) on the canals next week.