stevetheangler

Sunday 16th February 2014 and I’m back at my usual Staffordshire piking pond… fishing the swim where I had the follow to a lure two or three weeks back – peg 13 actually, so all superstitions were cast to the wind. However, rather than lure fishing, this time I was fishing with deadbaits.

I arrived at the pool and tackled up and made my first cast around 0915, fishing two rods. On arrival, before tackling up, I ascertained the depths of the water around me with the depth/fish finder (which incidentally picked up a good number of fish – probably carp – at around half depth). The depth being around 14.5 feet 30 yards out and remaining at that until around 3 rod lengths out when the depth started to rise steadily up to the bank. I elected to fish at around 2 rod lengths out initially where the depth was at around 12 feet. I  baited up the swim around this area with a breadcrumb/fish oil/mashed sprat-mackerel-sardine ‘rubby-dubby’ type mash, via a large Spomb, that contained very little of edible sized material but was intended to create a scent trail to draw predators into the fished area.

One rod was baited with a full sardine, popped-up, head down, lifted from the bottom by about three inches to simulate a feeding fish standing on its head. The other rod was baited with a standard ledgered tail half of a herring.

Over the course of the next couple of hours the baits were twitched in about a yard or so at a time every 20-30 minutes… and then after having worked to within a few yards of the bank they were re-cast out further and the same twitching/drawing repeated. Unfortunately, by the time I had to leave there had been no positive take of either bait – but I did have one slight 6″ lift of the indicator on the ledgered herring rod close top end of play but this came to nothing – probably just a line bite from a passing carp but it did get the old adrenaline going – something that has sadly been all too missing on the past few sessions.

So, to sum it all up – ANOTHER BLANK!!! Perhaps, I should have tried my technique of the ‘Christmas Tree’ sprat rig – which I had intended to start with actually but didn’t and then became lazy and didn’t change over to it. To my cost?? Possibly… but we’ll never know now.

TEMPS

A cold night overnight left a good coating of ice over the car that had to be dispersed from the windows before I could venture out. Air temps started at 2.8C at 0900 and rose to a maximum 13C before dropping to around 11C when I departed at around 1430. Water temp was 4.6C/4.7C all session.

PLANS

Tomorrow, Tuesday 18th February, I’m hoping to have a canal session on the quivertip rod after anything that may fancy a juicy worm, a dead maggot or a piece of luncheon meat.