stevetheangler

OK, today I was off to a club pool that is a little distant but fairly near. In fact, our club has two pools on the site – the larger, upper, pool of 2 acres is the main fishery and is intended to become the club’s premier carp fishery in time – recently some 20lb+ carp have been added to the resident stock which had been caught, I think, up to 19lb. The other pool, smaller at 1 acre, has been on the backburner with the club since its acquisition as the larger pool is being sorted out first. This smaller pool contains small silvers and a large head of jack pike it is believed but I’m not sure that anyone fishes it as there is little access to the waterside and the few old platforms, that I assume were installed by the previous holding club, have rotted away. Liz and I fished it once for pike a couple of years ago but blanked…

OK, today I was off to a club pool that is a little distant but fairly near. In fact, our club has two pools on the site – the larger, upper, pool of 2 acres is the main fishery and is intended to become the club’s premier carp fishery in time – recently some 20lb+ carp have been added to the resident stock which had been caught, I think, up to 19lb. The other pool, smaller at 1 acre, has been on the backburner with the club since its acquisition as the larger pool is being sorted out first. This smaller pool contains small silvers and a large head of jack pike it is believed but I’m not sure that anyone fishes it as there is little access to the waterside and the few old platforms, that I assume were installed by the previous holding club, have rotted away. Liz and I fished it once for pike a couple of years ago but blanked…

Anyway, today’s session was on the larger, main pool. And I’m going to start this report with my reason, or you may say ‘excuse’, for my results of the day… :D

Right, a bit about this pool… it’s HARD, damned hard at that! Matches are won on this pool with less than 1lb… often 16 anglers fish, 3 weigh in and the winning weight is 6oz! OK, so a few of them get broken by large carp on their pole tackle… BUT that would lead you to believe that the pool is devoid of anything but large’ish carp… WRONG!!! TOTALLY AND COMPLETELY AND UTTERLY! This pool is stuffed to the gills with plenty of silver fish inc plenty of roach over 1lb, good perch, etc, etc. In fact it is probably the most heavily fish populated water the club has – and as an analogy I would say in your pantry you have several tins or sardines – and this is the tin with the 2 extra free! When the people who advise on our fishery management did a netting to determine the population of fish, just on one sweep (and at the far, dam, end its too deep to net efficiently) , they couldn’t raise the net out of the water! Full of 2oz-4oz ‘sardines’ along with carp, a solitary 8lb bream, pike, perch, tench, etc. In fact, their advice was to stock with chub in order to cut down and control the numbers of the smaller fish. OK, then a pool so full of fish you can almost emulate JC and walk on the water but a blank is the usual result of fishing… what gives?

OK… besides all the fish there is an absolute abundance of natural food for them to live on… unlike commercials of probably similar stocking levels which require extra feed in the form of pellets, etc. when numbers of anglers drop (eg winter), there is so much natural food for them that they need not look beyond what they know basically… and in this situation they are pre-occupied with those food items and have no need to look for or want to experience new food items such as the angler’s bait. And really the only way for this to change is for bait and feed to be introduced by anglers so that eventually the fish will learn to accept these items… HOWEVER… Catch 22 rears its head… in as much as, as the fishing is difficult very few people fish there and so little bait/feed gets introduced… and as there is little feed/bait being introduced to the fish they are not getting introduced to sufficient quantities in order to get weaned over… Vicious circle!

However, having said that, the occasional red letter days do happen there from time to time… and it was in that frame of mind I set out this morning….

So I arrived at the pool at around 0800, set up in a location as seen in the photo above (peg 19) and spombed out a few loads of particles/maggots/groundbait to the intended fishing areas and then fished with two rods – both leger, 8lb line, size 6 hook – the right hand rod being fished with bread first then switched to meat towards the island under the overhanging bushes, the second rod out to the left towards an overhanging tree on the bank and baited with worm. Over the course of the day each rod was recast from time to time to various areas around but, by the time I packed in at 1400, not one bite had been had. There were signs of fish movement – at one point it seemed a perch attack was in progress with several fry scatterings in a period of about 15 minutes occurring.

So… the result for the day was ‘Fish:Won – Steve:Lost’…..

But I DID catch something… on packing up for the day and pulling my landing net in from the water, behold… :D

Steve:WON – Toad:LOST