stevetheangler

Tuesday, 10th February 2015, saw my return to the pike water full of hope …. again.

Setting off from home at around 0830, I arrived, after combating school and work traffic, at the pike pool at a little after 0900 to find that I’d the place to myself and that the water was free of the ice that covered 99% of its surface on my last visit. So, I decided to visit my usual peg. Once there the thermometer was placed in position and the tackle set up…

Unusually, as I normally fish one legered/popped-up bait and one floatfished bait, I decided on setting up my two float rods initially with one with the bait depth set to around 8’-9’ (12”-24” off bottom in the 10’ deep water in front of me) and the other at around mid-water at 4’-5’, fishing both between 2 rod lengths and 5-6 rod lengths out and allowing to drift across and round in front of me on the very light breeze. Baits were a christmas tree of 4-5 sprats on one rod and a single smelt on the other…

And so things remained until around 1130 with not a touch noted. At this point, I changed the tree of sprats to a single sprat and changed both rods to fish at 12’ deep so that the baits dragged bottom. One rod, sprat, was fished out to my left under an overhanging tree and the other, smelt, to the right, again just off the overhang of a tree… and another angler arrived at around 1030.

At 1230, the breeze, a NW’erly, had picked up over the previous hour and although not strong in any sense of the word, it did have a cooling effect due to it being across and into my body and face.

Between 1230 and the end of the session I did start to receive attention at my baits with both rods having indications of the floats ‘trembling’ but nothing more ‘serious’ came of those attentions – and most likely they were due to chub playing with the bait as on several times on previous trips these indications have been encountered and, although I’ve not managed to convert to a capture, my partner Liz has and they have been chub of reasonable size (ca 4lb).

And so, at 1510, I decided that I was going to call it a day and although occasional ‘trembles’ were still being noted the day ended as a blank.

WATER TEMPS:

Time               Air                  Water

0930                4.5                     7.5
1030                4.7                     7.5
1135                 5.2                     7.5
1235                 5.0                     7.5
1335                 4.6                     7.6
1435                 5.0                     7.6
1510                 4.9                     7.6

WATER TEMP TRENDS (Since Sept 2014):