stevetheangler

Friday 17th April and Liz and I headed off to the club’s tench/silvers pool for the day arriving at around 0745.

After selecting our swims and doing the usual setting up station and pre-baiting procedures we made our first casts at around 0900 …. I fishing my usual way for this pool – laying-on with worm, and Liz having two rods out, one fished laid-on style with maggot as bait and the other a small swimfeeder set up with luncheon meat as bait.

First connected bite of the day came to Liz on the laying-on rod at 1000, a good sized tench, but unfortunately the hook hold gave way as it was just about to be drawn to the landing net.

Not five minutes later, my float rose and started travelling along, a strike met with resistance and a few minutes later a 3lb 8oz tench was in the landing net…

Of course, Liz swore that this was the fish she’d lost 5 minutes previously! :D

However, she was shortly to make amends for her loss and a 3lb 10oz chub was landed at 1100, again on her laying-on rod. Unfortunately, a problem with her camera’s memory card meant this was the only picture that could be salvaged of her day – not the best photo as half of it was corrupt and had to be cropped to save the decent part of the image. But luckily, the photos she’d taken the previous week on her trip to Cyprus were OK. Strange problem with the memory card actually – re-formatted OK in the PC and is read-writeable again now in there BUT when put into either of Liz’s or my camera they both report ‘No memory card inserted’…??? Another spare card inserted into Liz’s camera works fine though…

And so the day continued with Liz landing a 6oz roach, and tench of ca 12oz and 2lb 8oz. And I, myself managed further tench of 2lb 15oz, ca 1lb, 1lb 9oz, ca 8oz, 3lb 4oz and 3lb 11oz.

And so it was that I won ‘First’ (thanks to Liz losing hers), ‘Most’ and ‘Biggest’ (by 1oz) :D and Liz won ‘Most Species’ :)

All fish were caught on the float (laying-on) rods BUT Liz had innumerable takes on her legered luncheon meat rod – most 5-10 beep type over 1 second runs which were ‘here and gone’ before the rod could be reached and shorter pulls too plus one rip-snorter which would have made even the most macho of carp proud (albeit there are no carp in this pool) which almost put Liz’s alarm on fire but, when struck at perfectly, there was nothing there at all and the strike hit fresh air.

Also many bites were had on the laying-on rods that didn’t result in fish being hooked – and a lot of those were what could be termed unmissable – perfect float lifts and glide-aways. The suspicion is that these could have been small roach/rudd just grabbing the end of the worm or bunch of maggots – but we’ll never know…

Weather on the day was good albeit with a very cool breeze on the back of the neck – bright but lightly overcast with air temps at around 12/13C on arrival, rising to 19+C at one point, but falling back to around 14/15C for the majority of the morning and then after noon it rallied a bit again reaching a peak of 20+C but lying mostly in the 17/18C range.

So…. this will be our last trip out for a week as we need to start packing for our week’s camping trip … and then we’re off to the Gower and hoping to fit in a session of sea fishing from Porthcawl Pier.

Most people fish off the end of the upper (stone) pier by the lighthouse, but due to my heights problem, Liz and I will be fishing off the wooden staging at the lower level – it was from here the Porthcawl-Ilfracombe Ferry used to set off in the 50’s (maybe 60’s) as I remember and we went on it once…

Reading up on the fishing around there it seems most things can be caught from there (given right times of year for the individual species, of course) – but plenty of dogfish and pouting etc… and there used to be a load of mullet that used to cruise along the walls too. So hoping for a nice days fishing – and for once it seems that the tide tables are to our advantage – best fishing times being 2 hours before high tide to 2 hours after generally and high tide being at around 1500 on Tuesday, 1600 on Wednesday (most likely day we’ll go) and 1700 on Thursday.

Previous years we’ve fished Mumbles Pier – and I actually caught a dogfish there last year – and in the 80’s I had a whiting… and considering that my paternal grandparents and other relatives lived that way and I fished Mumbles Pier at least once every year from 1957 to late 70’s when we visited them on holiday its not been very kind to me!! 20+ years for two fish!!! LOL!