stevetheangler

Tuesday 13th July 2015 and I was at yet another new venue for me – Valley View Pool, a Kinver Freeliner’s members only water.

The morning was a sort of misty/drizzly (aka ‘mizzly’) one that necessitated the use of a brolly – and gave me chance to try out my new Dinsmore’s screw-in brolly spike….

…that replaces the standard spike section supplied as standard and allows the brolly to be able to be set up almost anywhere regardless of the hardness of the ground – comes with a bar to aid with the screwing too. And it worked well… quite impressed! No more mallets and pounding, often to little avail anyway, for me! :)

First impressions of the pool was how nice looking it was despite the weather – a designer pool really with platforms all around and small promontaries and with three islands in the pool. Also it is a stocked pool with many species present – barbel, chub, goldfish, carp, crucian carp, gudgeon, perch, roach, rudd – with fish of good size (chub up to 7lb, perch of 4lb, etc). It’s not a large pool and the number of anglers at any one time are limited to six….

So, given the weather and the likelihood of under-brolly fishing, I veered from my would have preferred float fishing and instead set up two ledger rods on buzzers, main baits of the day being worm, maggot and bread…

[NOTE: the NEW spelling of ‘ledger’ – in the past I’ve always used ‘leger’. It was mentioned by a mate of mine that he’d looked up the spelling and found that ‘leger’ was defined as an accounting document, and ‘ledger’ was defined as fishing with a weight  holding the line/bait on the bottom. When I looked myself it seemed to me that both spellings were actually used interchangeably for both uses… and so I went and referred to the ‘Angling Master’s and their writings – ie Dick Walker, Chris Yates, John Wilson and Bernhard Venables in his Mr Crabtree personna – and discovered without fail that all four used the ‘ledger’ spelling… and hence I revert to their combined wisdom henceforth….]

So I fished from around 0800 until I wound in for my final time at 1530… and over the course of the day I had many small, nay tiny, perch, what I originally took to be a 12oz crucian carp – but on later checking is in fact a brown fantail goldfish…

… two common carp of 2lb 10oz and 3lb 10oz, a small rudd and a roach of around 8oz… and for the final hour of my time I switched to a floating crust set up as carp were actively taking pieces of bread and crust that I  had introduced and which had blown into the corner of the pool to my right … and were attacking the ducks that had also gathered in the area attracted by that bread… a duck would approach the area of the bread and a ‘V’ wave would appear heading towards it… and as it passed a tail would rise from the water and give the duck a good smack!! Anyway, the result of the floated bread fishing was a nice mirror carp of 6lb 2oz taken on the last cast of the day…