stevetheangler

It was Friday, 4th September when Liz and I returned to the mixed species pool that I’d fished on the previous session earlier in the week on the Monday.

An enjoyable day in the middle section ie when actually fishing but arrival and (especially) departure were sobering experiences…. so lets’s get those over and done with before concentrating on the actual fishing part of the day…

Arrival…
The forecast for the day had been for it to be dry but overcast over the day…
Wrong… on arrival there were dark clouds and a definite heavy precipitation appearing on the windscreen. So, we waited in the car for a while and the rain slowed, stopped, re-started and continued in such a vein for about 30 minutes or so – and then blue skies appeared on the horizon reaching us after another few minutes. At this point we went for it… and it turned out, weatherwise, far better in reality than the forecast all day cloudy skies in that we actually had a good deal of blue sky and at times good sunshine too. A couple of short showers intervened over the fishing period but they were a minor inconvenience really…

Departure…
The REAL disaster of the day….
We had started to pack up the tackle at 1600 planning to stop off for a beer on the way home and so had arrived back at the car, loaded up the tackle and jumped in to drive off at around 1700 …. I turned the key in the ignition, engine turned over but fail to start… repeated attempts, same result. SO after a period of meditation we decided we needed help  … and being a Green Flag member there was only one option open to us… to ring them for recovery which we did about 1730. Anyway, Friday appears to be a busy night or so we were told (but I suspect the other six nights of the week you get informed the same) and it would be an hour or so before anyone would get to us… an hour later we did get a message to say the van was on its way… but another hour later still no-one had arrived nor had any further info had been received… so we rang Green Flag back to get an update, they contacted the garage, who then contacted the driver of the van, who then contacted us (all within 15 minutes) to say he couldn’t locate us… Fair enough, as the pool is in a very remote area down 2 miles or more of country lanes and is actually 2 fields in from an un-named lane. But suspecting such difficulty I managed to get on to the angling club’s Facebook page via my mobile phone (networking signal was very poor too!) and posted requesting help with any postcode/co-ordinates that could be used to locate us by SatNav and quite quickly there was a response by a member with details from Google Earth including the lat/long co-ordinates of the gate to the pool. We passed these to the van man but shortly after had a phone call from him to say his SN didn’t take the figures in the format supplied and was there any way to get to a nearby house to ask for their postcode… Well, there was a farmhouse about a 10-15 minute walk down the lane and so headed there, the lady gave me the necessary information which I relayed to the van – and so, after another 15 minutes the van arrived with us!! OK… then the guy did his bit twiddling bits and connecting up his computer diagnostics reader, etc and after another 20 mins or so declared he had no idea what was up – no faults recorded on the in-car computer, and everything mechanically/electronically was doing what it should and there was no reason as he could fathom as to why it wouldn’t start up… and so we ended up in the Green Flag van, with the car on the trailer at the back being brought back home … and arriving here just a little pre-2200!! 8 hours after packing up our tackle! SO… with Liz due in early work today (Sat 5th) it was a case of feet up with a coffee (we should not have thrown out the coffee in our flasks when we tackled down, lesson learnt – next time the coffee will be kept until we get home!), watched the evening’s recording of ‘My Kitchen Rules’ and then off to bed. So it was a long day but at least we got home before daybreak…

POSTSCRIPT – tried the car again this morning ‘just in case’-  but still the fault existed. And then I had a ‘brainwave’ – from where I don’t know but something clicked in my mind about immobilisers – so I went and found out the spare key and tried that – and lo and behold the car started first turn of the key! Re-tries – original key won’t start but spare key starts every time. So it would seem that the  problem lies in the key’s immobiliser chip rather than car itself! Anyway, been to my local garage and had a word with them and I’m taking the car in on Monday and they’ll have a quick look to see if there’s anything they can do but said most likely I would need to go to a Ford place to get the key looked at or replaced. In my user manual it says that keys can be self-programmed in the car itself BUT it requires 2 working keys to make it happen – and I’ve only 2 keys in all and one of them (the one that needs re-programming) is not working. And while I was at the garage I’ve booked the car in for its annual service which is due at the end of September anyway but needs doing early as we are expecting guests at that time from abroad and also the week after they leave us we ourselves are on holiday and I want it done before we go…

POST-POSTSCRIPT – well, it transpired that whilst fishing I got my car key, which was hanging off my belt,  jammed in my chair and as I stood up the 2 halves of the key separated. As it splits to change the battery I hadn’t damaged the key per se so I just pushed the 2 halves together and carried on fishing. HOWEVER, what I hadn’t realised at the time was that the tiny immobiliser chip that’s embedded in the key had fallen from its mounting and had been lost in the grass – not that knowing that at the time would have been useful anyway – looking for something 1mm by 0.5mm in trodden grass would have been less fruitful than the proverbial needle in the haystack? Anyway, a key devoid of this chip will turn the engine over, and indeed start it for 1 second or so but then the engine just dies out… 

Anyway, so let’s talk of the fishing now :)

And so, it was around 0900 that we eventually started fishing, having waited for the bad weather to pass, walked to the swims and having done all our pre-casting in preps. We both fished 2 leger rods, Liz with small open end feeders with red groundbait laced with particles and maggots and with varying baits inc meat, sausage, sweetcorn and maggot and myself used straight leger rigs with 1/3oz weights and on one rod used a size 12 hook baited with worm, maggot, cockle at varying times and on the other a size 6 hook with baits varying between bread, 3-year-old cheesepaste, prawn and meat for the main part.

Sport was fairly consistent throughout the day with various species were landed between us.

Liz:

• Roach, 4oz, meat
• Mirror Carp, 2lb 2oz, sweetcorn

Steve:

• Common Carp, 2lb 3oz, meat
• Perch, tiny, cockle/maggot
• Chub, 2lb 11oz, prawn
• Perch, ca 8oz, prawn
• Perch, tiny, worm/maggot
• Gudgeon, worm
• Perch, tiny, worm

A few other bites were missed by us and a couple of escapees were also encountered… and plenty of carp were interested in the marshmallows that I catapulted out from time to time but we didn’t bother trying for them…