stevetheangler

Tuesday, December 29th, and it was off to Pike Pool 24 for my final session of 2015 – a pike session with deadbaits.

Weather for the day was excellent – calm and bright with blue skies – air temp on leaving the house at 0730 was 8.5C, at 1100 in direct sunshine it rose to 21C on the thermo but out of the sun was 10C-11C throughout the rest of the day.

I fished two rods.

Rod 1 was set up as a running submerged float paternoster(*) with a 5’ link to a 2oz lead and the bait fished with an 18”-20” trace thus the bait (a jack – NOT a small pike but a small (3”-4”) sea fish a bit like a miniature skipjack tuna) was suspended around 3.5’ above the bottom in water of depths of around 12’-17’ depending on location. The wire trace was fitted with one size 2 single hook put through the dorsal muscle of the bait and a bait flag fitted.

Rod 2 was set up as a standard ledger rig using a snap tackle consisting of 2 size 8 treble hooks and the bait was a needlefish (aka bluey or pacific saury)…

Both rods were fished open bale arm with standard alarms on the front rod rests with drop back arms fitted to the rear rod rests to help indicate drop back bites.

During the day, 3 takes were noted – all drop-backs… the first on the paternoster rod came at about 1300, the strike met resistance momentarily but then a hook pull occurred …. and later two dropbacks were noted on the ledger rod but both times after about 12”-24” of line movement the bait was dropped….

At 1530, with light dropping it was time to pack up….

A couple of things incidental…

On arrival I got out my echo-sounder and in the 12’-17’ depth bands the water was alive with fish swimming at around the 8’-10’ levels…

And the pool was packed with anglers – although I think I was the only piker there until about 1500 when a lure fisher arrived, the rest after carp. Usually on a mid-summer’s morning this pool is ‘busy’ if there are 4 people there (inc Liz and I) – must have been brought out by the change of weather after weeks of cold, wet and windy…. Anyway, the carpers seemed to be catching well enough…

And so ends my final blog of 2015 – and hopefully my first blog of 2016 will appear shortly :)

TEMPS: 

Water: 8.5C to 9.0C
Air: 8.5C to 11C

TEMP TRENDS: 

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[(*)Running submerged float paternoster:

This is created by the use of a John Roberts paternoster boom…

… and an egg shaped polystyrene ball. The ball is pierced so that the vertical/weight arm passes through and the hollow horizontal arm sits above… the weight/link is then clipped to the vertical arm… the main line is threaded through the horizontal tube and terminated with a clip to attach the wire trace plus bead/stop knot to allow a longer bait drop.

When in use and cast out, the the poly-ball floats up to the depth set by the length of the weight’s link, and then the main line is gently tightened until the line is lightly tensioned against the resistance of the ball.

The advantage of this ‘running’ paternoster over the standard ‘float on main line above the trace/main line connection’ (fixed float) is that line can be taken freely with only the length of line on the reel spool (open bale arm) limiting the amount due to the main line being totally independent of the weight/float whereas with a fixed float paternoster there is very little ’play’ before the float/weight are felt and can cause the fish to drop the bait prematurely…]