Sunday 10th January was a trip out to a previously unvisited water in the depths of Shropshire.
The land around and the 50-100 yards or so from the car was very boggy due to the recent long spells of very wet weather but had virtually flat access and surrounds although I elected to carry rather than cart due to the muddiness. A nicely sized pool with a good number of ‘pegs’ to fish from and the half dozen or so of the anglers there were well spaced. The surrounds also seem to have been recently planted with what appeared to be willow saplings – something that when matured will help dry out the ground around the pool as they ‘drink’ the water and hopefully minimise the bogginess in future…
I’d heard that the water is a mixed fishery with various species including ‘match sized’ carp.
The pool itself was a chocolatey colour – whether due to carp foraging or due to run off from the land due to the wet conditions is not known. As seen in the aerial view photo, there are also 5 islands within its bounds.
I fished facing across to the just past the north end of the central island from the east bank (see photo 1), with a sometimes stiff breeze coming up from the south, a condition that changed my mind from originally intending to float fish over to setting up 2 ledger rods. Temps on the day were quite cool with air temps barely reaching 6C – and in fact in the 15 minutes between 1145 and 1200 the temp dropped by 2 degrees from 5C to 3C… Water temps were mostly consistent at 5.0C-5.2C.
Before fishing I used my ‘Lucky’ fish/depth echo sounder to check out depths in front of me and found that just in line with the island the water depths were around 4.5’ rising to 3.9’ for most of the rest of the way back to the bank but about 2-3 rods length out from the bank there was a drop to 6’-7’ for about a metre’s distance… and the sounder was also picking up fish in this depression which it had not done in the previous part of the scan. I suspect that this was actually a channel running parallel to the bank but not sure as I didn’t do readings further along the bank, etc.
Actual bait-in-the-water fishing was partaken from around 0845-1300.
Two ledger rods were set up with 8lb line, light 4g leads and initially size 12 hooks, one baited with worm and the other with maggot and fished with bobbin/buzzers into the deep hole/channel and fished this way for the first couple of hours with small quantities of maggots catapulted into the swim at intervals. Quite a few small tugs ensued on both rods and one small silver was landed plus two others were dropped off the hook.
For the final couple of hours I switched to size 8 hooks and larger baits – small cube of meat on one rod, a half prawn on the other but not one bite was detected.
I saw a few small silvers caught by others but not sure if any other species made an appearance…
So I think the weather was against a good catch really – water temps being the lowest I’ve encountered this winter so far. But it seemed a good pool – quiet – and a nice relaxing place to be come the better weather. Hope to return at some time…
TEMP TRENDS:
stevetheangler 
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