stevetheangler

Thursday, 4th February, I decided to try a bit of general coarse fishing – hoping for some good chub in particular – on what is my usual pike pool…

I arrived at the pool’s side at around 0830, threw out some feed in the form of a few balls of my usual crumb mix with added maggots and then tackled up and prepped my equipment and laid out my ‘station’ ready for action…

I used 2 ledger rods – 8lb main lines, small free-running weights, and a size 12 hook on one rod baited with worm/maggot cocktail throughout the session, whilst I used a size 8 on the other which was baited at times with paste of mainly wholemeal bread flour/blitzed cucumber – the thinking for this is that when pike fishing with smelt, a cucumber smelling fish, then generally, at least at this particular pool, there is a lot of interest in those smelt baits by chub and several have actually been caught – and also cheesepaste and prawn.

[I also read some time ago of someone who also reports improved pike results by storing his non-smelt deadbaits in blitzed cucumber puree.]

And so it came to pass that I made my first casts of the day at 0900 – and first action was at 0950 when the worm/maggot rod was the source of a slow bleep as line was taken very slowly. A strike met a firm plodding resistance and I thought I had hooked into a good bream – but when the fish broke water it was actually a pike of around 3.5lb-4lb and was duly netted and placed on the unhooking mat. And then the ‘pike curse’ took effect – as I uncovered the mesh of the landing net from over the pike’s head it flipped its body and did an incredibly good impression of toothpaste leaving its tube after being driven over by a No 7 bus being driven at 90mph – and so it rocketed out of the landing net, sliding off the unhooking mat and on down the bank back into the water and the 8lb line to which it was attached had no chance to hold it back… so no actual weighing could be made and no photo… and no chance to admire…

And after that very little happened until I eventually tackled down at 1500 – about 4 small tugs on cheesepaste, 1 small tug on worm/maggot and nothing at all on the cucumber paste or on prawn.

TEMPS:

0900             Air: 10.3C    Water: 7.5C
1000              Air: 12.1C    Water: 7.5C
1100               Air: 11.9C    Water: 7.5C
1200              Air: 11.9C    Water: 7.5C
1300              Air: 12.0C    Water: 7.5C
1400              Air: 11.4C    Water: 7.6C
1500              Air: 12.5C    Water: 7.6C

Air (Max/Min):         12.7C/10.3C
Water (Max/Min):       7.7C/7.5C

TEMP TRENDS: