stevetheangler

Tuesday, 9th February, I headed off on a pike fishing session on one of my club’s pools…However, before leaving the house I made an important, and as it turned out, disastrous decision. I’ve been cutting down on tackle and I thought I’d reached the point whereby I could get away without the barrow and carry my tackle to the water’s edge. *** WRONG ***! Firstly, I hadn’t considered my shoulder shape – ie they are curved downwards – and so to keep straps (bags/holdalls, etc) on I tilt the carrying shoulder up… ok, fine if only one item but if you have two then you need to use both shoulders BUT then by raising one shoulder the other one drops? And one of the items slides off… so, carry with the straps crossing the chest you say – yeah, great, then strangulation occurs in the pincer movement of the straps around the neck… AND I actually had 3 items with shoulder straps to carry anyway – rod quiver, main tackle shoulder bag (still quite heavy in fact due to the pike tackle – 12” pliers and cutters, a number of 2-3oz leads, 1.2 litre flask, bag of fruit – and a Korum mat bag (unhooking mat cum bag) containing my Shakespeare stool/chair and weigh sling. Also I had an insulated hand bag for the frozen deadbaits. Anyway, this water is a fair distance away from the car park – and due to the carriage problems most of it done in a ’carry half the tackle 200 yards, go back and  get the rest and carry that 300 yards, go back and get the first lot and move that up and drop, then frog leap the second lot along,…etc…etc’ until I reached where I wanted to be. Well, actually, NO, irt wasn’t… I wanted to be further round the pool but gave up and selected a second-best option. AND that was the easy leg of the trip – the downhill arrival – the harder bit was the uphill journey back that required more stops and more leap-frogging…

MORAL: if water/swim > 100 yards from car then take the trolley/barrow!!

Actually, the barrow, fully laden with what I carry now (even with my Big Daddy recliner high back chair), feels as if there’s nothing on it these days as I used to have 3 big bags full of stuff, buckets, boxes and other stuff.

Anyway, the journey from the car to the swim on the pool was enlightened somewhat by spotting a capybara…

…hopping up a hillside to my right… at first I thought it was a coypu but that has a long rat-like tail and my spotted creature had a small (almost like a docked dog’s) tail. I would have photo’d but as said before I was well weighed under with tackle and my camera itself was within my tackle bag … and my mobile in a pocket in my waistcoat under my jacket… and even if I’d the camera in hand my the time I’d have switched on and focussed it would have been well over the top of the hill. But I know what I saw :)

And so… I eventually arrived at where I was to fish albeit not where I had intended originally, cast out the depth finder and ascertained the depth gently shelved out down to 10’ or so 3-4 rod lengths out and then level at that depth further out… and I also noted fish at about half depth being detected…

Two ledger rods were assembled and fished with bluey’s, sprats, jacks and pollan from 0900 – and twitched and jerked at intervals, re-cast in different areas, etc… and one rod was fished with a pop-up ball at varying depths between 18” deep (ie ball on surface and bait on 18” wire trace) and pulled lower at 10-15 intervals by tightening up gently until the bait was 18” off the bottom…..however, not one sign of interest was seen and at 1330, with a very cool breeze having arrived, I tackled down and started on my multi-stage trek back to the car…

The next outing is planned for Friday 12th Feb… and as the forecast weather reckons a high of 2C … and as Liz has decided to spend the time with her sewing machine … I think it will be a few hours for me lure fishing on some stretches of the canal that I’ve not visited previously.