Session 49 – A Long Time Coming….

Friday 2nd September and I set off for a day at a local club pool (GH) for a day’s fishing after what seemed an age. Last trip was almost two weeks ago (Tues 23rd August) as I’d missed my usual next two sessions on the following Friday and Tuesday due to going to the Shrewsbury Folk Festival over the weekend intervening…

So I set off at 0645 planning to float fish and to fish surface baits for which I’d bought a new lot of dog biscuits (not a great success – some floated, some didn’t and of those that did float a lot sank with the weight of the inserted size 2 hook – so destined now to be ground down for paste/groundbait use. BUT I did take a loaf of bread too so I was able to surface fish without problem).

I arrived at the water, the first there, settled in my swim and after the usual preliminaries, including baiting up and putting out floating freebies, I cast out onto the sloping 12′-10′ of water in front of me with worm on a size 12 hook, 6lb line, 5AAA antenna float but due to a plethora of fish on the surface I quickly switched to the floating rod rod.

First fish landed at 0945 was a mirror carp of 2lb 11oz on floating bread. And over the day I switched between floatfishing and surface catching in chronological order (FB=Floating Bread, FF=Floatfished)…

Mirror Carp 2lb 11oz (FB), Common Carp 5lb 1oz (FF worm), 8oz Bream (FF worm), 4oz Bream (FF worm), 7lb 4oz Common Carp (FB), 2lb 15oz Common Carp (FB), 4lb 4oz Common Carp (FB), 2lb 0oz Common Carp (FB), 1lb 4oz Bream (FF worm), 2lb 13oz Mirror Carp (FF meat), 4lb 8oz Common Carp (FF meat), 2lb 8oz Common Carp (FF meat), 3lb 7oz Common Carp (FF meat), 3lb 2oz Common Carp (FB), 5lb 0oz Common Carp (FB), 4lb 0oz Common Carp (FB)…

So plenty of action over the day even if nothing spectacular in size – and I suffered several hook pulls resulting in lost fish too :).

Disasters of the day:

One of the arms of my landing net snapped off just above the metal spigot that fitted into the poles ‘Y’ connector. It was OK though as I just pushed the remaining end into the connector and it gripped OK for the rest of the session…
I trod on and tipped over the container of my 2 pints of fresh maggots – I didn’t immediately notice and ended up digging into the gravel of the pitch to try to recover as many as I could – so a job to be done today is to sieve the maggots from the gravel….