January 27th 2017 saw a return to Pike Pool 1 with a new tactic in mind… to cast out ledgered deadbaits and to leave them undisturbed until either (a) I had a take or (b) I was packing up to go home. And, unfortunately, it was (b) that prevailed in the end…. over previous outings I had twitched, tweaked, fished high, fished low, static bait, drifted bait, etc, etc all to no avail so I thought I’d try the ‘let it be’ method…
I arrived on the morn following a very sharp drop in temperatures – in fact, I had planned to go for a second visit to a pool recently acquired by one of my clubs in search of general coarse fish but as the pool in question is quite shallow (4’ or so) I ditched that plan in favour of pike fishing the deeper pike pool – at around 0815. Air temp when I left the house at 0730 was -3.0’C according to the car’s thermo but had risen to -2.0’C on arrival – and about 50% of the pool was frozen over at that time. However, within an hour of arrival the air temps were up in the positive range and the pool was completely ice free all over. On leaving at 1515 the car thermo was registering 6.0’C. Water temps measured at about 3’ deep at the pool’s edge were 2.5’C on arrival, 2.8’C on leaving.
[A couple of postings ago I said ‘water temp was a surprising 9’C’ or something similar to that. A confession … I’d read the thermometer wrongly! I was using a new thermometer which has 2 lines on the digital display, air (in) & water (out) and humidity and to read the in/out temps you manually have to switch between them by use of a button – whilst the previously used thermometer showed both in & out temps simultaneously on 2 separate lines on the display… SO what I’d done was read the air temp correctly as shown on the upper line BUT had read the HUMIDITY display as the water temp in effect… so the 9.0’C reading was actually 90% HUMIDITY].
Anyway, the usual preliminaries – setting up the ‘station’, nets, etc and rubby dubby fed into the area – were carried out on arrival and then my 2 pike float rods were assembled and set up to fish laid-on the bottom. One rod baited with a pair of sprats was fished 4’ out from the bank (still 10’+ depth of water) under the branches of an overhanging tree/bush 10’ to my left, the other with a single 6” pollan fished, again to my left, further out just outside the overhanging branches on a slope were the depth drops slightly to 12’… and then I settled down to wait … for 6 hours as it happened before packing in and heading home… Well, not quite true, as I did in fact, for the last hour fish the sprat rod at around half depth to see if anything would rise … but nothing ensued. And on winding in the pollan rod after it being out there for the full 6 hours untouched – there was no bait on the hooks … had I sat there 6 hours with an unbaited rod? Did it fall off on the retrieve and thus have been fishing OK? Dunno, but there was not much resistance when I started to wind in as I recall so I fear the former scenario was the case.
Anyway, the day gave me chance to try out my new headcam – worked well, good quality video especially for a £25 device… 95 minutes before the battery gave out which was good…. and can be controlled from a mobile phone via a WiFi connection.
Also, had my FishSpy cam out in action – not sure what I captured as the murky water requires that I need to do some editing in relation to brightness, contrast, gamma compensation, colour range, etc to try to enhance it and see if I caught anything on it of interest – and also there’s 3 hours of footage to scan through…
stevetheangler 