So having arrived back in the UK on September 12/13th it took me 10 days to get back on the water, rod in hand. I had anticipated that I would be fishing on Friday 15th but I’d underestimated the amount of prep work I needed to do which included making up new groundbait, getting maggots as well as the other general stuff. And so it was Friday 22nd September that I finally headed off…
I decided to visit a local club pool (AA-GH) with the float rod in mind in search of chub and bream although a decent roach, a possible perch (not many in there – I’ve had one small, <1oz, perch caught up in the landing net on one occasion and have heard of a 3lb+ perch being caught there but other than that I’ve not even managed to capture one on the WaterWolf underwater camera on the occasions I’ve put that out) … but being its a carp pool that is the the most likely species to be caught.
Anyway, I arrived on site at 0730 and found my desired location to be free so I quickly baited up the area I intended to fish (to my left on the edge of an overhanging bush) with a small quantity of crumb with particles and maggots added, put the probe of my thermometer in the water and prepped and slung out my new Deeper Pro Plus sonar fish/depth finder. Worked well, but seems my old ‘Lucky’ hadn’t been telling the truth about the contours at this swim – ‘Lucky’ reckoned on a 14’ depth in general but with several sharp drops in areas down to 28’ and 40’, whereas the Deeper showed an constant 13.7’ to halfway back to shore and then a constant sloping rise to 3.5’ at the bankside. However, the use of the Deeper was somewhat curtailed by the fact my Android tablet had failed to charge overnight…
I also baited an area out to my right and put my Waterwolf camera out over the area – however, I’d got the camera set to suspend too high in the water (4’-5’) and due to the murky water not good results were obtained – one job for today is to shorten that anchor line to 3’ or so.
Anyway, at the pool, had my mess with the technicals and was ready to fish…
The water depth at my intended location was around 10’ deep and so, I set up the float rod with 6lb mainline, a size 10 barbless hook on a 6” hooklength of 6lb braid, a sliding 4g dumpy bodied antenna float shotted with 3 SSG shot plus an AAA shot at 4’ from the hook and a SSG shot just above the hooklength – and the float set around 12” overdepth in order to fish ‘laying-on/lift method’.
Baits used over the day were worm/maggot, Babybel cheese and luncheon meat and all attracted nibbles at least.
First cast was with worm and maggot and whilst waiting for my first bite I noticed fish cruising on the top and so I catapulted out some small marshmallows which were soon being taken and so I decided to get the ‘floater rod’ set up… but having completed setting that up I noticed the line on the float rod twitching and the float gone and so I struck – however, what I’d failed to notice was the reel handle that had been backwinding as I missed the bite and on retrieval discovered the float was now 40-50 yards out in the pool!
Anyway, I tried for a bit with the floater rod and marshmallows which attracted some interest but not a proper take before going back to the float rod … had a bite, hooked into a reasonable fish which I played for several minutes (either a good bream or a carp) before the hook pulled … and as the fish was quite close in at that point the float and hook catapulted straight into a bush – and resulted in having to snap-off and loss of the float.
Over the rest of the day, I had a fair few nudges but only two proper bites with one of those resulting in a bream of around 8oz-1lb shedding the hook at the bankside and the other the landing of a 2lb 3oz common carp.
Packed up about 1530…
stevetheangler 
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