stevetheangler

As planned, on Friday 3rd August I set off for the intended venue (AA-GH) hoping for a great bream session on what is mainly a carp pool but it does hold bream and silvers … and excellent pike (and did include a fish that had been caught several times over the years in the 30lb range – but sadly it was found dead in the shallows, probably due to the rigours of spawning in March 2016, weighing 38+lb) …. It also holds at least two perch, of 1oz and 3lb, the smaller I found in the bottom of my landing net when packing up one day, the larger gets caught occasionally but are the only two perch I’ve ever seen or heard of in there and having been a member for 7 years and fishing maggot/worm virtually every trip it seems there’s not millions of them.

So, I arrived on site around 0700, and decided to have a scan around with my Deeper Sonar to suss out if there were fish around – looked like it was a can of sardines! – and to suss out the contours around my peg and thus where to cast my bait for the day and settled on a distance out of around 30 yards that put me fishing into 10’-12’ of water. I also wanted to save the scan of this area adding them my Deeper Lake Book which allows the building up of contour maps of whole waters bit by bit/session by session BUT for some reason there seems to be a glitch in the local mobile phone saved file and it won’t upload so I’ll have to re-do this section again on another visit it seems. There was also a green algae scum over most of the pool but didn’t hamper fishing – to be expected to be honest as the site is an equestrian centre and the manure/straw pile is very close to the pool and the nutrients can leach into the pool when it gets wet – EA have examined the situation and they’re quite happy as basically the algae just provides a rich food source for fish and the organisms on which also feed….

Setup was a sliding float – a 4AAA windbeater fished lift-method style with baits of worm/maggot, bread, corn and meat on a size 10 hook to 4” of 6lb braid. Main line was 6lb mono… This looked to be the best way to try to avoid the attentions of the carp as the sonar  showed most fish at mid-water or higher whilst retaining bite sensitivity for the shy biting bream. The downside to this, of course, was that connecting to bites required a long strike to tighten the line enough to set the hook due to the angle of the line at the float (rod tip to float line was virtually horizontal, whilst float to hook was vertical … so a 90 deg angle in the line… so a bit of quick Pythagoras is needed… I’d 34 yards of line between me and the hook normally (30 yards out, 4 yards deep) … but I would need to straighten out the line to get enough force to set the hook (ie what would be the hypotenuse of the right angled triangle) and thus would need to make the line to hook or take up the slack between that figure and the 34 yards I’d got out…

SO.,..  HYPO = sq_rt(Distance^2 + Depth^2) = sq_rt(900+16) = sq_rt(916) = 30.3 … and hence difference = amount of line needed to be taken up on the strike = 3.7 yards = 12’ or so.

First fish came fairly quickly – a small 6oz bream – and over the course of the day about 9 others joined it with the largest at 1lb 12oz.

Also one common carp of around 3lb-4lb almost found itself netted but the hook pulled just as it was about to be netted but not a disaster as bream were the intended target.

A couple of things that happened…

1. The Dreaming …. I must admit, even at the age of 67, in regards to fishing I’m like a 5 year old on Christmas Eve and just can’t sleep the previous night with things whizzing in my head about what I’ll do, where I’ll fish, what baits, etc and its usually 3:30-4:00am when I do eventually doze off … but this time I saw 4:45 on the alarm clock … and as it goes off at 5:10 it meant I got less than 30 minutes sleep overnight. Not surprisingly I dozed off during the early afternoon then really. But on waking up I couldn’t see my float anywhere  … and on winding in it seems that something had taken my bait for a trip of 60-70 yards down the pool and then discarded it. As I always fish with the reel’s anti-reverse off I avoided the loss of a rod it seems!
2. OK … my setup … float set at around 18” overdepth, bulk shot (3 x SSG shot) that sinks body of the antenna float to its neck set at a depth of around 3’, and the final SSG anchor shot (which sits on the bottom, too heavy for float to support) set to 4” from the hook. When cast out float sinks to top of body (as expected), and then line tightened enough to pull the antenna down to required height. In theory 2 things can happen – fish takes bait and lifts anchor shot which allows float to rise in the water or fish swims off with bait and float submerges…?? BUT … and this was happening a lot … I was getting the float lifting to the top of the body AND then continuing to rise and eventually the whole float falling flat on the water … HOW??? For that to happen the fish would have to be not only lifting the anchor shot but also lifting it off the bottom by 6 FEET (3’ up to bulk shot PLUS another 3’ past in order to start taking up the weight of those). Have been thinking about this since and the only likely answer is that they were NOT real bites at all but were line bites with fish swimming into the line above the bulk shot and thus causing the line to dangle over their bodies and thus support the shots’ weight?

Right, so that was that… did catch my targeted species but not exactly at the sizes I would have preferred them to be…

Off out again Monday 6th August, with Liz this time, to another club’s mixed species pool … and then it won’t be until Friday 17th until I’ll be back on the waters as the following Friday-Monday August 10th-13th we’re away at a rock festival (tribute bands on the back of an articulated lorry type)….