Monday February 25th , Liz and I set off for our day on a club pool – in fact one of the pools we’d actually intended to fish the previous Monday but due to on-site ground conditions not being conducive to being driven over we switched venues.
We set off at 0730 in the morning with the windscreen needing de-icing before we could drive away – but the car’s thermometer reckoned a temp of 4.5’C as we drove off the drive but by a couple of miles down the road into the more rural areas it was indicating -2.5’C … and along the trip continuously varied between -2’C and -0.5’C … and there were periods of driving in and out of heavy mists.
On arrival at the site we found that the generally dry warm weather of the past few days and the early frost had made it possible for us to access the member’s pool (KF-WL2) as intended, the soft ground having dried out and been firmed up by the frost, with just one 6’ muddy/soft length that had to be navigated. The other pool on-site is a smaller one on which the club allows day tickets (KF-WL1) but it does have carp to double figures, decent perch, the usual silvers and ide and so a good pool in itself and where we’d have fished if access to the members pool wasn’t possible. The members pool is ‘the’ club’s carp pool but also good fishing for good sized tench, bream, perch and silvers and also has eels.
The Members Pool
Being a bright sunny and still day with barely a ripple on the water, I elected to fish on the float using a 2SSG rated onion float in the ‘lift method’ feeding small (golf ball sized) balls of groundbait every ½ hour or so with a small ‘pult of maggots added every 10 minutes or so. Bait used over the day was maggot, worm and prawn.
AND not one single nudge of the float all session long (0900-1500) despite feeding and fishing various positions around the margins up to 2-3 rod lengths out in about 6’ of water.
Liz fared slightly better to me – using two feeder rods with maggot feeders she did manage 1 rudd of around 8oz on maggot and also had a few tweaks on the same but not a touch on small meat cubes or sweetcorn. I did note that the rudd was absolutely freezing cold to the touch, like an ice pack it felt.
We packed in at 1500 to head to our usual end of session visit to our local for a beer and bag of scratchings :) and as we passed by the day ticket pool there were two people there – one had arrived in a van at midday that we saw going down the track leading to the pool but there was also a car that I’d not seen arrive so don’t know how long he’d been fishing. I did notice that there was a keepnet out in the water though so I assume that something had been caught.
So … I’ve now just completed sorting my tackle out for a trip to the River Severn (Middle), a club stretch near Bridgnorth I’ll be bait checking tomorrow (27th) and off on the trip on Thursday 28th…..
WATER TEMPS:
6.2’C rising to 7.3’C over the day…
stevetheangler 