stevetheangler

Liz and I left for our annual Easter camping week on Saturday 27th April returning on Saturday 4th May. Our destination was to a Parkdean Resorts site which, besides the usual static caravans, also has a small allotted area for camping – and quite cheaply too compared to other more mainstream tent/camp sites. For 8 nights, with electric included, we paid £74 (ie just a tad over £9 a night) … and we had access to all the facilities that the bookers of the caravans had, the bars, swimming pools, evening shows/cabarets, 10-pin bowling, bingo, etc. And the toilet blocks are extremely well kept with free showers and even an indoor wash room with 3-sinks for washing of the cooking/eating utensils.

These days, for even a basic tent pitch, with reasonable toilets/showers and a washing up area (and usually these are outdoors although sometimes under a roofed veranda), and a clubhouse (usually without any form of entertainment other than TV which is usually tuned to football in which we don’t have the slightest bit of interest and so often take our tablets in and watch videos) we can pay £18 per night and upwards – and add in access to a electric supply and it gets £20+ per night…. so £9 a night is a mighty fine deal!!

Anyway, advert for Parkdean over (and we don’t get any reward for the plug! LOL).

As usual with Liz and I, on arrival onsite at 1600 we were faced with putting up the tent in drizzle with a strong breeze – not an easy feat with tent 7 metres long and 4.5 metres wide! And due to the adverse conditions we also managed to fit the sections of 3 poles together wrongly meaning a 50% demolish/rebuild to correct was required doubling our usual erection time but once up to our satisfaction – and only 10 minutes later – the skies turned blue and the winds dropped… And the departure was just the same virtually – emptying tent, loading contents into the car and finally collapsing the tent (which was just balled up and jammed into the back of the motor) was done in high winds and driving rain … and 10 minutes down the road on our journey back the skies blue’d and the sun shone….

Anyway, we’d visited this site last Easter for the first time and found it had a reasonable looking fishing pool – not large with room for probably only about 15-16 anglers – but hadn’t taken our tackle that time but this time we managed to squeeze 2 pre-tackled rods each (1 float rod and 1 ledger rod although in the end the ledger rods weren’t used) in my 5-rod quiver, my Shakespeare seat box with the sundry tackle ends’n’ends and a bait bag with maggots, worms, sweetcorn, meat and prawns. I used the box as my seat, Liz used one of the camping chairs and the day flasks supplied our hot drinks.

So, we decided on having our fishing day on the Tuesday (30th April) – the rest of the week being planned for outings (Hornsea Mere where we went out on a boat trip, and to Beverley, Kingston Upon Hull (aka Hull), Bridlington where we engaged in our 2nd hobby, charity shop visiting, wherefrom I managed to gather a few more books (9 in fact) for my angling collection (I have around 330-340 now IIRC) and Liz bought a few ‘bath books’ – she normally reads on her Kobo e-Reader but doesn’t like using it in the bath so has her real paper ‘bath books’) and a ‘The Great British Sewing Bee’ book that came with a boxed set of some of the patterns that they used in the show.

So, Tuesday morning I was up early to make the flasks and have breakfast ready for our start (fishing on the pool is allowed 0800-2000 and costs £5 per day) and then, with Liz, we took the tackle over to our chosen swims. Liz went back to the tent for her breakfast and came over a little later to start fishing until 0900 and then she went to reception to pay for our day tickets before coming back to resume… and we fished until around 1530. The day was mild with a minor breeze – the reason we chose the day really as it seemed it was to be the best weather of the week from the forecasts

We both float fished, Liz mainly on maggot, myself worm. There were plenty of movements – dipples, swirls, and even at one point a huge mass of bubbles just in front of Liz – and we were getting line bites, float nudges and attacked baits but hardly one proper take – and between us only one fish was caught and that fell to Liz – a roach of around 1oz which, as the title says, took all the prizes of the day! First fish, smallest fish, biggest fish, most species, and last fish LOL.

There were a couple of other guys also fishing and Liz was speaking to one of them on one of the evenings when she was at the bar – he’d fished 3-4 days and hadn’t caught anything of note and not a lot of those not of any note either! He also said the other chap had had one decent tench on one day and a carp of a pound or two on another day. So seems like the fish are very wary and shy in the pool but I suppose they do get to see baits more often than most…

So, not much (although I seem to have managed quite well! LOL) can be said further – regarding the fishing any way.

So my next outing looks like being on Thursday May 9th – and will be a first time visit to a local pool belonging to a club we’ve just joined. Not 100% sure of what’s in there except that there’s a lot of crucian carp been stocked as part of a joint undertaking between the EA and the club and as part of an overall EA scheme to increase the national falling numbers of pure crucian carp – many ‘crucians’ are actually hybrids these days either bred as such and stocked (ie F1 carp) or due to natural crossbreeding between common carp and the crucians. Years ago I seem to recall it was a good bream water, and think pike exist in there along with the usual other suspects.

Going back to the crucian theme… one of my other clubs has also taken part in a joint effort with the EA to increase ‘pure’ crucian numbers – the club provided a totally fish free water which, around three years ago, the EA stocked with just crucians and tench ie no chance the crucians can cross breed and this year, after 2 years allowed for the fish to settle in, we now fish the pool and, hopefully, it will soon be a venue for specimen sized crucians.

WATER TEMPS:

So the last water temperature readings have now been taken until September 2019…

And they were… 13.3’C rising to 13.7’C over the day…