stevetheangler

Saturday, 25th January 2020, I went for a session of a few hours pike deadbaiting on a couple of the local stretches of the Staffs-Worcs Canal that lie between Brickbridge, Wombourne and Swindon Village – one half of the combined one mile (from the Waggon and Horses pub at Brickbridge to Botterham Lock) being administered by the Wolverhampton AA and the other half (Botterham Lock to Swindon Village) being administered by the Birmingham AA.

As Liz had the car for work it was a bus ride to the venue for me albeit Liz dropped me off at a bus stop for my required service on her way to work – and that worked well as the bus came within five minutes of my arrival there – and just thirty minutes later I was on the canal bank adding the final touches to my tackle set up.

I used a fairly standard floatfished deadbait rig – a twin semi-barbed treble snap tackle wire trace attached to 40lb braid mainline, with a slim pencil float and 10g quick change weight. My rod was an 11’ Ron Thompson (ca 3lb TC) Bass rod (£13 from Go Outdoors) coupled with a 5000 series fixed spool reel (a TFG one I received as a ‘gift’ for subscribing to a magazine).

Baits were varied between sprats, sardines, smelts and those smelt/pikelet looking ones of unknown species (BTW these are TOUGH baits – takes some pushing to even get a brand new hook to pierce!) over the day and swims…

So over the period of around 3 hours or so of actual fishing I wandered down the banks fishing half a dozen or so likely looking spots en-route, giving each spot about 20-40 minutes attention….

But all to no avail, although at one point I did get a float wobble but not sure if that was due to a fish or a passing dog that was showing interest in my bait bag at the time catching the line with his wagging tail but must say that when I tried flicking, and quite forcibly too, the line where he had been located I could make no impression on the float, so perhaps…??? Anyway, there was no further action in the following 10 minutes and I moved on…

An enjoyable day again albeit blank number 6 of 6 outings made in 2020 so far… and as I’ve commitments in the coming week coupled with the weather looking not too good either it may well be next Saturday, although we have weekend guests due – actually a late Xmas get-together for us. Liz’s brother, his partner and a friend are all coming to do our Xmas present exchanges… We were supposed to get together just before Xmas Day to have a meal out and swap presents but my illness/hospitalisation interfered with that – and then a further hospitalisation caused the next arranged get-together to be cancelled again  … and the coming weekend was the next available time that all of us were free to do it. So, Saturday, will be the Xmas present exchanging and unwrapping night coupled with a takeaway Chinese :)