stevetheangler

Tuesday 30th January I set off for a pike session at Pike Water 24 leaving the house at around 0720 and arriving on site at the venue at around 0800 – and I was surprised to see another car on the car park actually the owner of which soon appearing as he had been reconnoitring around the water … and although he did set up in the swim (5) next to mine (4) he left after an hour or so (with his friend who’d he’d been waiting for). He’d been float fishing for silvers (without any luck as I saw) … weather hadn’t been the greatest up to then though with the sort of lighty misty drizzle that doesn’t indicate its presence of the poll water’s surface along with a light north easterly breeze that wind chilled the cool morning further still.

Pre-tackling rods I cast out my Deeper Chirp+ sonar to try to locate fish shoals – and they seemed to be quite a way out in the deeper (13’-14’) water… and so that was where I initially fished my two baits – a fresh smelt(*) and a sardine both legered and popped-up – the smelt at about 4” off bottom, the sardine at about 24” – both arranged vertically nose down. Both baits were also injected with 5-10ml of emulsified fish oils (mixed halibut and sardine) as an attractant.

I always emulsify my oils as oil and water are immiscible and so any released oils will just rise upwards from the source directly to the surface in a column in a pure form. Emulsifying causes the oils and water to mix stably by adding to the oil/water mixture an emulsifier. Emulsifiers include things like egg yolks, lecithin and glycerol – and washing up liquid is one too albeit probably not the greatest thing to add to fishing baits! The emulsifier works by being a material that has, simply explained, a water attractive part and an oil attractive part and thus each water will stick to the one part the oil to the other. SO …when the emulsion is put into water it will disperse AROUND and SPREAD around the source in a ball shape … not lost upwards.

I emulsify my bait oils with (approx) 10ml lecithin solution/10ml glycerol (aka glycerine)/20ml oils made up to 100ml with water and shaken well. Not only does it make a saving on expensive oil (ie 100ml pure oil = 500ml emulsion) but is also far more effectively spread around the bait when in use.

Tackling up the rods I’d discovered I’d not not put my box of pike leads in the bag and so instead of my usual 3oz leads I had to use 2×1.5oz on each of my leger links … something I need to rectify before my next pike session.

Anyway, I fished until 1200 … the weather brightened up slightly after 1000 but around 1100 the skies darkened again and it felt as if the temps had dropped too … and although I had, from time to time, tweaked the baits short distances along the bottom to add movement, cast to different areas and tried a bait closer in to the margins just past a slope down, the sort of area which pike like to patrol … I’d not had a single touch and so I decided to call it a day.