stevetheangler

So, the week of March 17th to 24th was spent at the Haven holiday village at Burnham-on-Sea, Somerset, as it has been mine and Liz’s usual Easter’ish break venue for the past few years… and we’d already booked again for the coming October … and whilst there we’ve booked again for next March. Yep, we hate the place! LOL! And we’ve been going to Burnham now for probably 10 years although initially we visited another site on the opposite side of the town as part of the Sun newspaper’s £10 holiday promotions – but the aftermath of the pandemic of 2020-21 saw big changes to how the Sun operated… previously all weeks at all sites were nominally £10 per person per week (min 4 persons) but there were sometimes extras that needed to be, or could be, added (eg entertainment passes) so usually the cost for myself and Liz worked out at around £100 for our week…. post-pandemic all that changed with sites placed into price bands with varying costs according to dates, etc and this meant that our £100 usual week date/site became more like £300+ … which led us to look for other venues in the area … and we discovered the Haven site … for usually about £180 but even that is a Mon-Mon 7 night break (ie 6 full days onsite) compared to the old Sun 5 night (Mon-Fri) one (ie 3 full days onsite) and so far better value!

Anyway, both sites had a fishing lake … and, in fact Haven has two decent sized waters but are £7/day to fish either against the free but small one of the original site …

The site….

Anyway, we arrived onsite around 1430 on the Monday but as our given time for access was actually 16:00-17:00 we went to the main complex to get some food and drink – planned as a ‘dintea’ or ‘lundin’ thing based on how posh you are, in order to free up the rest of the day to unload the car and sort the goods out in the ‘van… or in my case to prep my tackle/flask/food ready for my first session early on the Tuesday morning.

Tuesday, my alarm goes off at 0615, get dressed, quick cuppa and bowl of cereal and out of the door… on the pool in next door to my desired swim by 06:45 …. tackle up and chap in my desired swim packs up abour 30 minutes later … assumed he’d night fished but no bother as quite happy where I was.

Decided to leger … 2 x leger rods, 8lb main line with 6” 8lb braid hooklengths to size 6 hooks and frame feeders.

On the hook on one rod was a cube of squid tentacle, on the other 2 large dendrobaena worms … and both feeders loaded with a cereal mash with added hemp seed, pearly barley, rice (dyed red and yellow), suffocated maggot, wheat, plus molasses and hemp induced oil.

Fished through until around 15:00 with barely a knock – and those were most likely ‘liner’ nudges…

So I blanked but wasn’t greatly surprised as it was icy cold out – especially facing the stiffish south-easterly ‘breeze’ with a water depth of just 30” in front – seems to be quite consistently that over the whole water going on previous sonar soundings taken over the years.

So first session of 2025 – a resounding, with accompanying echo, blank! J

I had intended to fish on Wednesday too but I was too tired on the day and the bed won!! :)

Hoping to make session 2 next week back on club waters :)