A Big Catch - but not for me!

Had a day out in the boat with my old mate Kevin yesterday. It was a great day - for him that is. The mild winter continues and we had a dry day with fairly light winds, ideal really. Having two in a boat makes it all the more important to move swims frequently. You tend to use more rods (we used six bait rods between us) so the water is covered more effectively . Any fish in the area are likely to come to the boat fairly quickly if they are going to get caught at all so we adopted a policy of moving every hour or so.

I picked up a low double in the first few minutes of fishing but it turned out to be my only run of the day. Kevin caught everything else, taking a jack, a low double, two fifteen pounders, a seventeen and a super fish of 23lb 6oz.

Jealous? Me? Too right I was! I can't complain really, I've done similar things to Kevin in the past, it was just his turn this time. There was something very exciting that came out of this session though. We spent a little time searching out new swims and the one we found was an absolute peach. It consisted of a huge clay mound way out in the lake, the top of it some 30ft deep and surrounded by water twenty feet deeper. It's a tight little feature so it doesn't show up on any charts of the lake but as soon as we discovered it, we just had to give it a go. It took less than ten minutes to get the first pike from this spot - Kevin's twenty-three as it happens and just as we hauled this fish aboard for unhooking, another of his rods was away with a small fish. He later took a fifteen pounder from there so it looks like we may have found something a bit special! How do we know the mound was made of clay? Well we got an anchor stuck not once, but twice. If I hadn't rigged the anchor up with a weak link we would have lost it. Each time we got it back, there was a heavy clay deposit on it. Most of the bed of this lake is deep silt so why should this bit be different and what difference does it make to the pike?