Fun in the Sun

With the car still in dry dock I was faced with some more local fishing this week until my old mate Denis stepped into the breach. Denis has a good towing vehicle and he suggested we take my boat out for a day - so we did.

I don't like fishing weekends because it gets so busy and sure enough there were many many boats out fishing for pike but Denis is a monday to friday worker so we had no choice. In the end that didn't matter, we had a great day out.

It was one of those days that most pikers dread, with a very hard night-time frost followed by cloudless skies and brilliant sunshine. On shallow waters that would, indeed, be a disaster and sure enough I was in touch with a few other people who were fishing shallow lakes during the day and they didn't catch. It's different in deep water though and we were able to enjoy good fishing and good weather.

It was after nearly three hours fishing that we got our first run. It's fairly common for a hard frost to lead to a slow start so we weren't too surprised and the first run came to Denis's rods. It was a scrappy little eight pounder that took a half mackerel and we hoped it would herald a purple patch but it wasn't to be. An hour later we hadn't had another run and so we opted for a move to a swim we knew was often very productive.

Bread and Butter

It was good move to a "bread and butter" swim and I was quickly into action with a 16lb 3oz pike. That was followed after a few minutes by another of 17lb 14oz (pictured).
We waited a while before moving again and then later moved onto another banker swim. This turned up a 15lb 5oz pike, again to me and though we stayed there until dark, no more runs were forthcoming.

Not a bad day in all, with three upper doubles to me. Poor Denis had to make do with the eight pounder he caught in the morning. The huge numbers of boats that were out on the day hampered us a fair bit, preventing us from fishing a few good swims and cutting down on our movement but I can't complain. Good fish, good company and brilliant weather - what more could you want?