Six of the Best

Mobile at last and although it was rather windier than I would have liked, I just had to get the boat out for a two-day session. It's close to the end of the traditional pike season now and you can never be too sure what to expect. Some pike will have spawned by now for sure but others may not spawn for another month or even more. On a big water you can get both of these extremes as I found out last year.

It stayed fairly dry for my trip but the wind was a pain and at times it seriously restricted the amount of water I could fish. I hardly fished my usual swims at all but that's no bad thing as it means I'm forced to experiment a bit. In the end most of the fish i caught were from new areas and I'm glad to say I learned a few things.

Day 1 started slowly but at around 9.30 I had a nice fish of exactly 16lbs on a sardine. That was followed some time later by a 14.14 from a new swim. I went on to do a little trolling and had a terrific hit on a slow-trolled replicant that turned out to be a fin-perfect 14lb 3oz fish. I noticed that there were a lot of bait fish in the area where I caught this one and fished it for a while with deadbaits but nothing more came to my rods. One more came at the end of the day in another swim though, a four pound jack with ideas above its station. This took a whole mackerel and absolutely tore off with it, producing my fastest run of the season.

Day 2 was windier and a little slower with a twelve pounder early on before the wind forced me to take shelter. I moved over to the place I had caught on the troll on day one and found that the bait fish were still there. I also found several nice fish arches hanging just off the shoal of bait fish and dropped a marker on one of them. I anchored up and fished close to the marker and had a fish within minutes. It was only a ten pounder but that's the third occasion this season that I've caught by doing that and it's certainly something I'm going to do a lot more of in the future.

I finished the day with a 15lb 5oz pike which took a mackerel while the wind was really roaring. Not too bad really, six doubles with two of them over 15lbs. No biggie though!

It Never Rains...

...but it pours, that's the old adage. What it means of course is that when things start to go wrong they go wrong badly and my recent trip to Chew Valley Lake just about proved it.

I was there for four days last week, two of them I spent in the boat with Denis Bird and two with Kevin Dunne. The fishing was fairly average for Chew, we caught plenty of pike but most of them were small with a sprinkling of mid-doubles thrown in to make the heart jump a little when one of them hit a lure. Yes, lures took the majority of the fish with only two falling to deadbait.

Day 1 brought a few trials and tribulations for Denis. He hadn't put his braid on the spool tightly enough and as a result it was overrun after overun. The pic shows him doing a bit of knitting in the boat - he spent quite a bit of time doing this and it meant more fish for me since I was probably getting three casts in to each one of his. Every cloud has a silver lining though and by the end of the day he finished with two scarves, a pullover and a pair of mittens.

It was an awful day weather-wise. Torrential rain poured down on us all day and we were glad to get on dry land at the end of it.

Day 2: We re-spooled Denis's line the next morning and he had a much better day of it. This was the best day of the trip with six doubles coming to the boat amidst a barrage of jacks but it was spoiled a bit by me having a good pike, a possible twenty pounder, shake the hooks out right at the boat. The day nearly ended in disaster too. On the last cast of the day, Denis made a mighty heave with his six-ounce replicant in an effort to get it as far out into the lake as he could. Unfortunately, instead of the lure sailing out into the blue, it connected violently with the back of my head, whipping off my cap and almost knocking me out. "Ah well" I thought, "At least we'll get a picture of it and it'll make a good story." That was the plan, but as you can see, Denis then made a hash of the picture too!

Days 3 and 4, both spent with Kevin on the tiller were much the same as each other. High pressure brought hard night-time frosts and hot, cloudless, still days, just about the worst kind of weather for autumn piking. I was even wishing for the return of the torrential rain we'd had on day 1. This meant just more jacks and a solitary double to me, while Kevin had to make do with the jacks.

This is when things really started to go wrong for me. One of my reels stopped working - I later discovered that the internal spring had snapped. Then another reel started to play up. Only wear and tear this time but the effect was getting worse with every cast. Eventually I dismantled both reels to see if I could cobble up a good one between them. the result? neither reel was any good now. Then I started to crack lures off. Three Replicants were sent to the bottom of the lake before I realised what was going on. The tip ring on my main lure rod had broken and it was slicing through the line. I had left my other rod in the car (as I had no reel to put on it) and this left me with no tackle at all that I could use to fish lures. Kevin came to the rescue and lent me a rod and reel but it meant we were restricted in what we could do.

Oh well, these things happen, at least we got to see a spectacular sunset and got to share the water with a couple of piking "elites". Can you identify them sillhouetted against the sun?