BRYANS ANGLE

Welcome fishing friends, i hope you all had a good Christmas full of good food, good company and hopefully a few angling related presents. I know i,ve had a lovely couple of days in the company of family and friends but i,m itching to get out fishing but unfortunately i still have a couple of days left of family visits before i,m let loose again. I guess my only consolation is that its pissing down here so i probably wouldn,t of gone anyway. Who am i kidding i would just don the waterproofs and got on with enjoying myself. Well i managed a couple of trips before christmas which proved to be both a blessing and a bind. First off i spent the afternoon fishing a very small local pond which i,ve heard rumours of large perch being caught. This water is less than an acre in size and shallow with depths no greater than 3ft. Its a pretty little water though and i enjoyed my few hours fishing there. I started off by fishing for the silvers to get an idea of how prolific the water is and...

A couple of evenings ago i decided to have another go at catching a thornback ray at a local mark. I got there a good 4 hours before high tide to fish the tide up in hope of catching some bass as well. Fortunately the mark i wanted to fish was free so i quickly set up my rods and started to cast various squid, herring and ragworm hookbaits out at different ranges. I use 3 rods whenever i can as it gives you more scope, most fish come to the 2 rods cast to the horizon but its surprising how often the short distance rod will produce the bigger fish. There was no action until just before high tide when as i was having a little beach comb i noticed my ragworm baited rod start to nod then pull down. As ran up the shore whatever was on the end of my like just kept on pulling until my tripod and all 3 rods had come crashing down on the rocks. Once the active rod was picked up mi started to pump in a heavy weight which thumped every so often. I wasn,t sure what was on the other end but was p...

Recently i,ve heard a few rumours that some big tench have been caught from a local day ticket lake, just a couple of miles away from WATERBOUY TOWERS, with at least one confirmed double figure beastie being banked. Well as you,d expect, these catches got me interested so at the beginning of last week i paid a little recce visit to the aforementioned water. I,ve known of this water for the past 6 years since a couple of locals took on the mammoth task of renevating the, long left wild, water. When i first had a look at it all those years ago i had to admit it didn,t inspire me as it was just an overgrown hole in the ground with huge piles of rubbish and soil everywhere, so i didn,t bother to pay any attention to it. When i turned up there a week ago it looked like a totally different lake, the overgrown reeds, bushed etc had been sympathetically cut back. There was plenty of good size clean swims which had been built, but with plenty of space between them. And there was a pleasant arra...

I ventured onto the rivers a day after the new season had begin as the weather was beautiful and i couldn,t be bothered doing any work. By 3pm i had walked the mile and half to the small weir pool that i fancied having a fish in. I,d stopped of in a couple of chubby looking swims on the way and had spotted a couple of small chublets drifting about but seeing as the water was really clear and the sun bright i decided on not giving them a go. The weirpool on the other hand looked great, slightly coloured with plenty of turbulence and a lovely slack area in front of my swim. I set up my quivertip rod and cast a maggot feeder out just into the flow with a 2 maggot baited hook attached. Straight away i was into fish, mainly small chub with some roach to half pound a few nice dace, i havn,t caught any dace for years, and a few perch to around the half pound mark. All the fish i caught were in immaculate condition, well fed and hard fighting. I did somehow manage to lose a much bigger p...