NEW WATER

Late friday afternoon i arrived at my new syndicate water with tench, and to a lesser degree carp, on my mind. First thing to be done was to have a little walk around the areas that i,d ear marked for attention, no mean feat considering this water is hovering around the 100 acre mark and its long. Parking up in one of the car parks i could see 3 other cars so i opted to take a little walk along the arm towards the shallow end as this area has mature trees on both banks as well as nice reed beds and the bed is silty with years of decaying leaf mulch from the surrounding trees, also this is where the original river used to run before the area was flooded. Sods law dictates that the swims that i had an interest in fishing were already taken, but thats fishing for you. A quick chat with one of the carpers revealed that a couple of tench had been caught from this arm earlier in the week. I was tempted to set up further along the bank but opted to give it a miss as to be honest i didn,t really want the long walk it entailed, so i jumped in the car and drove the mile or so to the middle area of the lake passing another couple of anglers along the way.

After parking up i took the short walk to the small bay i fancied fishing. Fortunately there was no-one fishing there, in fact i don,t think there was anyone fishing within quarter of a mile so i had plenty of space. I,d seen tench cruising around this bay a couple of years ago when i was taking a walk around whilst deciding if i was man enough to join the syndicate and tackle this huge water. Quickly back to the van i unloaded my kit then piled it on the barrow and made my way around the bay to a nice little swim at the end of some reeds. Bivvy up, rods sorted, out came the marker rod to find a nice layer of weed interlaced with small gravel patches through out most of the bay. Two nice areas were selected and out went 1.5kg of mixed particles, pellets, boilie crumb and dead maggot to each spot neatly and easily done using the big size spomb. What a piece of kit the spomb is, easy to use and really accurate, even in my hands. One rod was placed on each spot with a small method ball and either fake corn or maggots on the hooks. My third rod was for the carp and was a snowman rig and small bag of choppies and pellets cast to just past the weed line.

After getting all my kit and usual paraphernalia sorted out and tucked away i settled down to cook a nice dinner of lamb meatballs in a chilli and tomato sauce. All the while i was getting little bleeps and pulls on the method rods so i was a little surprised that by morning i hadn,t actually had a full blooded run, my guessing was that the indications must have been from small silver fish and possibly bream as this water does hold a lot of them.

By the afternoon i decided to spomb out the rest of the particles to the middle of the bay as i had seen a couple of tench roll there the previous evening, my thinking being there might be something below that they were showing an interest in. After an hour of the rods being cast onto the spot i had a screaming run which could of been mistaken for a carp, but after a lacklustre fight a new PB bream was safely in the folds of my net. Although not my target species i,m always happy to catch any fish, especially if its a new personal best. After the bream the weather took a bit of a turn for the worse with the skies clouding over and the wind picking up, so i prepared for the worst and settled down for a nice dinner of sausages and beans. You may note that i like my food, i really do love to cook and also to eat so cooking decent food whilst i,m fishing is all part of the enjoyment to me.

PB bream of 7lb 3oz.

Well i was right about battening down the hatches as the weather got quite rough during the course of the night. The wind got up and it chucked it down with rain keeping me awake for most of the night. I did have a few aborted runs but by the time i,d got to them the fish was away, small bream i think. I packed up at 8am as a check of the weather apps showed that there was more rain due so a quick retreat home was the order of the day. All in all i had a nice relaxing session resulting in just the one bream but i,m more than happy with that, theres also meant to be some big double figure slabs in there so i,m hoping i connect with one of them one day. I may not have caught my target species but i,ve learnt a few more things, which is how you get one step closer to your goal. I think i,ll try the opposite end next time as i,m fancying a couple of swims there.