May 20 2009
Belated fishing write-up
Well, after my last fishing post, I have managed to get out one more time to test out my new approach. I got to the canal for a couple of hours on Saturday and covered the same stretch that I did before, again sticking to the soft plastics.
About half an hour in I had covered a fair bit of ground using a Storm Wild-Eye shad, to no avail. I swapped over to a Storm grub (not sure of the type) and jigged it around some fallen trees to see if there was anything about, but nothing took. I decided to walk back down to a spot I had a take on before, and I cast the grub in and ‘trolled’ it along as I walked back. I tend to do this quite a bit but have never caught a fish this way before. This time however, a fish smashed into the grub, hooking itself and giving me quite a shock! It gave a good account of itself, and scrapped all the way to the net – dead on 5lb!
This left me slightly despondent. I have not caught more than one fish in a session since before Christmas, and I still had an hour or so available. Undeterred, I carried on, keeping my head held high and trying to keep my confidence up. About 20 minutes later A pike shot out of the near bank and hit the grub about three feet out, but I failed to connect. As a boat was on the way past I backed away from the water and changed my lure to a Pearl Wildeye Shad and waited until the boat had gone by. Once the coast was clear I dropped the lure out and was into the fish more or less straight away. Swiftly in and returned, this one was about 3lb, but felt like a giant to me as I had broken my one-fish spell, and also found myself catching the fish that I was sure were in the area.
I’m meeting up with one of the other LAS members on Saturday to fish Bradwell Lake, so I’ll report back on the results next week. It looks like I may be setting up a Milton Keynes chapter of the LAS so this could prove to be our inaugural fish-in!