Where's Willy?

Monday saw me with yet another day off and yes I went fishing.

To be honest I wasn't up to much so I decided that I would head to the decoy lake to try and catch my 2nd Tench of the year. So armed with a pint of fresh casters, method mix and sunshine I ventured out of the house on a bright and fresh morning.

I arrived later than planned )seems to becoming a habit) and walk the back to see what was moving about. The surface was flat calm and I expected to see the surfacing fizzing with Tinca bubbles, but instead it was eerily quite. Another fisher had set himself up in peg 4 and I chewed the fat with him before deciding to fish peg 2.Peg 2 is a deep peg and is where I solitary Tinca has come from last time out. It is a feast of lilies and cabbage and the fish love the marginal shelf that the plants grow on even if it is 13ft deep.

Normal setup were soon put out. Method feeder with pellets on one and the float setup on the other rod.
The extension to the float rod makes it easier to fish this swim and thus take the rod from a 13ft to a comfortable 15ft. A Long rod in these types of swims makes it so much better when presenting a bottom bait.

The float swim was fed with a mixture of casters and hemp and soon the lilies were being parted by the hordes of Rudd that seem to be overpopulating the lake. I had taken these into account and had shotted the rig as to avoid as many of these tiny fish as possible. Casters seem to be better at that and draw less attention on the way to the bottom.

I was soon into the first fish, a roach/bream hybrid. This was quickly followed by a number of hybrids before the Roach then started to show.
But 9am I had a quick mixed bag of 20lb+ of fish with and average size of 8oz. The old large Roach came to the net but nothing above a 1lb.
By 10am the Roach had been changed into skimmer bream and for a couple of hours I felt like I was making progress in getting into a better quality of fish, but alas I didn't and soon the 8oz Roach were back with evengance.

By midday I was getting fed up with the Roach and switch to a larger corn bait and for a while I had a chance to take in the wildlife on the lake.

A Grey Wagtail was my companion today and as I fed the casters into swim, a few would find there way on the the Lilly pads. The Wagtails would then hop across the pads and take the casters with relish, so I began to fed them. Soon both male and females Grey Wagtails were taking the casters back to there nest along with the occasional damsel fly that the caught on the wing.

 These was also a disturbance in the reeds to by left and after what seemed like an age of watching the site of the commotion, a water vole appeared.

The method feeder rod was stumbling quite and by mid afternoon was replaced with a controller float and floating bait. First cast to the cruising carp was spot on and a small carp boldly headed up to grab the hook bait. But no sooner had it take it, it ejected it and the small shoal was spooked. I did cast to several other fish, but none were interested, perhaps a zig-rig would have worked????

By 4pm I had enough and backed up. I think next time Out I go back to after the big Bream, just for a change mind.

Line