If at first you don't succeed

Its been quite on the fishing front the last week or so. Its not that I've not been out, more like the better quality of fish have either not been feeding at all or just failed to latch on to bigger fish.

Been fishing the rivers for bream most of the time and caught some reasonable numbers of them to 5./12lb, but the bigger fishing have not stayed in the swim along enough, so a tactical change will be required.
I think the quality of the bait and ground bait has been sound, the problem has been that I have just not put in the quantity of bait to hold these hoovering beasts in the swim long enough. So I think I will be taking double the amount of bait for my next session in a couple of weeks time.

Also did my first evening/night zandering trip of the season, mainly because I have had the time in the evening to get to the river.

The afternoon/evening was a stormy event with heavy rain and claps of thunder and lighting all around me. But as the evening got later and the sun started to set the evening became still and bright.
I had tried to catch some fresh roach, but bites were impossible to come by during the storm and by the time that the storm had passed over, the float was difficult to see. Good job I had a decent stash of bait in the freezer.

Two rods were baited and fished on either marginal shelves for the first few hours, but no runs materialised during the season, well not from Zander anyhow. A Great Crested Grebe whom has been cruising up and down the river during the season gathering small fish for her chicks was out and hunting, when the alarm beeped and the bobbin lifted. I did strike and very quickly the grebe appeared at the surface and quickly chucked the bait to one side as she scooted off.

The far bait did get some attention from the eels during the early evening, but I suspect they were bootlaces from the jangling bobbin.

The rest of the evening was uneventful and by 10:30pm, it was damp and cool so I headed for home.

The traditional pike season start of 1 October is only a matter of 12 week away, so whilst having some free time to spend in the tackle room, I soon started sorted the out the old traces and seeing if any of the traces were salvageable. Most had blunted or rusting hooks and the wire was in need of replacing too, so armed with new wire, hooks (4,6 & 8 hook sizes), size 8 swivels and long rig tails I started to making up a selection of new traces for the season.
Next job will be a complete line change on the mono reels. The braid is new on the pit reels, so that just will be checked for any abrasion and replaced if needs be..

Also been looking to lighten the load out of the day pack again, with an aim of lightening the load by at least 2kg. One easy step is to reduce the amount of clutter from the pockets of the pack. So gone are the endless bits and pieces of useful junk that I hauled around last season.

I'm also reducing the amount of spare floats, leads, spools, etc etc that I carry about. In most cases the stuff I've put to one side has not been used in two seasons!!!! So I probably won't need it for this season.

So then that just leaves, bait and food......how much of each should I take? Well the huge flask is being ditched for a 1litre version and the vast food mountain will be reduced to the 1lite food flask and some energy bars. Also the bait will be reduced, so I only take 3 section or whole fish of say 3/4 types. It quite interesting that from the records I've kept that the vast majority of fish I caught over the four season have fell to 3 baits. So these will be the three I take, plus a change bait for the odd occasion that I fish a pressured area.Of course this will be dependent of the venue too.

TL