Afternoon & Evening

Haven't had time to write a blog entry as been busy with writing for others and a nasty summer cold so the fishing has taken abit of a breather over the last month.

I did manage to get out for a short afternoon session last weekend in search of some specimen roach.

I arrived at the lake around midday and had a mooch about to see what was about. The weather was warm and overcast with a light blustery westerly wind and soon I found a spot to fish.
Back to the car, grab the gear and mooch back to the swim to set up. With the ground bait prepared at home, was easy to get ten balls rolled and catapulted out about 40 yards were the weed becomes less dense.

It was to be a two rod on buzzer type of day, one on a maggot feeder heli rig and one on a ground bait feeder paternoster rig. Hook bait would be mixed up during the session to see what preference the roach had.

The first rod out was the heli baited up with a couple of maggots and no sooner had the bobbin been attached than it was jumping about with a snared roach attached. This happened a number of times over the next 15 mins and I was surprised the number of baits by the roach, but when I looked out across the water I could see that the roach were boiling over the baited area.

Once there was a break in the action, the second rod was baited and cast out with a couple of casters on the hook.

With the rod settled the kettle went on and the first brew was in my hand, but not for long.
The caster rod was away and a nice roach of about a pound was landed, happy days.

The action on both rods was frantic and not what I expected. In the first couple of hours I must have landed 8lb of roach which on rods on buzzers is quite noisy. With the stamp of roach not being huge, it was time to switch things around and put on some bigger baits to try to limit chances of smaller roach snaffling the bait. So off with the maggot and casters and on with the corn and mini boilie.

The bigger baits did have the desired effect to a point, but whilst the micro roach didn't get the bait even with double corn on a size 12 hook the 8-10oz roach were able to take the bait with relative ease. Meanwhile the boilie remained untouched but I was hopeful that something would take it before it got dark.

Alas nothing did, but it was great to be back out.