I have a self imposed two hour rule when I got out pleasure fishing.
Very simply if I don’t get a bite within two hours – I move swim or move venue. I’m out fishing for fun and whilst being outdoors and on the bank is important — so is catching a few fish.
This weekend I had a few hours free before my day was taken over by the kids. So I thought that an hour or two/three on one of my local lakes would be an ideal way to spend a few hours on Sunday morning. I’d taken my daughter fishing here earlier this summer and bagged up on roach and rudd using maggot waggler techniques. For this trip I wanted to brush up on my bread punch tactics, and was hoping that the roach would be obliging again.
I set up at 8.30 and potted in liquidised bread on two lines, 6 and 11 metres. Starting on the short line for the first half hour, I couldn’t buy a bite, despite trying all sorts of variations in depth and shotting patterns. So out to the 11 metre line – expecting a bite first put in seeing as though the fish had been given time to settle in on the bait, and had not been disturbed by the activity on the inside line. You guessed it – not a touch. I spent the first half an hour on the inside line, an hour on the long line, and then another half an hour back inside.
Not a flicker of a bite.
So – I’m quite strict with my two hour rule and was now left with three options. Move to another peg on the same lake. Move to another lake on the same complex (Rhodes Lodges in Middleton). Or move to a completely new venue. The fact that water levels were down on all the lakes on the complex after the long dry summer and autumn that we’ve experienced helped me make the decision to move venues. The lake that I was fishing is usually around 6ft deep – but water levels were over 2ft lower than normal – and maybe the fish had just holed up somewhere in a deeper hole. I wasn’t going to spend the time finding this hole,,,, so a move to another venue was the best option.
Sainsburys Pond in Middleton has always been a banker venue for a few roach…. so that’s where I headed. Only a short drive away, I was back fishing using the exact same tactics within 20 minutes. As I was only had an hour left I fed only 1 line. Again the water levels were down by nearly – so using a bit of local knowledge I set up in what I know is the deepest swim in the lake – however this was only 4ft !! (I am worried that these venues might really suffer if we have a long cold winter, and extended ice cover on our lakes).
A small nugget of sloppy liquidised bread, a small size 20 B511 hook, 0.08mm hooklength, a map 4×14 pencil float, 4 no 8 stotz as bulk with a single 10 stotz as dropper and I was away.
First put in, the float didn’t event settle before it slipped away and I was into my first small roach. I didn’t catch anything over 4oz but had a brisk hours fishing catching plenty of small roach and rudd before I reluctantly packed up. The fish were hungry, and if didn’t keep the bread feed going in, the bites soon died off. As you can see from the photo above they ate all the feed I had.
I’m hoping to have a canal session this week – again on the punch bread/sloppy feed..