Feuding neighbours......................

Its been a bit of an odd weekend weather wise, it looks cold outside with the grey skies and the wind blowing but its not! The temperature has not dipped below 13degrees where I live and has been as high as 20degrees yesterday afternoon.

I drove down to the river last night to spend a couple of hours with barbel in mind. I managed to fish an area where I have spent a little bit of time before but I am beginning to believe that the fish do not get that far upstream as I am yet to have a bite from this area. There is a fairly deep hole just under your feet and when I ran an echo sounder over it a few months back it showed fish in the area, I do not know how big the fish where but they appeared on the screen. I know, an echo sounder but I could not resist borrowing it from my friend, more to confirm what I knew than anything else but I did find a couple of new areas to fish as well. I did find a couple of really interesting features that I did not know about but as of yet they have not produced. I also ran the gadget over a couple of well know areas and I was bemused to find that some of the holes are not where the fish get caught, perhaps the barbel do not frequent them!

I fished through to about eleven o’clock, the rod tip remained stationary during this time and when the rain started I decided to head off home.

Today I went perch fishing on a small still water near to home, I wanted to fish a larger water but the wind was quite strong and I did not think it would be prudent to sit by the waters edge and get blow all over the place.

The car park had just the one vehicle in it so I had the water to pretty much myself and he was fishing the car park swim; I headed of to the far end of the pond to a large patch of lilies. I was using an old quiver tip rod; I have a new one on order, a small block end feeder full of maggots and a large lobworm as bait. I did not have to wait long before the small perch homed in on my bait. I caught several before I decided to move to the opposite bank in search of something a little bigger.

A scruffy little man!

I had to leave behind a large handful of maggots however, there where two Robin’s in my swim who where fighting with each other for any spilt maggots. They are very territorial little birds and they do put up quite a fight before they give in, one of the two was a little scruffy looking, I am not too sure if he was too well looking at him. The other one looked young and full of life, so I threw two handfuls down in separate areas so they would not have to fight and moved on.

That is one huge tail!

I cast in and almost before I tightened up against the feeder when the tip swept round I and I was into a really good fish. The fish tore off and just for a moment I though I had hooked a huge perch, it was just for a moment because if this were a perch it would have been a really huge fish……………………. It turned out to be a Tinca Tinca with a damaged mouth!

I treated the mouth wound as best I as I could, I have one of those carp care kits and used some of the liquid on the sore areas and returned the fish to fight another day. I went on to land several more perch and a lovely looking roach but no big perch graced my net today.

Happy days.