Half a bluey in it's gob

Mid week fishing is all very well but the bloody traffic!!  Especially when the A road is barely moving, again.  As expected my diversions had bottlenecks too and it was 0945 before I had a cast.  The river was up 18” or so today and pushing through a bit but still not what you would call flood conditions.  The paths were flooded however; deep, slippery mud in places but I managed to stay on two feet, just about.  My chosen swim is virtually a ‘U bend’ with slacks on both banks so I dropped a smelly deadbait into each. As usual simple inline float legers with the tips in the air to keep the braid out of the water.

I’ve come to expect an early take here and I wasn’t disappointed when the near side sardine started to move.  However I was disappointed when I wound down to find the bait had been dropped.  Another half hour passed, I’d been moving the baits about without finding anything and was contemplating a move downstream but my wandering attention was alerted by a micron, the bluey was moving but once again the bait was dropped before I made contact.  Highly frustrating.

Rain swept in so I took refuge under the brolly, muttered and ground my teeth…  A good thing about this kind of swim is I can reasonably move rods around, up and down stream and still have them only a couple of yards of my chair, a bit like fishing a point on a stillwater I suppose?  But by 1130 I felt like I was running out of options and was eyeing a move downstream once more.  Something splashed in the far slack, I don’t know what but it was sizable so across went the bluey again and five minutes later the bait was taken once more.  This time I managed to set the hook and the rod stayed bent.  Whatever it was felt heavy banging away out there and I wondered for a moment if I had something a bit bigger than the norm but it shrank at the net, still a Pike of twelve pounds or so.

I gave the swim another half hour then finally did have a move downstream, an hour fishing another bend with baits on the near side brought nothing and with rain closing in behind me, a rising river in front of me and a day in Norfolk to follow I decide to cut and run.

A day in the ‘other boat’ beckoned, my old pal Mr W joined me for the day which began a little uncomfortably on a damp drizzly morning.  This was soon forgotten as we found fish in the first spot.  I was away first with a fish of eight pounds or so on smelt followed by another slightly smaller one on lamprey.  A few minutes later it was Mr W’s turn with a low double putting a smile on his face. 

As expected it went quiet so we went wandering.  Fishing the other river has made me even more impatient so we moved every forty five minutes or so and there were few areas within reach we didn’t try at some point.  Mr W managed another small fish and later had a creature giving him a run around but it turned out to be a low double foul hooked in the tail.  The afternoons have been quiet here this season and this was the case again but at least the drizzle had stopped.  We kept on moving, trying a couple of areas I haven’t fished in years and here we did find some fish, in the form of a dropped take each.  By the time the sun was dropping we too were sagging so decided to get away home before the roads went mental.

Either side of that I had two trips out on the special place which epitomises the fishing there at this time of year.  I’d waited for conditions to be in my favour and mild, cloudy with a breeze does nicely, I knew well where I wanted to fish. For once it went like clockwork and I managed to drop onto a fish early on then caught a couple more through the day which is a result at any time.  Then on the next trip I had almost identical conditions and was confident of a repeat but despite doing the same things in the same places I didn’t see a float move.  I should have known better but that’s Norfolk and I’ll be drawn back again before long.

With the rest of the household off doing stuff of their own I didn’t see any point in staying home alone so quickly got some bits and pieces together for an afternoon on the river.  I was on the bank by 1330, walking a stretch of river I hadn’t looked at since the summer.  At that time I remembered it not been particularly inspiring from a Pikey point of view but there were a couple of pools worth searching so I walked a way downstream and set up on a nice looking bend.  The plan was simple, a couple of deadbaits dropped into likely looking spots for twenty minutes or so before moving onto another spot.

By 1530 I’d covered quite a bit of water, dropping baits into slacks, beside overhangs and sometimes bang in the middle but I hadn’t found any Pike.  My next spot was a place I’d caught plenty of silver fish back in the summer, with a small bush opposite me and a more substantial tree below me.  It was beneath this that I dropped half a bluey and after twenty minutes this was moving into mid river.  I set the hooks into something small and straight away I was aware the fight was ‘different’ and up popped another one of those spotty things.  It was a bit bigger than the one I’d caught in the summer, a new PB at 2-02 which somehow managed to get half a bluey into its gob.

I fished one more swim close to the car and enjoyed the sunset without anything else making off with a bait.  No Pike in the net this afternoon but searching out another stretch of water was time well spent.