SnowPerch!

Once again, time has been my worst enemy of late even more so than the snow but I had a day booked off work last week to run some errands and I decided to try my best to squeeze some bank time into the day aswell. The snow was covering the ground quite thickly in places and I was in two minds as to whether I'd even be able to get near the river. Once off the roads and on the track I pushed onwards, wheel spinning most of the way until eventually I got near enough to walk the rest of the way.

I found a nice deep swim with some cover and started fishing, it was around 1.30 so I only had around three hours of daylight left. The first couple of hours went by without so much as a twitch on the tip to trouble the scoresheet but with snow everywhere to deaden the sound of far away traffic it was lovely sitting there in almost total silence save for the local wildlife. I was sat there still as a rock and I amazed at just how many wild creatures were going about their daily business despite the arctic conditions. Mice and voles ran past my feet, kestrels hovered overhead and at one point I heard a noise behind me, turned around and was confronted by a large dog fox, his reddy brown coat looking magnificent against the white backdrop. He was only ten yards away and our eyes met for a split second before he was gone in a flash.

Time continued to tick away until, shortly after a recast, I finally had an enquiry. My hand hovered over the rod and after an age it moved again and my strike met a solid thumping resistance. A nice fish of around 1.5-2lb was soon netted and went a long way towards warming me up a bit!

The fading light conditions were obviously to the fishes liking because two more bites over the next hour gave me two more Perch, both of a similar size to the first. All in all it was a nice solid session and well worth going out in the white stuff for.

Another snowy session on Saturday afternoon ended without a bite but the temperature had risen considerably and the river was slowly beginning to rise with all the snowmelt going in. Heavy rain that night finished the rest of the snow off and caused the rivers in my locality to come up alarmingly fast. I had originally planned a day Grayling fishing on the Dove for Sunday but a glance at the EA site that morning told me it was a no-hoper.

My mate Phil had told me he was headed to a local lake complex to try his new lure setup out so I decided to accompany him for a couple of hours. The nearby Trent was only just within its banks when we arrived and within a very short time it began to trickle ever so slightly into a couple of the lakes. We decided to depart sharpish before we got stranded and head to a nearby canal. No action was forthcoming although to be fair I didn't really expect any but it was nice to be out and about. Below is a couple of pics of a very hostile looking Trent as it was earlier today. I do hope we can get some decent river conditions before the end of the season but the way the weathers been over the last couple of months I'm starting to doubt it!

 

 

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