I headed for a lake near Birmingham for todays trip at the invite of my sisters fella Dan. Wed been meaning to get together for a session for a while and upon his promise of some nice Tench and Bream i pointed my car towards Brum. I met Dan at the gate to the fishery and we headed around to our chosen area.
The lake is very shallow and weedy and the bottom is visible over most of its area. Despite this i didnt see any fish moving other than the odd roach topping. Not to be discouraged i tackled up the rods and fired in half a dozen jaffas of groundbait into a clear looking area at about 30 yards range. I adopted my usual maggot approach and was quite confident after catching a couple of quickfire Roach straight away and getting plenty of twitches.
The swim suddenly went dead as a doornail without any apparent reason, that is until a twitchy bite resulted in a small Pike of about 4lb in the net. No wonder the Roach had disappeared unfortunately they never came back and i spent the rest of the morning sitting behind motionless bobbins.
By now the sun was up to its full strength and was getting really warm. As a result the lakes resident Carp began to show themselves and were cruising about on the surface everywhere i looked. These provided a distraction from the job at hand and i spent the whole afternoon fruitlessly pursuing them with floating bread on a controller rig. Dan was targetting the Carp and he lost one mid afternoon from the shallows.
As the afternoon wore on, the sun went in and the Carp stopped cruising so i decided to go back to my original plan and recast a couple of maggot rigs to my earlier baited area. After an hour or so i heard the shriek of a buzzer and looked across to see Dan connected to a fish. It was soon landed despite its best attempts to bring half the lakes weed with it and turned out to be a long , lean mirror of about 14lb. After doing the honors with the camera my own alarm sounded and the bobbin dropped to the floor. I wound down to the fish and the rod took on a satisfying curve, dan came over just in time to net a decent Bream for me.
At 9lb5oz it was my biggest Bream of the year so far and highlighted the potential of the water for the future. Dan fishes the lake regularly and has had them to over 12lb so another visit could be on the cards before the weed comes up, i say that because come july/august the lake becomes practically unfishable due to the heavy weed growth apparently.
After the fish was weighed and returned we realised it was time to go as the place was closing for the night, talk about leaving it till the last minute. Thats the great thing about fishing, it only takes one bite to make or break your day!
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