Bittersweet endings

Sunday 6th of June

With 10 long days left till you know when, i opted for a final closed season trip to Tamworth with my old mate Paul. The forecast had given out heavy, thundery showers for today but as it turned out we actually had them in the night and although it was drizzling upon our arrival it soon brightened up and turned into bright sunshine.

I decided upon an out and out pellet attack and soon had the method feeders in place. After an hour or so of biteless fishing the bailiff turned up and informed us of a session he enjoyed yesterday where him and a couple of mates had caught several big bream to double figures from the pegs up the far end to where we were. The bream had been spawning up there apparently but nevertheless, bites are hard to come by on this particular lake so it had to be worth a look. As soon as the bailiff was gone i was around the far side and sure enough, the Bream were there in numbers. Not spawning just cruising about in the surface layers. I told Paul and after having a quick look for himself a move was soon the order of the day.

Once setup it was soon apparent that there was a lot of Bream in front of us and, although there was a couple of hefty fish amongst them, the majority were fairly small and looked to be around the 7lb mark. This was a little disappointing as id been led to believe the average size was 9lb+ and the majority of the fish in front of us certainly werent that size.

Never mind, we soon cast out and within minutes i had a fish on only to lose it straight away. This was repeated twice more over the next hour and a decided to tweak my rig a bit in a bid to actually land something. The mods seemed to do the trick as a went on to land 3 bream over the course of the afternoon as did Paul. All 6 fish landed were between 6-8lb.

The average size confirmed my suspicions about people exaggerating the sizes of the fish in there. Lets face it a 7lb Bream on the mat to the unitiated could quite easily seem to be a 10lber due to its sheer depth of body and length. I definately saw a couple of double figure fish cruising about but its another one of those places where i dont fancy battling through the small ones to get to the bigguns. Bites on the water are hard enough to get as it is unless you land on them so it looks like another water off the radar, for now anyway. Despite all this it was great to catch from the lake, no Tench this time though.
Like the title of this entry suggests its a bittersweet ending to my time on the lake but there are plenty of others on my Radar so watch this space.....