A Bee in the bonnet

Monday 6th June

Since my last blog entry i developed something of an obsession with catching a Tench from the tricky water where a caught those Rudd last week. The plan was to fish short evening trips until i actually caught one and in the event it turned out to be surprisingly hard going!
Despite being very deep in places, the pool has an absolute plethora of features, in fact it probably has just about every possible fish holding feature you can think of and it screams Tench everywhere you look. However, as i mentioned before, its Tincas dont give themselves up easily and after speaking to other anglers recently, to catch more than one in a session is a relative rarity.
I headed down on Wednesday  last week after work for few hours and i only managed one bite all evening. The hooked fished shot off through a weedbed to my left and i was left cursing another hookpull. After that my swim remained stone dead until i packed up just before dark. The local mouse population was surprisingly tame though and seemed to be very partial to micro-halibut pellets!



The next trip was Saturday evening and i arrived at the pool to find that the hot weather of the previous couple of days had caused an algal bloom and the water had turned pea green. This didnt put the fish off though and i managed 4 bites in about 4 hours. I only hooked the one though and after beating me up for five minutes or so it swam around a sunken tree and cut me off. The problem i had was that the 15ft float rod i was using didnt have the backbone to be able to control the fish and ,despite putting a savage curve into it ,the Tench pretty much went where it pleased throughout the battle. I headed for home with big plans to beef up my gear ready for the next round.

This brings me nicely up to the most recent session on Monday evening wherupon i returned armed with my 1.25lb Drennan Avon rod . At 12ft it couldnt quite reach over the marginal weed as easily as the float rod but i was much more confident of gaining the upper hand should i hook anything decent. The fish were certainly active tonight, lots of bubbles and movement on the float had me hovering ready to strike several times. It wasnt long though before the float slid away and i bumped a fish off the hook. This had me worried that the rod was now too stiff to hit bites at close range. Three more bites had me striking at thin air over the next couple of hours until finally at about 8.30 i latched into some solid resistance. Right from the start i was able to show the fish who was boss and i was able to bully it away from the snags and reeds with ease. Admittedly it wasnt a huge one at around 2lb or so but the sense of relief  and elation at finally netting one was huge. After taking a quick pic for the blog i packed up a happy man.