July back end

As the title suggests this little update is about my fishing in the latter part of the month. We've been experiencing something of a heat wave of late which, for someone who despises the sun like myself, has made for some pretty uncomfortable fishing.

First up was a session on a new stretch of Trent and although it was a daylight trip I was still hopeful of a barbel as the area is known for producing one or two in the day and recent rain had caused the river to rise and colour up a little.

Small pellet hook baits on fluorocarbon hooklinks were to be my main line of attack and it was apparent from the start that this was highly attractive to the local roach and bream population! No barbel were landed but I did get plenty of bites from a succession of nice roach and a couple of bream.

 

 

My next trip out was an afterwork evening trip to one of my favourite bits of Trent with Phil and the lure rods. After a slowish start we started to get a few however, both opening our accounts with a pike apiece.

At one point I managed to find a real perch hotspot and lost count of how many I caught from it! Every cast was a coconut and I reckon I must've had somewhere around 12-15 from that one swim alone!

In another swim I hooked a very good pike indeed, certainly upper double figures and I realised my net wouldn't be big enough to land it. In these situations I usually glove the fish out but the swim I was in was on a very high bank and I couldn't see an easy way down to it. The fish was well beaten but as I faffed about trying to clamber down to it a final flare of the gills dislodged my tiny lure and it made good it's escape, gutted I was!

Soon it was too dark to carry on and I was well happy with three pike landed and a ruck of perch in just a couple of hours fishing, shame about losing that big one though.

My most recent trip was a late evening rendezvous with some Trent barbel. I didn't arrive at the river till 8pm as with the hot sunshine I didn't see the point in getting there any earlier. I planned to stop till around 12-1am seeing as that covered the hours of darkness when most action seems to occur.

I wasn't to be disappointed either, at bang on 10pm, just into dark and right on cue, I landed my first barbel of the evening at 10b4oz. Another followed exactly and hour later at 11pm which went 10lb12oz and I thought to myself how strange a coincidence it would be if I caught another at midnight.

In the event it was 12.15 when I caught my third and final barbel of the evening and although it very nearly pulled my rod in on the take it proved to be my smallest of the season so far at 6lb4oz, in fact I think it's the smallest I've had from the Trent for a good couple of years, always nice to see the next generation of doubles coming through though.

 

 

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