With the tench fishing still relatively quiet, I decided to break with my plans for the Spring and have a session on a Berkshire Syndicate lake that contains a small head of very large bream. Despite the lake being relatively small at only about eight acres the bream had proven to be exceptionally tricky the previous year and had proven almost uncatchable until the Summer. I hoped that the warm spell would have woken them up.
Arriving late on the Tuesday night I was forced to set up in the dark and it was hardly surprising that apart from the odd medium sized tench the fishing was slow. Wednesday I spent a couple of hours with the marker float and found a few areas where the lake bed was made up of firm silt, rather than deep silt or gravel. The lake bed is actually like an egg box and a lot of these spots are literally only a metre or so across, making accurate fishing and feeling down the lead very important to ensure you are fishing efficiently.
With all the rods on nice clean spots at varying ranges I baited up with a mixture of 3mm and 6mm Fish Frenzy Halibut pellets, maggots, Fish Frenzy 8mm Scopex Squid Squidgee boilies, half a tin of corn and a handful of 10mm Scopex Squid Liver Plus boilies. Heavy baiting is normally a waste of time on this lake, so in total this was only around 2.5kg of bait around the rods put out with a small Cobra spod to keep everything nice and tight.
Wednesday was more productive with several tench coming to one of the rods, and as dusk fell I began to get line bites on all of the rods, some of them very aggressive and even taking line from the baitrunner! The first proper bite didn’t materialise though until the early hours when the line pulled up tight and I could make out the rod tip nodding in the light from my head torch. A tentative strike and it was game on!
The fight was quite protracted for a bream, mainly because I was worried that after twenty nights fishing on the lake my first bream would somehow drop off on the way in! Eventually though after a great scrap on a light 1.6lb 12 foot rod that I designed some years ago specifically for the task, he rolled on the surface and after a quick lunge I had the fish in the net. On lifting I knew it was a good fish, and thought that it would break my long standing PB of 13lb 7oz caught many years ago from a Colne Valley pit.
On the scales the gnarly old warrior went 14lb 12oz, easily beating my PB and was absolutely covered in the most amazing spawning tubercles that gave it a really prehistoric appearance.
I stayed on for another two nights, but as usual the lake refused to give up any more of its breamy denizens and I had to make do with more tench to keep me busy. With the weather cooling thanks to the strong North Easterly wind the bream simply disappeared.
Tackle consisted of:
12ft 1.6lb specialist rod
Shimano Baitrunner 6000
10lb Nash Bullet line
2.5oz Nash flat pear lead fished on a lead clip
Size 10 Nash Fang X hook
8-inch 12lb Drennan Sink Link hook length
75cm Nash Diffusion Camou leader
Hookbait:
10mm Nashbait Scopex Squid Liver Plus boilie tipped with a piece of white artificial corn.
best regards,
Paul Garner
