We arrived at the venue at about 19:30 sadly I forgot to take a picture of the river at sunset but I do have this (bad) photo of it from when we were leaving the next day. We rushed to put the two tents up, one for us and one for our gear. I somehow managed to only bring 4 pegs and one of the tents requires 8 pegs just for the over wrap
mg: Luckily the gear tent was a dirt cheap (Argos) thing that was only one layer and
I figured the gear would weigh it down. As for the other tent I just had to bodge job it with the only thing holding the whole tent down being the 4 pegs on the over wrap. The ground was filled with rocks and I couldnt even get three of those pegs in half way, the fourth was firmly in the ground.
With the tents set up we rushed to the river to make the most of the last bit of sunlight. The venue was no night fishing but nowhere did it state what night fishing was so we decided half an hour into darkness was fair game. As I am sure most of you are aware last time I was here I had a real problem with my rig getting tangled somewhere between hitting the water and retrieving but I had a plan to try and combat this. I set up a 3 oz cage feeder on a running rig with 8lb mainline through to a 10lb floro hook length. This seemed to help but I was worried it was losing me bites, I had nothing until about twenty mins into darkness when a 8.5lb bream lifted my spirits.
View attachment 5610 View attachment 5611 You would think it they would be able to put up a fight with a tail like that!
After that little fella came and went I begrudgingly picked up my gear and moved over to where the tents were pitched. Me and her sat around and chatted while sharing a bottle of jacks and before long our stomachs started rumbling. While she prepared our dinner I took the opportunity to get everything ready so that I could get fishing without faffing in the morning. I decided to take apart my feeder rig and try tying one of the rigs that someone explained to me in the "advice" thread.. couldnt do it for ***** even with the help of pictures haha. I instead tried to weigh the hook length down with a couple of SSG. I ate my dinner, put all the half assembled fishing gear into the gear tent, cleaned my teeth and drifted into a sound sleep.
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4:30am I am rudely woken up by the wind blowing my over wrap completely off!! I jump out of my tent in my underwear and start manically trying to secure the bloody thing. I realized there are little bits of materiel that are used to tie the over wrap to the frame (thank god) and managed to get it all attached. If it wasnt for the one peg I managed to get all the way into the ground it would have been game over! The wind was howling, wife was snoring, I was wide awake and the wind just got worse and worse!
I waited until about 7:00/7:30 before venturing out of the tent and to my surprise the gear tent had moved a good ten meters and was now half in a bush!! I found 2/3 of the lost pegs and secured it to the ground before getting my gear and heading to a sheltered little spot. I chucked out my feeder rig only for it to get tangled again and again. I tried different size shot and different spacings to no avail. I then tried making 8 inches of the hooklengh out of leadcore and this seemed to work fine. after playing around with bait combos for a while I had two more bream (7.5lb and about 2lb) before the wind changed direction and blew all my bait everywhere... and there was a lot of bait..
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The wind was so stong at this point I couldnt use a feeder as the quiver tips shook violently and the bite alarm was going off for no reason. The only way I could fish was with a really long, strange float A friend gave me that seemed to resist the wind somewhat. I have questions about it so will make a thread about said float soon. The fishing was very hard with very few fish showing their faces but I did get a few including a little gudgeon and a little pike on a relax shad.
