Fishing was all too rare at the back end of last year as I’d been looking after my poorly girlfriend, but a visit from one of her friends enabled me to get out for a couple of nights. The weather was due to be a bit of a mixture of damp days and cold, clear nights; not particularly inspiring conditions for anything in particular, so I decided to hedge my bets with a session targeting three different species on Mallard Lake on the Bluebell Complex.
My last trip here had produced a superb looking 30lb plus common, so I was hoping that the lake might still be feeling in a generous mood and provide another chance of a decent fish if I tried different methods and baits to give myself a chance of either pike, carp or even one of the very rare big bream that occasionally crop up by accident to the carp anglers.
When I’m on a session when it’s likely to be both cold and damp it’s great when I can set up close to where I can get the car, as there always seems to be tons of gear required to stay relatively comfortable. However I try not have too much of a fixed idea about swims prior to arrival and on this occasion I was determined to have a good look around and perhaps use the marker rod to do a bit of mapping out of the water if the venue was quiet. As it happened there was only one other angler on, who was already fishing a swim nowhere near the area of the lake where I expected to be setting up, so I had loads of water to explore.
I grabbed the marker rod and wandered off to have a few casts in an area I’d already earmarked as a possibility. I found a couple of interesting spots and was tempted to go back to the car for my gear, when out of the corner of my eye, a disturbance on the surface caught my attention. The disturbance was more of a flat spot, as if something reasonably large had turned over just under the surface, flattening out the ripple. It was a good distance out and a few swims further up the bank, but definitely worth investigating.
I wandered over to the closest swim and stood for another ten minutes looking over the water, but nothing else happened, so I decided to explore the area with the marker. The first cast fell a couple of yards short of the area where I reckoned the flat spot had occurred, but landed on a very firm bit of bottom that felt as though it may have been recently fed on. I punched the next cast with the marker out in the same direction, but a bit further out and as I felt the lead and marker down through the water, there was a distinct knock about half way down before the final touchdown on the bottom. It’s a pretty rare occurrence, but I’ve experienced something similar before, and I was reasonably sure that I’d actually bumped a fish, probably a carp, on the way down.
This helped me to make my mind up pretty quickly and I decided to set up in this swim as it seemed that there was at least some fish already in residence. It was a good old hike from the nearest point I could get the car to, but after two full loads of the barrow I had all my gear in the swim and I could start to get some rods out.
The firm spot close to where I thought I’d bumped the fish was close to the maximum range that I felt I could comfortably spod out a bit of bait and I decided to fish two rods out to the spot, with half a dozen Spombs carrying a mixture of hemp, crumbed boilie, some small 3mm pellets, a sprinkling of corn and a few whole 10mm boilies. The two rods cast out to this baited area were both baited with a 10mm boilie tipped with a piece of yellow plastic corn. The only difference was that the boilie on one rod was a standard bottom bait straight out of the bag, while the other was a little glugged pop-up.
A third rod was fished on an adjustable zig rig, aimed a little to the left of the first two rods, but still out towards the area where I thought I’d bumped the fish with the marker. I’d guessed that the bump was approximately half way down in roughly 12ft of water, so I initially set the zig up to fish the little black and yellow Nash Zig Bug at 6ft, with the intention of playing around with the depth on a regular basis.
A fourth rod was cast out with the pit’s pike population as the target. I fished this one well to the left of the swim at the base of the marginal drop off. This rod was baited with half a mackerel mounted on a pair of size 6 trebles on a 30lb wire trace and a pretty standard running ledger type rig.
At this time of year the hours of daylight don’t last long, so by the time I had all the rods sorted and the bivvy up it was starting to get dark and a fine drizzle had set in.
It was a milder night than forecast, with an almost constant drizzle, so I was pretty much confined to the bivvy in order to stay both warm and dry. I’m happy enough dealing with the cold on winter bivvy sessions, as the kit and clothing available to anglers nowadays means that there’s no real excuse for getting cold so long as you’re prepared to get kitted out to deal with it. It’s when it’s wet as well as cold that causes extra problems.
My Titan bivvy is snug, totally stable – even in very high winds – and properly waterproof; but while my winter waterproof clothing means that I’m not going to get a soaking if I’m outside in the wet, it does mean that I’ll be tramping mud back into the bivvy on my boots and bringing the moisture that’s on the outside of my jacket back in as well, which means taking extra care when removing the outer layers and extra condensation.
For bivvy sessions in the winter months I always use a groundsheet and on particularly muddy venues I use bits of cardboard that I place in the doorway area of my bivvy to help prevent the groundsheet in this area becoming caked in mud. In the winter I also try and remember to take a couple of extra cloths to wipe away moisture or mud that gets inside the bivvy and onto anything that I want to keep dry.
All was quiet up until around midnight, when two or three beeps from the alarm on the left-hand of the two rods I’d placed out on the baited area suddenly signalled that something was going on. I was quickly out and with the aid of the head torch I could see that the line had pulled up tight, although there was no line actually being pulled from the spool. The line stayed relatively tight, whereas a liner would have probably seen the line and indicator dropping back to its original position. However something held me back from picking up the rod and striking, and a few moments later the tension in the line suddenly disappeared and the opportunity had gone.
It took a moment to sink in… then I could have kicked myself! It had the hallmarks of a positive pick up rather than a liner. One of those subtle bites, more common in the colder months, where a fish has just mouthed the bait but hasn’t moved off and has simply stayed on the spot until they’ve managed to blow the hook out. I’d have normally struck such an indication, even in the warmer months of the year, so quite why I was so hesitant and let the opportunity pass this time around I’m not sure. Perhaps I wasn’t quite as alert as I’d normally be and wasn’t thinking as clearly as usual, but whatever the reason I was soon regretting what I finally concluded was a missed chance.
Unfortunately the rest of the session was something of an anti-climax. The conditions didn’t improve, in fact it just a little colder and stayed damp, with either drizzle or light rain throughout. In order to stay relatively dry I didn’t do as much playing about with the adjustable zig rig as I’d first intended. I recast it a couple of times and played around with the height of the bug itself a few times, but only when I was almost forced outside by a call of nature or something.
Similarly I didn’t really do too much experimenting, or adjustment of the other rods, just having a re-bait and a single re-cast of them all when I had to wind in and trot off to use the toilet facilities mid-way through the second day. The only bright side to the later part of the session was the fact that it actually stopped raining for long enough to allow me to get everything back to the car in the two exhausting trips, squelching through angle deep mud with the barrow, without being drizzled on the whole time.
Unfortunately my girlfriend remained ill and I couldn’t get out again as I was doing my best to look after her but we did make the most of the rare opportunity to take ourselves off for a two week holiday to Cape Verde, which was a rare treat.
We were chatting in the lounge one evening, remarking about the fact that it was a rarity for us both to be spending so much time at home together, when we realized that due to work commitments and one thing and another we’d not had a proper holiday together for the best part of three years. We talked about the various pros and cons of winter sun holiday destinations but it was still a bit of a surprise when about 20 minutes later my partner suddenly looked up from her iPad and announced that she’d booked us a holiday… and that we’d be flying off from Gatwick to Boa Vista in three days’ time!
I was obviously concerned about how she’d cope with the travelling etc., but her thoughts were that if we didn’t try and make the most of the current opportunity, then it might be another three years or more before a similar opportunity presented itself; so I just got busy packing some shorts, t-shirts and sun lotion into my travel case rather than arguing against her logic!
We had a very relaxed fortnight in the sun, which was especially good for my girlfriend, with most of the time either spent chilling out on a sun lounger by the pool, or strolling along the beautifully vast and almost empty beaches. Cape Verde has got something of a game fishing reputation with the season running from March to October (peaking from April through to July), when there’s a good run of blue marlin and chances of other game species. However we were there well outside of the productive periods, so I didn’t even consider looking at the potential boat fishing opportunities, or trying to sneak in any fishing kit as part of my baggage allowance. We did see a few mullet looking type fish just beyond the waves where the surf was calmer, but it seemed that it was the little sharks, typically weighing just a couple of pounds or so, that were the most common catch for anyone bothering to fish from the shore.
We did in fact witness a holidaymaker catch one of these little sharks during one of our walks along the beach, but unfortunately I hadn’t taken my camera with us on this particular occasion and so missed the opportunity of getting a picture of one.
Our two weeks in the sun seemed to pass very quickly and once we were back and with Xmas and New Year out of the way I was keen to get fishing as soon as possible, but it would all depend on if there was a continuation in the improvement of my girlfriend’s health.
Keep your fingers crossed and I’ll let you know how things panned out next time.
Until then… happy fishing!
