April's Fishing

Hello once again.

April may seem a bit hectic, but as I write this May some of March's matches might have overlapped.

As a bit of a change I took my new barbel rod to Grey Mist in Warrington to try and catch a few tench. The warm weather at the beginning of April had started the tench feeding in earnest, with some anglers getting over 10 fish in a session. I have not fished Grey Mist since I was 16, so as you can imagine I did not manage any tench in my first visit, but it was a nice change. My second visit was a bit more productive. After some good advice from a fellow angler I set up in a swim on the left hand side of the lake in a small bay with the wind blowing towards and across my swim. I was told not to fish too far out using a groundbait feeder and a bunch of 4 or 5 maggots on the hook. I was fishing from around 5 pm and it only took fifteen minutes for my first fish, a tench around 5lb I guess. The rod seemed to perform well. After unwrapping it after it was delivered at 1-3/4lb test curve I thought it might be a liitle heavy handed, but it casts well and has a good action when the fish was hooked. Anyway review over. About 10 minutes after that I caught another about the same size. At this point I thought I might be in for a good session, but that was the last of the tench. I kicked myself afterwards for not taking any photos. My only 2 other bite after that were from Jack Pike, which was very strange. I did manage another session on Grey Mist. I fished a car park swim, with the wind blowing to opposite end it was no surprise that I blanked.

In between fishing at Grey Mist I fished a couple of matches in the Cheshire Angling Spring League. The first was on the Macclesfield Canal at Scholar Green. I have never fished this part of the canal before, so I just set up the usual bread punch, caster and a chopped worm/caster rig. This was one of the first warm days of the year which made a nice change. I ended up with just over 3lb made up of small skimmers and roach on bread and a few caster roach. I think nearly 10lb won the match.

Following this I fished another spring league match on the Trent and Mersey canal at Broken Cross near Northwich. I drew a peg close to the main road towards the end of the pegs being used. The peg was on a slight bend just before the road bridge, because of this the boats would need to manoueve close to the bank to line up to get under the bridge. As a result anywhere past about 8 metres was very shallow, I did settle on an area towards a moored boat at an angle to my left at 11.5 metres as a bread line at around 2.5 feet deep. Any further across was really too shallow, but I set up a caster rig anyway. My other line was at 6 metres where I fed casters with a bit of hemp. The bread line was ok, but the fish where quite small, so I started to loose faith in this line. I tried the caster swim at 6 metres and caught the odd roach. A couple of boats went over the line, but once the water had settled I could bite again. I kept plugging away and caught some nice roach in the end I weighed 5lb odd and the match was won with 14lb and a couple of doulbe figure nets followed that. It was a good match and I enjoyed catching some nice roach on caster.

As I have not been up-dating this blog very much lately I will group together reports rather than do each month and hopefully catch up with myself.

Tight lines.