2012 03 March 30th Nursery Fields, Edenbridge, Kent

Outing three of the season was to be another visit to the club’s Nursery Fields water.

I decided that due to the good weather continuing that I would leave earlier this time and so just after daylight broke I loaded the car and set off on the 15 mile or so journey to Edenbridge.

When I arrived at the fishery there was yet again just one other person there. I unloaded the car and set off for my today’s swim of choice.

I had decided to give the swim at the top of the lake another go as I felt that I had had a good day there two weeks earlier and that with the warmer weather continuing I might have an even better one today.

I used my normal 2 rod set up, one waggler with a size 18 hook and a feeder rod with a size 16 hair rig to house a 10mm strawberry flavoured boillie.

For the first time this season I mixed up some groundbait which consisted of brown crumb, some attractor, a few feed pellets and some corn. My plan was to use this sparingly, a golf ball size every hour or so.

After feeding the first ball of groundbait and some maggots into the swim I made my first cast at 8:14.

The first cast resulted in a skimmer bream as did the second. By 9:00 in total I’d accumulated 4 bream, 4 roach and my first tench of the season.

The swim was apparently alive with fish as the next hour produced a further 5 roach and 4 bream. The bream were small skimmers however the roach were of the 2 to 3 ounce variety not the really small ones that I was getting at Chittenden.

Once I’d determined that the fish were feeding today I began to throw 2 pieces of corn in front of the weed bed just to the right of me. At 10:00 I had a look but got no sign of fish activity. However at 11:00 the float dipped and I thought I’m in here. Seconds later the float shot away and I was into something larger than the bream and roach! It wasn’t a monster but it was a very nice crucian of 1.25lb!

Between 10 and 11 I’d also had 1 more bream, roach and tench on the single maggot.

It must have been the commotion of catching the crucian that caused the swim to slow down a bit because the hour leading up to noon only produced 2 skimmers.

Nigel, the bailiff told me that the fishing completely died in the afternoon of the previous day so I was hoping that the change of pace was just a blip and so it proved because by 13:00 I’d added 7 more bream and my first Rudd.

Up to this point there had been no activity on the feeder rod even though I’d been feeding the swim continuously throughout the morning however this changed during the lunch period when in came a nice tench and up to that point my best bream of the day. On the waggler I had 4 further bream and another tench.

For the next 4 hours I decided to abandon the single maggot, yes I would have carried on catching that much I was confident of but I wanted to see if any other bait would work.

I knew was working (that’s what the crucian took) so I tried that first. The result was a tench.

After 30 minutes or so without a bite I changed to bread. A used a small piece of flake and this proved a good decision as I took 2 roach and 5 more bream before I packed up at 18:00. The bream were all around the pound mark which just shows what a change of bait can do!

I hadn’t seen much carp activity during the day but as I packed away a white (ghost/koi) carp of a least double figure size passed just in front of me!

Wildlife update 1.

The result of the mating frogs of 2 weeks ago was all around the reed bed. Seemed like a few pounds of spawn to me.

Wildlife update 2.

For most of the day a very brightly coloured pheasant walked up and down behind me. He’ll be safe if he stays in the fishery I should think.

Wildlife update 3.

Woodpeckers building nests on a fishery can really be loud. This chap seems to be working on his home all day!