2014 26 October 5th, Nursery Fields, Edenbridge, Kent

Today was my last trip of the season. My 26th in all so not a bad year.

I decided to finish the season where it started, at the club's premier fishery, Nursery Fields.

I am a big motor racing fan so today my leaving time was delayed because I had to watch the Japanese Grand Prix. It was just after 9 am when I left the house for the drive down to Edenbridge.

There was rain in the air however the temperature was high for the time of year. I was anticipating a good day, so were a lot of other people it seemed as when I arrived at the car park there was at least nine cars in there! More than in the height of summer.

I unloaded the car and made my way to my favorite swim at the top of the lake. I like this one because it has the shortest casting distance to the island coupled with the fact that I always seem to see several carp cruising on the surface.

It was going to be a two pronged attack today. On the first rod I was going to leger with a 15 mm strawberry boillie close up to the reeds by the island. The second was a standard waggler set up with a
small banded halibut pellet as the bait.

I fed 2 balls of ground bait plus a few pellets into the swim and was ready to make my first casts at around 10:30.

All morning I sat and waited for a bite without even an indication that there were fish about. Every hour I fed the swim with a small ball of ground bait. Every cast I fed two or three pellets.

Lunchtime came and went there was still no action on either rod. I was beginning to think that it wasn't going to be my day.

Another angler, about 4 swims away seemed to be catching small silvers at a fairly good rate. Perhaps he was using maggots. I began to think that perhaps I should have brought some.

As the afternoon wore on I began to notice that the carp were all on the surface! The sun was now out and shining down pretty strong.

At 15:55 to my utter amazement the buzzer on the leger set up went off. I struck, expecting one of the lake's carp to rush off but alas no. There was some fight but not all that much. When it broke the surface I was not surprised to see it was one of the lake's small tench. I wasn't going to blank today!

Twenty minutes later the buzzer went again and I was into another fish. Yet again it was a tench. This one was slightly bigger than the previous one.

By the time I packed up at 6 pm the float still hadn't moved.Perhaps they just didn't fancy pellets today.