Cold Winter Day
It has been very cold for the past few days. It was -7 yesterday morning and -5 when I awoke this morning. I am glad that we have a local river as all of the ponds and canals are frozen solid.
As I headed out today I knew that there was only one species that might take a bait today – the wily old Chub! So I went armed with Dendrobaena, Lobworms, Cheesepaste, Bread and Luncheon Meat. I arrived about 9:45am.
I had only been using one rod with a roving approach on my recent trips but none of these resulted in a fish. So, I decided to take 2 rods to increase my chances. I had also been using a size 6 hook on these trips so decided to take some rigs made up with size 14 and 16 in case the 6s were too heavy and putting off shy biting fish. I fished peg 7 at Ings Lane Bottom. There are bushes to my left and right so I fished one rod to each bush.
I fished a size 16 with lobworm tail to my right and a size 6 with breadflake to my left. Within the first 90 minutes I got a few taps on breadflake but none were hittable. They could have been line bites or fish just nipping off bits of bread – either way it showed that were fish in the swim. I also got a tap on worm of the right hand rod but again, not hittable. At least my confidence was now quite high.
I then decided to try a smaller piece of breadflake on the size 16 to my right hand side. The hook wasn’t really big enough for the bread but I thought it was worth a try. At about 12:10, after the bread had been in for about 10 minutes, I got a proper bite and hit into a nice hard fighting Chub. I had to apply lots of side strain to stop it reaching the bush. It was great to see a decent sized fish as I brought it up to the surface. The end result was this lovely 4lb 2oz Chub. It felt quite hollow so could be much heavier if it filled out a bit.
This really got my hopes up. However, no matter what I tried I could not get another bite.
I decided to take out my keepnet with about 30 minutes to go. This would give it a chance to drip-dry. However it froze solid! It’s the first time I have had to collapse a frozen net (like a large spring). Also, when taking off my hook length, my pear-shaped lead had been on the ground for no more than 2 minutes – when I lifted my rod, the lead had frozen to the ground. It really was a chilly day.
