My only chance of getting on the river before the start of the close season was this weekend, but there wasn't a match on it which was a real shame. My wife was away for the weekend visiting our eldest daughter, that meant I was going to go fishing both days and my youngest daughter would look after me when I was at home lol. A plan was hatched river Saturday and fish a t match Sunday at Hillview.
I got out to Newbridge and Warren Bates was out there too, he was on peg 24. I didn't want a long walk and so I settled in on peg 18, it's a good peg and has the added bonus of you being able to get down the bank a bit, which would be a godsend as it turned out. The river still had plenty of colour in at and a bit of pace, so was going to be a bream job I thought. As I was only planning fishing for about 4 hours I just set up the one feeder rod, a large open ender, with 0.13 to a 14 PR355. I wasn't going to ball it in today just put everything through the feeder. I added some of the new Sonubaits Thatchers groundbait into my mix. This groundbait was originally made by Rodney at Thatchers tackle shop in Wells, he has now passed on the recipe to Sonubaits. I used to use this fishmeal gbait a lot so I am glad it is available again, mixing it with a natural gbait and brown crumb has also worked for me in the past for bream / skimmers.
I started around 9am and made about 10 quick casts to get some bait in, I had a bite after about 10 mins and it was a roach of at least 12oz on triple red maggot. After this I didn't have a bite, but I was not leaving the feeder in for too long to keep bait going in. Just before the hour mark the wind started to get up pretty bad, luckily it was off my back but was buffeting the tip, but that didn't stop me noticing a proper bite and I struck into solid resistance. A proper fight from a decent slab ensued, the flow was helping it a lot. Eventually I netted a very dark coloured 5lb bream which had a few spawning barnacles on its head. I'd taken this fish on dendra and 2 dead reds. Ten minutes later and rod was buckled in two by another bream, this one was really heavy and I was sure it was a bigger fish. I had to keep the rod low to avoid the fish kiting up to the surface in close as there are many branches in the water. This fish was much lighter in colour and I would have said it was close on 7lb. Sadly this was not the start of a bream fest and I went an hour with just a small roach. I had now lowered the rod tip to about 4 feet of the water as the wind was so strong it was blowing the tip all over the place. I had a close shave when a branch blew off the tree to my left, yikes. I then had another bream but this one was on 4 red maggots, again it was another big slab.
I spent another spell with no indications other than a couple of small roach and a chublet. I then lost a bream which I am sure was foul hooked. Around 1:30pm I had another 2 bream one of 4lb and one of 6lb. At 2pm I decided to call it a day. Shaun Townsend happened to be walking along and so I asked him to take a quick photo, 5 bream and some bits that would have gone close to 30lb. A nice way to end the river season.... However, once again blogger / my laptop will not let me load the photo on to my blog!!!!! I'll try again later in the week. Not been great for things electric as I have a part of my house without electric at the moment, happens to be part of the kitchen too, so no fridge or freezer, FFS!
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