With the remainder of the week forecast to be blustery with some rain, I decided on the spur of the moment to go over to the side ponds at the Clay Pit. I also wanted to use up some maggots that I had from the previous week. It turned out to be a good decision.

I half expected to get smaller fish on maggots with a few perch thrown in. I started by missing a number of fast bites but when I finally made contact it was a very reasonable roach that fought well. Another roach or two followed before I hooked into something more powerful. It was a tench.

I had hoped to pick up a tench or two but was surprised how quickly I was into my first one. It fought hard and weighed in at 2.7lbs. It wasn't long before I was into my second, this time a fish of 3.1lbs. And this was within the first hour of fishing.

I then caught another good roach followed by a smaller rudd before the third tench took the maggots. This was the best fish of the day at 3.6lbs. The roach seemed to have stopped feeding at this point, possibly because the tench had moved in, my next fish being another tench of 2.95lbs. And to finish off an unexpected catch I took a tench of 3.3lbs.

That was the last tench of the session and in fact bites fell away afterwards with only a couple of fast dips that I couldn't connect with. I had planned to stay until 6 pm but with the fish seemingly being off the feed I packed up around 5:30 pm. But for a three and a half hour session it really couldn't have gone any better.

I was surprised that the maggot bait had attracted such good fish, having only caught miniature rudd in the main pit on this bait. I was also slightly surprised that I didn't take any crucians, having caught a number on corn on my previous visit. Perhaps the bites that I couldn't hit were crucians as they are notoriously finicky biters.

With the fine weather and the tench feeding freely it was a very enjoyable few hours. It just goes to show that an opportunist decision to go fishing for a few hours can often have surprising results.