Diary of an average angler

The day didn't start well when my car wouldn't start. In fact it was dead, no warning lights, nothing. It later transpired that the battery had failed completely. Fortunately my wife's car was available but with my car problem in the back of my mind I had been in two minds whether to go. The weather forecast was perfect and in the end I set off, but I only stayed for just over three hours as I wanted to get back to sort out the car. Fortunately I had some decent sport in those three hours.

A lot of the lake was still inaccessible because the high water level has flooded the paths and fishing was limited to an area near to the car park, where I fished a couple of weeks previously. But on this occasion a couple of carp guys had commandeered most of the area, with multiple rods out on two banks. Fortunately there's a thin strip of land that divides two sections of the lake that was accessible, if still very wet and muddy because of the raised water level.

I found a swim on this strip that looked inviting. There was a bed of lily pads about ten yards out, which was an ideal feature to fish to. So I set up and groundbaited with some mashed bread laced with 'insect feast' wild bird food. My latest concoction.

Bites came quite quickly and I soon had a bream on the bank. It was, however, possibly a hybrid, as the fins were reddish rather than the normal black. But it looked 'breamish'.

The swim turned out to be easy to fish and with no wind the waggler was easy to deploy.

After a couple of bream had come to the net I struck into something big. It turned out to be a sizeable carp and after managing to extract it from the lily pads on its first rush, and having played it in open water for a while, I thought it had started to tire. But unfortunately it made one more rush for the lily pads and I couldn't stop it. This time it performed the time-honoured trick of transferring my hook to a lily pad stem. I got the hook back after hand lining but the carp was gone.

A couple more bream followed and then, after I thought a moorhen had caught the line, I started to retrieve only to hook into something. And this something wasn't a bream. After a spirited fight my first tench was in the net. I then lost a fish that I guess was a tench, which came off after a minute or so.

Another bream followed, and then another tench, this time after getting a positive bite. Although not seemingly much larger than the first tench, this one fought much harder, very impressive for its size.

I continued to get bites but I had not been connecting with many of them throughout the session, and this problem continued. I did manage to get two more bream, but then the bites tailed off. There were signs of surface activity that I think was from a shoal of small rudd, and these were actually causing my float to move about, making me think something was playing with the bait when in fact it was just small fish knocking into the line and the float.

With my bread almost gone, and the bites falling off, I decided to pack up earlier than I had first intended, the car problem still playing on my mind. So, after just over three hours I called it a day, but despite the short stay I was more than pleased with my catch. It would have been nice to get the carp in, but I was lucky enough to get a few decent carp on the bank during my previous two sessions, testing lightish tackle to the limit. I was probably due to run out of luck!