Saturday night at Crockerton

Banana Steve · #1 04-26-2007, 07:37 PM

As last week progressed I fancied a little bit of Tench fishing at my local lake, and I also had received my new Bivvy, so I thought I would kill two birds with one stone; go night fishing for the Tench.

I arrived on the Saturday morning at around 8am to notice that someone else had been there all night and had chosen the peg that I fancied. Oh well worse thing happen at sea. So I decided to set up in peg 7 which is a little tight for casting but it does have a view of the back of the Island, and is renowned for good Tench living there.

So after fafing around for a couple of hours with setting up my Bivvy and setting up my Avon /Barbel rods up for the Tench I was ready to start fishing at 10:30.
I started of on hair rigged meat and within 5 mins my alarms started to beep. The first fish was a small skimmer of around 5ozs. Over the next couple of hours I seemed have attracted the small skimmers.

It was just after 1pm when my right hand rod screamed off, I was rewarded with my first Tench of 1lb-4ozs. The Tench was a nice male.

Then it was back to the norm, plagued by the small fish. After a couple of hours had passed I caught two better fish on the trot, a 2lb 10oz bream, and a 3lb 6oz bream.

Then about an hour later, I kept getting the knocking of the small fish again, well that’s what I thought, after a couple of minutes of this, I thought that it would be better to change the hook bait, I always strike on the retrieve because you never know, and this time I had hooked into something. The fish tore off like a steam train, and I swore that it was a good carp, my Avon rod was bent right over, and after a good battle I was triumphant, and to my surprise what I thought was a carp, was a really nice looking female Tench. On weighing her she came in at 4lb and 4ozs, PB for me by 1lb and 2ozs. I did notice that the tail on the fish was very small, there was no sign of fin rot, I just think that she had a small tail, but the way she fought it made no difference to her power.

As the day drew to a close I started to feed floating pellets on the surface. However, it only produced one fish, and that got off. As the sun started to dip behind the horizon I decided that I would set both my rods with bollies and hope for a carp during the night. Well I got the runs for the carp but lost every single fish that I hooked, and all of them spat the hook. I even changed the hooks over it still made no difference.

Well that’s two sessions and still no carp out of Crockerton. But “I Will Be Back” as quoted by the Terminator. I have planned to fish there for 4 days just after the bank holiday, so fingers crossed for the next time.