Saturday on the canal, thanks Gerry!

cookie mbaits · #1 11-21-2010, 09:35 AM

Fished the Gloucester canal on saturday and thought i would put up a post about the session and at the same time I would like to say thank you to Gerry on behalf of myself and my mate Tony who I fished with.
We set out from Caerphilly at 4.30 am in the rain and after the obligatory mc d's breakfast and coffee, we made our way down the m4. We got roughly to the Sharpness dock at about 6am.( I say roughly because the sat nav had its fun!)
Spoke to a few locals and found the part of the dock we wanted to fish, only to find out it was private fishing! After pulling what little hair we got between us out, we decided to fish further up toward Gloucester. I have been fishing the canal on and off for about 7 years for zed's as its the closest water to me with any zed's in it. To date I have only managed 1 small z around 1lb from Quedgeley. And with exception to the 12.05 I caught from Bury Hill, that is all the z's I have caught.
I recently joined the forum as I have been reading Richards posts and bits of info for a few years now and thought it would be rude not to!
Back to sat, we only had a post code for the area we were to fish, and set off. I spoke to Gerry on this forum and he advised me to fish this section, and he said he would try and get down to meet me at some time through the coarse of the day at the canal. We found the section about 10am (we wasted ages looking down the dock!

) Saw a couple of match anglers over the opposite side off the canal, and 45 mins later, worked out how to get over to talk to them! After a quick chat, we found a place to park and got our gear down the canal. Got set up at about 12pm (half the day gone!

) Anyway got some rods set up and spread them along the bank. We started of with some dead bait roach fished on the bottom. About an hour in to the session, Tony had some interest on one of his rods, as the take was dropped, we decided that maybe the bait was too large and dropped down to a finer trace with size 8 double hooks, which I had made the night before. About an hour later he another had another take on the same rod, this time he connected, after a spirited fight a 5.05lb Zander was in the net! After the fish was weighed and carefully returned, we shook hands and celebrated with by now luke warm coffee!
We then met up with Gerry and chewed the fat for an hour before we made our way home.
I wrote this post because I wanted to thank Gerry and the forum members that helped me out, and although it wasn't actually me who caught the Zander, it meant a lot to me as it was very much a team effort and the reward for seven years labour! So thanks to Gerry, Darrell and all concerned!