Thursday 14th October

By contrast, everyone else at Brooms was catching nicely on feeder today but I had a poor time on the pole, ending up with two commons, one of which was albeit a good size fish - and a gudgeon!

It was probably my own fault.  I think I picked the wrong swim on the west bank, thinking the SE wind would bring fish my way.  It was a swim where I've caught well before, but earlier in the year.  As well as missing lightning bites, I hooked and lost several fish and, in retrospect should maybe have changed to a larger hook size of a more normal pattern. Worm was only attacked by smaller fish (accounting for the gudgeon) so I decided to go on the swingtip in the middle of the session and got a frustrating series of touches and pulls, and two lifts that almost had the swingtip horizontal before fading into nothing.

Back on the pole at dusk I tried pellet briefly but got more lightning bites I couldn't hit. On the last cast with a decent size lobworm, I struck into a good fish that came off after a few seconds.

Easy to think that I got this wrong, but even so I could have had seven or eight fish on the bank rather than just three.

Tuesday 4th October

Very belatedly, I got round to my first serious fishing trip since April!

Everyone else was on the feeder at Brooms F1 pond but I stuck with the margins, feeding two swims either side of me on the short pole in swim 11 - and to good effect.

I took one nice mirror and a common on meat to my left but couldn't connect with any bites in the right hand swim as the fish stripped the meat off the hook in lightning quick time.

Switching to worm in the left hand swim I got a barbel, and then a really nice barbel that I reckoned was about five pounds, as it overlapped the large Brooms landing net at both sides:

Barbel

You never really get an idea of size from net photos but I take size 11 wellingtons, so it's over 2' long and took me about 10 minutes to land on the pole.  It was certainly the biggest I've caught.

Switching back to meat and saying to myself that barbel fight harder than carp, I hooked into a juicy mirror with almost no scales that set out to prove me wrong and took even to longer to land.  I estimated that it would have scaled 7lb.

Mirror Carp

On the last cast, I hooked into another big fish that snapped the line as soon as I applied any pressure and, unfortunately, it was a bit too late to tackle up again.  Possibly there was a weakness in the line but using 3.5lb bottom and 5lb above, you'd have thought the elastic would have coped with most things up to 10lb.  My first instinct was that it was a big'un that turned its head at just the wrong moment.

Overall I had ten fish, three mirrors, three commons, three barbel and one chub. Only one carp took worm and only one barbel took meat.  The chub was one of only two fish from the right hand swim when I finally hit one of the lightning bites, raising the question whether chub were responsible all along.

All in all a smashing return and a much better size of fish that was coming in on the feeders.