Rixton Clay Pit........

  In typical fashion for us anglers i spent all week in the office looking out of the window, day dreaming of being sat by a lake tench fishing only for Saturday morning to arrive and the temperatures plummet dramatically.  Loading the car up you could feel a real nip in the air and once in the car and on our way to Warrington the temperature was below 5 degrees.

  We arrived at Rixton nice and early hoping to have a decent amount of time fishing and get back in time for the England v Wales match.  The car park when we arrived was really empty and had a maximum of 3 cars in it so my hopes of getting one of the bigger pegs where high as its so much better when you can fish close to each other.  The mist was just rising on the water when we arrived and it look almost pre-historic and is one of the things i love so much about early morning spring still water fishing.

Video of our swim for the day:

  I decided to set up a waggler float rod to fish of the tip of the dead Lillie's and also a feeder rod as a sleeper rod with corn on it off behind the island to the right of my swim while my dads chosen attack was a his trusty puddle Chucker feeder rod on maggot.

  The fishing was very slow indeed with only 4 skimmer bream between us in the first few hours fishing all coming on maggot with not even a twitch on the sleeper sweetcorn rig,

One of the Skimmer bream:

As the morning progressed a really cold wind was blowing straight down the middle of the pit and had a real nip to it which unfortunately had an effect on the fishing for the worse and by this time the place had really filled up with around 3 pegs around us being occupied but all seemed to having the same results as us with the odd skimmer coming out to play.

It wasn't till around 1pm that my dad decided to have a do in the margin to his left, right next to a sunken tree and the results where instant with perch being the first to turn up, only small but very welcome indeed, this was followed by the odd skimmer and more small perch.

 The swim was kept going with a mixture of groudbait, maggots and sweetcorn mix and it seemed to to the trick and almost certainly was the reason we were getting so many skimmers interested.

  The fishing was such a relief after a quiet morning that we lost track of time and was only the fact we had a perfectly marked roach that i got my phone out and realised what time of day it was.

Nice Roach:

  Both me and my dad have had days fishing where we have caught more fish and days where we have caught larger fish but that last hour and a half's fishing under the rod tip for roach, perch and skimmers took me back to when we used to go fishing as a kid on the Bridgewater all those years ago and reminded me that you don't always have to catch the biggest fish in the lake for it to be a memorable day by the water.

  Hopefully this week will see the temperatures hold above 10 degrees into next weekend and we might see some of these lovely tench come out.

tight lines

Danny