A Warm festive welcome to this week’s angling blog update
and I hope I find you all safe and well and prepared for the festivities
ahead. This is our first Christmas as
parents and although our little girl will know nothing at all about it this
year it has been a joy to experience what Christmas is like as a parent and our
only hope is we can make Christmas as magical as our parents made it for us.
One place we did visit recently was the Christmas markets
in Manchester and I have to say I recommend it to anyone, the smell, the atmosphere, the food and of course the
beer all come together to make these markets a truly magical place to be at Christmas
time and we thoroughly enjoyed our visit and will certainly be going again next
year!!.
On to a quick update on Decembers fishing
December from an angling point of view has really been a
none event, the rivers have been out of their banks more than they have been in
them and even now most of the UK is still suffering from the none stop rain we
seem to be receiving. The weekend
before last was really a angling trip to forget, we travelled out to the river
Dee with a view of at least trying one of the slacks to see if we could at
least find a fish or two. What met us
was a river barely in its banks and running through like chocolate.
We decided to give it a few hours in a slack we knew was
over soft ground but unfortunately failed to entice and bites and with a high
tide forecast to hit around midday we decided to head for a small river on the
way home called the River Gowy that we hoped would be a little bit more
agreeable due to its normal slow flow.
The river gowy when we arrived at Mickle Trafford was a
raging torrent and was running through fast and coloured and was totally
unfishable in its current state. Luckily
this river is on the way home so no petrol or time was wasted stopping off at
this venue. A quick chat and we decided
to stop off on the Trent and Mersey Canal to try for a pike or two but was not
only met with a froaen solid canal but also with it holding a terrible colour
and half of it being drained of water due to the catastrophic collapse of the
bank when we had the last bout of rain a few weeks ago.
This just topped off a truly awful days, well fishing
would be the wrong word for it I think, day out is more apt lol.
This weekends
trip
The rain continued to fall all through the week and the
river never really recovered to stage where it was anywhere near fishable and
by the weekend it was out of its banks again and flooding the surrounding
fields no doubt. With all the rivers in
the area in the same predicament we decided to put our faith in a still water.
Arriving at my uncles the weather was already awful with
heavy rain falling and the wind howling down his street, it was far from the
warm mornings we had experienced earlier on in the year. With the temperatures a sweltering 9oc we
decided to put our faith in Cicily mill.
Arriving at cicily mill we were met with a completely
flooded car park and all the pegs around the lake under water. We had a quick look around the outskirts of
the mill but it was clear that it was going to be hard to find an area we could
fish. With the pegs being made from wood
and noting underneath them we had to put the safetly of the fish first, had we
hit a carp there would have been no way of stopping the carp going straight
under the peg leaving us no angle to control the fish so we decided to stop off
at Statham pool on the way home to see if it was fishable before settling on
Ackers pit if it wasn’t.
Statham pool was in a dangerous state with it being completely
flooded to the point you could see none of the pegs and there was only a few
feet of the path down to the pegs visible, again not only unfishable but
actually dangerous. We knew Ackers pit
had a dam at one end that would mean the level here would be controlled so we
set off to the urban pool that is ackers pit.
We set up on ackers pit in a gap in the rain but it wasn’t
long before it returned with a vengeance as the video above shows. I knew from the reports on Franks Column that
there had been a few decent roach coming out of here recently and as always we
knew of the great head of carp it held.
We were due back home at 2pm so we only had a few hours to endure the
rain for so we set about our task, both on the pole and both fishing 4 sections
to help us keep control in the strong wind.
It was lovely to be joined on the bank by a family of
swans, there was a time when they were a weekly feature on the blog, and was
great to see a family swans doing so well.
The fishing was slow but with us both on castor we knew it would be
worth the wait. My uncle was first to
get into some fish catching some fin perfect roach and to a decent stamp as
well as the one below showed. These
proved to be a common catch for my uncle during our short session and had keep
nets been allowed would have made a great photo.
My peg was fishing noticeably slower than my uncles and
it was a while before I connected with my first fish of the session, a small
roach. The small roach continued to come
for me until the peg completely died, yet my uncle was still catching, it left
me scratching my head as to what to do. I
increased my feeding by using the catapult rather than the kinder pot and soon
latched into a fish that was of a better stamp, at first I thought it was a
small carp, a catch I would have been glad of given the bad conditions but no
it proved to be much better than that, a perch!! And a nice one to boot, I was
made up, no record breaker but it lit up a damp day on the bank.
That was it for us both with regards to better fish and
2pm soon swung round and it was time to pack away. We will certainly be returning to this venue
if the rivers continue to be high and will almost certainly be going here in
the closed season. The conditions made
presentation hard and with no ledgering allowed as an option to counter this we
feel if the conditions were a bit calmer we could do really well on this venue
and it was great to see a Warrington still water with some decent roach in it,
although the perch did bear the scars or a recent battle with a heron or
cormorant.
Well that’s another year done and it will soon be the
blogs second anniversary, how time flies eh.
Till next time I wish you all a Very merry Christmas, Matt
Hayes is on Discovery shed 24/7 today so I am off to do my best to instil
fishing into her head!!
Tight lines
Danny
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