As luck would have it a thread was posted on the maggot drowners forum including a video of this actually taking place, what amazes me is the size of the pike, the pike looks to be only a few pound. I had always thought it was much larger pike that fed of this type of prey. It also goes a long way to explaining why we see large clutches of ducklings one day only to go back a few days later to find only half of them left yet we very rarely see baby ducklings dead in the canal.
More on those toothy critters to come later in the blog.......
Pike eating duckling video
This week I took delivery of my new pole and the speed at which it was delivered took me by surprise, I ordered the pole from www.climaxtackle.com on my dinner hour on Thursday afternoon and was amazed to get a phone call from my Fiance on Friday to say a rather large package had been delivered.
With a fishing trip one evening this coming week being penciled in for the commercial I decided to devote all Saturday to buying all the gear to elasticate my 4 top sections and setting them up. Saturday morning saw us making a early trip down the M6 to Stapley Water Gardens stopping off at Cheerbrooks Farm for full English breakfast, highly recommended if your down that way!! A quick trip round Stapley and Daves of middlewich and I was all set to tackle to job of elasticating my top sections.
With a lot of help from my Uncle we quickly elasticated both the top sections and the power sections. I decided to put black hydro in both power tops and white and blue hydro in the match sections and I cant wait to try the power tops out this coming week on the commercial.
On to this weeks fishing and Wednesday evening saw both me, my uncle and his mate from work all meeting up at 5pm for a evening session on Flushing meadows fishery I arrived there early and was already set up by the time the others arrived and was straight into a carp, a great start to the night!! but unfortunately the hook pulled and the first chance of the session was lost 1-0 to the carp.
Not to be disheartened it was back in over my small pot of bait, I was very optimistic as there was so much activity in the water and it wasn't long before the float was buried and I was playing another hard fighting carp these carp really are great fun on the pole and as you can see on the picture above they are quite chunky fish.
The swim was bubbling like someone had put an alkaseltzer in the water but in the short time I have fished this venue I have learnt that this is always a sign of small skimmer bream being in the swim. On this venue you don't really catch carp after carp but more catch one and wait at least 15 minutes while the skimmers knock your bait while you wait for another carp to come in a engulf the bait and it wasn't long before this was the case again.
My uncle was the next to connect with a carp after wading through a few skimmers and I was also enjoying a hot spell as I hooked into my third carp of the session within the first hour.
My uncles mate, Curly, could not for the life of him get past the large shoal of skimmers he had in his peg and he was catching one every put in for the majority of the session. After the carp above my swim went very quiet with all the tell tale knocks on the bait I had experience earlier coming to an end. My approach when fishing here is big fish or broke so I fully expect their to be lulls in the action while I wait for the bigger fish to move in. It was not until around 7.30 I got my next bite and it was so violent I didn't even have to see the float go under as the carp literally hooked itself and darted for the deeper water in the middle, it showed me how easy it is for people to look away for one minute only to find their pole or rod heading towards to water.
Not even the biggest fish of the session, maybe even the smallest but definitely the hardest fighting.
The swim again went quiet for a while but the next action was a lost fish which felt bigger than anything I had hooked on there before and literally went off like a steam train and there was nothing I could do to turn it and the hook pulled.
Last fish of the session:
We left the fishery around 9.30pm with all three of us having different fortunes but as is the way when fishing commercials of an evening you never know who has fished your swim in the day and how much bait was put in, both these factors I am sure have a great effect on your success come the evening time.
Sunday 31st July
Today saw both me and my uncle back on the banks of the River Dee my uncles plan was to pole fish the slack into a deep hole in the edge while my plan was to wait it out for bigger fish on the feeder. We arrived under the cover of darkness just as the light blue glow of the new day was appearing in the distance, as we approached our chosen swim we were surrounded by colony of bats skimming the surface of the water as they greedily hunted for a last gasp meal before the impending daylight forced them back into hiding for another day.
Since I have purchased my new holdall I can now leave my feeder rod set up ready to go, so it wasn't long before I was using the little light that was in the sky to see the tip of my rod.
There was a few large knocks on the tip but nothing worth striking at and the only excitement of the morning from my swims point of view came as the group of local swans made their way upstream. I said a while back that I would follow their progress as much as possible and unfortunately looking at the video it seems like a few of the cygnets have not made it this far with only two surviving.
The fishing was very poor to be honest and I was facing a big fat blank straight in the face as I still hadn't had a bite at 10.30am while my uncle was just getting a few decent roach on caster but they were few and far between.
What followed still amazes me as i write this now, my uncle was bringing in a roach approaching a pound when a jack pike shot out from no where a started attacking the roach, chasing it around the swim. The roach survived with only slight cuts to its back but the pike decided he was still hungry and was lying at the base of the keep net eyeing up another potential meal.
I quickly set up a pike rig and hooked on a small gudgeon, no sooner had it hit the water the pike was onto it and making its way back under the raft or debris to the left of the swim, I struck and the fish was on and boy was he an angry little fellow, tail walking and doing his best to throw the hooks. Not long later and he was on the mat having his picture taken I estimated him to weigh around 3lb,
To enable my uncle to start catching again I put the fish back away from the swim please excuse the music but this song was in my head the whole morning while this was unfolding.
I walked back to sit with my uncle for a minute and have a brew when my uncle, now in a pike free swim got a bite and as he was bringing the fish in, Bang!! the fish was gone and the line was cut clean, not another pike!!. Luckily the previous gudgeon we had used was till usable as bait and back in it went and straight away and other jack pike was on.
The two pike where two separate fish with the first being slightly larger than the second but to catch two in such quick succession shows why your swim on the river can go very quiet very quickly. After all the commotion of these two pike in the swim the fishing never really recovered and we called it a day at noon.
This coming week I hope to spend an evening on the commercial with my new pole and hopefully next weekend try and get onto a new river or new venue.
Till next week
tight lines
Danny
