Roachfest.

With sea temperatures still very low and easterly winds battering the coast fishing in saltwater has been a bit of a non starter recently. Turning my attention to freshwater and with the trout season underway I have visited the Water of Leith but have struggled to get myself a trout from the river on three separate occasions. The river isn't being stocked this year and as a result the permit is now catch and release only. Personally I think this is a good thing as long as the river is managed properly, hopefully the wild fish will thrive. Over the three sessions I only saw two fish and whilst I managed to hook one of them, a fairly decent fish too which I think was a sea trout, it quickly performed a trademark sub surface thrash that bent out the hook and escaped after about two seconds flat. My only fish of late have been caught during two sessions at Scotland's self proclaimed premier coarse fishery, Magiscroft. Fishing maggot on the waggler on both visits I was hopeful that I would perhaps catch a common carp or a bream or maybe even a blue orfe, any of which would be a new species for me.

Sat on my seatbox ready to strike watching my "puddle chucker" insert waggler.

On both occasions however the resident roach had other ideas and over the two sessions I caught 67 of them. Two small ide and two small perch providing the only respite from the little silver buggers. None of them were very big either but I quite like small roach as they have a nice blue tinge to their backs that they seem to lose when they become adults, a bit like juvenile pollock lose the nice orange honeycomb markings from their flanks.

I'd guess the dark back of juvenile roach serves as camouflage against predatory birds.

Burning like fire. Stunning orange eyes also make the roach very pleasing on the eye.

At first glance small ide can easily be mistaken as roach.

Angry little perch always bring a smile.

I did try scaling up my hooklengths and hooks and fishing double/triple maggot, sweetcorn and also pellets a couple of times to try and find some bigger fish but this just resulted in a total lack of action! As soon as I swapped back to the finer end tackle and single maggot the roach started biting again. I may try fishing using a different approach next time. Perhaps a feeder or a simple ledger setup although saying that the waggler has produced other species on previous sessions so perhaps it just comes down to the peg I'm choosing on the day!

Tight lines, Scott.