Tickled pink.

Last Tuesday I had to sit in the flat waiting for a few packages to arrive as well as an engineer to repair my Dyson vacuum cleaner. Exciting stuff and not how I wanted to be spending a day off really. Luckily all three arrived before noon and one of the packages contained a couple of pints of pinkies that I'd ordered online. I was keen to try fishing with them for the first time to see if they would improve catch rates in the cold weather and also in preparation for freshwater mini species hunting in the summer. I decided to pop to Eliburn for a few hours in the afternoon to hopefully catch a few fish on the waggler. Fishing a puddle chucker a rod length out things were slow to say the least and after two hours staring at a stationary float I opted to move. It took another hour before the orange insert tip finally went under and I started catching some fish. Before it got dark I had caught a few roach, perch and a couple of bream/roach hybrids.

It's just as enjoyable catching stillwater fish but they're usually not a patch on wild loch ones in terms of appearance.

The following day I was off work too and after checking the weather forecast I headed to Magiscroft for another afternoon's waggler fishing. It was quite overcast with the odd light rain shower but I was looking forward to another day's stress free fishing. When I arrived I headed to one of the Birch Ponds at the back of the complex. Unlike the day before bites were coming from the first cast and were pretty continual throughout the session. Single pinkie on a #22 hook proving quite effective on the resident roach, and much to my delight, a succession of gudgeon. 

A gang of gudgeon.

The humble gudgeon is a little freshwater favourite of mine and the population in this pond seems to have exploded from nowhere. Despite having fished the pond several times in the past I've never caught one from it but I ended up catching forty of the pretty little fish. I spoke to the bailiff when he came round and he told me that this was due to their six year life cycle causing their numbers to increase rapidly and then drop again in a repeating pattern as the adults die off and the juveniles that replace them develop. Quite interesting and not something I've really given much thought to before. A couple of other anglers who were also fishing seemed to be struggling and packed up and left half way through the afternoon. I can only guess that my pinkies, small hooks and sensitive insert float made a difference in the conditions. I caught over one hundred fish including a few tiny perch only a couple of inches long before packing up and heading home before it got dark.

On Tues this week I popped back to Magiscroft again and used up the remainder of the pinkies. The quality of these small maggots was very good and none of them had turned into casters. I can't say that maggots I buy from some tackle shops are anywhere as good so I'll certainly be ordering freshwater baits online again. Despite the weather being quite miserable and strong winds blowing I managed to tuck myself away at the back of the Birch Ponds again and enjoyed another busy afternoon catching gudgeon, perch and roach. Due to the poor weather I had the place to myself but was joined for most of the day by some ducks. They swam around in front of me, gobbling up any pinkies that went astray and landed in the shallow water in front of me as I catapulted them in around my float .

Grubs up.

These short sessions really are quite relaxing even in poor conditions and tide me over nicely until the weather improves again. My mate Keith is a big gudgeon fan too so I can see us heading through to Magiscroft soon and having one of our friendly coarse fishing competitions which I'm sure will be a good laugh.

Tight lines, Scott.