Sunday, November 08, 2009

Float testing for the day down Monk Lakes

Today I was off to Monk Lakes, Kent to test out some of my float designs all available from my online shop (link on the right). The intention was to fish one of the match lakes but when I arrived I fancied a change from the featureless holes in the ground and decided to sit down the far end of Bridges Lake.

After paying my day ticket money at the office I had a drive round the lake to decide where to fish, apparently since the lakes were dug the silverfish population has flourished and it was now heaving with all sorts of fish growing fast on bait fed by the carp boys.

I decided on a swim at the far end with the wind blowing into it with a island to my right and lots of open water to fish.
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The plan for the day was to give my new Finesse range of a good work out and the swim seemed perfect. This foat is designed with siverfish in mind but still retaining strength. The lake didn’t seem very deep with only about 3.5ft of water at 5- 9 meters, with it getting a few inches deeper out at 11 meters. Seeing as there were not many people about I figured the fish would come in close and decided to start at only 9 meters. If this was unproductive I can always fish out a couple of sections more. The rig for the session was simple with a 0.3g Finesse float.
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This was shorted up with a small bulk of no8s 18 in from the hook and a couple of number 10 droppers at 6 inch spacing. The rig trace was a 0.10 Drennan rig line attached to a 16 Drennan Silverfish Hook. This was plumbed up to fish just touching the bottom. . Elastic choice was a doubled up 5 Preston Slip.

The bait for the day was white maggot, a selection of Got and Skrettings expander pellets, plus a very basic cheap ground bait which consisted of a 50/50 mix of fishmeal and brown crumb.

Cos it was cold I didn’t feed a lot to start just a small ball of ground bait with a handful of pellets and maggots. Things were very slow to start with no bites for 10-15 minutes so I decided to feed about 10 maggots every 30 seconds with a few expanders mixed in to try to draw a few fish. This was a good tactic as I soon started to get a few knocks on the float and was catching a few skimmers to about 8oz. After catching a few I stuck on a 6mm expander and the size of skimmers got bigger. With fish up to around the 2lb mark.
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Things got slow after a while so I decided to try throwing in a couple of balls of ground bait as the fish seemed to respond well to a bit of noise, This worked well and I was catching the one a bung soon after fishing at about 10 meters just beyond the feed. It seemed maggot produced a selection of fish including skimmers, chub, roach, tench and rudd, where slicking on a expander sorted out the bream in the 1-3lb range.

It was easy fishing really and as long as I kept bait going in about every 30 second I was getting one a bung. I got a bit bored to be honest so set up the waggler to give that a try. Fishing my 2.5AAA homemade peacock insert just beyond the pole line at about 20 meters and again feeding little and often I was into fish one a bung, this time some hard fighting tench around the 1-2lb mark and a few chub to a 1lb.

It was getting a bit late and I decided to call it a day about 4pm after about 5 hours fishing probably catching the best part of 150+ fish! So not a bad days fishing giving the float a thorough workout.

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