There are pros and cons of the little pond over the road. The main advantage is that it is literally less than a couple of hundred yards away from my house, I haven’t yet timed it but I reckon that if I had my rod set up I could be fishing withing five minutes of closing my front door. The other great advantage is that it has lots of lovely fish in it, rudd, roach, tench, carp and all kinds of ornamental goldfish, thanks to the local residents.
It has a few disadvantages though. It is slap bang next to a main road and the traffic noise is awful but it does ease in the evenings when the number of heavy lorries decreases. It has suffered terribly from weed, once summer has arrived the only way you can fish is to rake a hole in the weed and fish there, nowhere else is free. The club has been working on this and it will be interesting to see how it fishes this year. The other disadvantage is that the fish are small, at least the ones that I have caught! Beautiful, perfectly formed, but small! Oh yes, one more thing, it only fishes when the water has warmed up and is no good in the winter at all.
As the temperature around our way has picked up, I decided to spend a couple of hours there one evening and see if the fish were biting. Maggots are the ideal bait there and with memories of evenings spent catching a fish a cast I went to the local tackle shop only to find that it was shut for the afternoon. There are other tackle shops within driving distance but there also other baits so I decided to give them a go. When I got home I spent a successful few minutes lifting up the missus’s plant pots and gathering a handful of worms. Then it was to the freezer to grab some white bread which I keep for catching carp off the top but on this occasion it would be used for fishing for smaller fish.
It was a nice evening and I was soon on the bank and I decided to plum the depth to see what effect the club’s weed cutting had had. The usual technique is to fish shallow and above the weed but I found that I was able to fish deeper this time. I cast out into the usual kind of area and peppered the float with groundbait, no maggots to feed this time but I figured I could manage without. I sat back, relaxed and waited. It was a still evening and the float was just a tiny dot on the surface, I have learnt that bites on this water are very shy and didn’t want to miss any. Time passed, I brought the hook in regularly and checked the bait, the traffic grew lighter, the birds were singing, all was right with the world, well almost everything, a bite would be nice!
The bird song was getting more intense and although I can recognise some birds, others elude me. I got my phone out and opened the Merlin App which quickly recognised the usual suspects, robin, wren, blue tit, great tit and then a song thrush. I haven’t seen a thrush for several years and it was good to hear that one was around. You know that old saying about doing the same thing but expecting to get a different result, I reckon that it applies to fishing so I decided to give worms a try. It didn’t make any difference though, a couple of hours had passed without as much as a knock. It was getting dark and I was thinking of packing up when the decision was taken out of my hands, yes, I got a tangle. I don’t know how it happened, I lifted the rod behind me and cast out but nothing happened except the float rattling around the rod! One look told me that my time was up, there was no way that I was going to be able to untangle that bird’s nest before it got dark and if I just cut the line and tackled up again it would be just as dark! Time to go home then, at least I didn’t have much to pack away and I was soon home. Just time on my walk to reflect on my session, a blank, and decide that it wasn’t my poor fishing technique it was just too early in the season for the fish to be biting. I will be back in a few weeks and hope that they have woken up by then.
I just thought that I would include this photo of the water on a different day as I had no fish to show!
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