After two blanks my hope for this session was simply to catch a fish. I took maggots to be on the safe side and sure enough I quite quickly caught a fairly decent roach. Smaller fish started taking the maggots on the drop resulting in a few smaller roach, a couple of dace and a couple of tiny bream. Changing to sweetcorn improved the quality of the fish but I unfortunately lost a few decent ones. I ended up staying far longer than usual in the hope of making up for the lost fish.

I walked around to the back of the lake as it usually provides some solitude, most anglers not fancying the walk or being unable to get their barrows through a narrow gap between a tree and a fence. In fact I was the only one on the lake when I arrived but a few more people turned up during the day. The swim I fished is tight, with reed banks and lily pads. This makes it an attractive spot but also not easy should one get into something big, which proved to be the case!

After catching a few smaller fish on maggots I was rewarded with a small tench, which had been my target species for the day. It was covered with red markings that I thought indicated a disease but subsequently discovered that it could be associated with spawning. Seeking better quality fish I went on to sweetcorn. I had lightly groundbaited with a mix of breadcrumb and proprietary groundbait laced with sweetcorn and maggots. It took a while to get bites on the corn but I was ultimately rewarded with a few bream, the best weighing at just under 3¼lbs.

I had brought a second rod as a sleeper for carp and had cast a lump of Spam over to the right with a PVA bag containing pieces of meat and groundbait. I didn't get a touch after nearly two hours but the hook came back without the bait! Casting a bunch of maggots to the edge of the reed bed similarly didn't produce a bite but all the maggots had gone when I retrieved, presumably sucked off by small fish. So the sleeper rod proved to be a waste of effort. I packed it away early.

Meanwhile on the float things became much more interesting. I have already mentioned the bream but in addition I lost no less than three good fish, all thought to be tench, all because of hook pulls. Frustrating doesn't begin to describe it. Besides these lost 'tench' I hooked into something much more powerful that immediately embedded itself into nearby reeds. For a while I thought that I could detect movement and that there was a hope of freeing the fish. But as time passed I became resigned to the fact that it had transferred the hook to the reeds. The resulting hand-lining led to losing everything although I was able to retrieve my 'Bob Goes Fishing' float using my landing net.

With the wind freshening it became more and more difficult to detect pre-bite movements on the float, a fact that could have accounted for the lost fish because of poorly timed strikes. So, much later than I had planned, I decided to call it a day. But a couple of 'last casts' resulted in a good fish being hooked, which turned out to be my second tench, this time a better fish. I fine ending to the session after a number of disappointments and the frustrations of dealing with the wind.