I was a bit undecided whether to go today. The forecast was for an easterly wind, albeit light. When I arrived it was cold and misty. There was little wind and I debated whether to go for the Tree Corner, which has fished quite consistently over the last few weeks. However, an easterly wind would blow right into this swim.

Also, there was a chap already in the pitch to the right. I decided therefore to go to the other side of the lake and fished the end of the reeds in the NE corner - what I call the reed-end swim. This pitch fishes well in the summer.

Things started off very slowly indeed. I was baiting with hemp and bread flake balls and tried flake on the hook, but this was unsuccessful. I opened some sweetcorn and started introducing this as well. With sweetcorn on the hook I started to get bites I couldn’t hit, as has happened on all recent visits. I took a few small roach but is was 11.45 before I caught one of any size, and it was then only about 4oz. Occasional small roach followed and by 14.00 I was seriously considering packing up.



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The threatened wind had not really materialised and I was wishing I had gone to the Tree Corner. To make matters worse, what wind there was had started to veer towards southerly, thus making line control difficult.

I had switched back to bread flake, which had produced a couple of small roach. Striking at a fussy bite at 14.25, which I thought was another roach, I was met with firm resistance. After a few minutes of excitement a 4lb 5oz common was netted.

This spurred me to fish on, but unfortunately a few more small roach and a lot of missed bites were all that materialised.

I packed up at 16.00, freezing cold. All in all it was a rather disappointing day. A friendly chaffinch did, however, benefit from being fed hempseed, which he seemed to thoroughly enjoy.