Renewing Old Aquaintances

many years ago I lived in Wilford, and at the end of the road near the Ferry Inn was an old dilapidated pool, you know the kind, the old tesco trolly and dumped fridge in the margins,with lager cans and the remnants of bonfires decorating the banks. I fished it a few times for pike, but it was the kind of place you fish on foot, travelling light for a quick getaway and definately not a place to fish after dark. It was on the Notts AA book at that time, but I never encountered any one else fishing there...
How times change, fast forward to 2011 and community group the Iremonger pond association have taken over the fishing rights, cleaned the place up, laying paths and permanent pegs and offer a years membership for a very reasonable £15. Night fishing is allowed, and the pool produced at least 2 20lb carp last year.  I hope to find time for a night session here at some point this year, but for the time being an afternoon/ evening would suffice to get a reaqainted with the place.
I found a family picnic in full swing as I arrived, and I walked a full circuit of the pool to see if any fish were showing, passing a few dogwalkers and people just out enjoying the sunshine. There were no fish topping in the afternoon sun, and a light breeze was blowing from the NE, so I settled into the peg in the SW corner.
There were rudd in here 10 years ago, before the pool was connected via a short channel to the River Trent. As I had failed to connect with any of the pretty blighters last year It was this distant memory of golden flanks and crimson fins which brough me here for the evening of easter sunday. My primary bait was breadflake, though I switched from time to time to redworm, optimistically kept throwing crust on the surface with a floater rod at the ready and tried tutti boilie and spicy prawn on bolt rigs. I fed pinches of bread regularly, and searched out the corner of the pool, finding it deeper than I expected, getting no interest with bread and picking up the occasional half hearted bite on the worms. There were lots of very small bits in the swim, and I suspected these to be the architects of the bites I was getting, after fishing progressively smaller bits of worm on the hook without success, and switching back to bread, I was again back on a whote redworm fished high in the water when the float dibbled, before sliding under... a proper bite... and familiar flash of gold and red as the rudd was landed.
  A trio of anglers arrived at 7ish, had a chat before they did a slow circuit of the pool, I though they were taking their time, and one came over to ask whait time i would be off. It transpired that they were planning on prebaiting, and the swim they wanted to bait had me perched in it. I told them just go ahead and bait up. "wouldn't want to ruin your sport" came the reply - "whats to ruin, I'm not exactly hauling them out". They said they would come back later. I wasn't far behind them, calling it a day as the distant bell of the council house chimed 8.

Show him how its done (NOT!)

Returned to the canal this evening with Mentalor for his next lesson. I had initially planned to fish at the Trent Bridge end of the canal, but, after parking at the end of iremonger road and walking along the towpath discovered that instead of the grass verge near the lock, the towpath now extends all the way to the river - and with pedestrians and cyclists, and nowhere to stick a bankstick, fishing here appeared to be off the agenda. We returned to the car & headed to the opposite end of the canal, back to Beeston.
After the poor performance a few weeks ago we fished between some willow trees towards the end of the moored boats. I fished four rods, all aimed at a chance carp, but more realistically expecting some chub. baits were a snowman rigged pair of spicy shrimp bilies, tutti frutti boilie, halibut pellet and lobworm. The boilies were bolt rigged and the halibut pellet and lob were fished on light running legers and each was attached to a pva stocking containing 10 crushed baits.
Mentalor was legering redworms on one rod and floatfishing redworms on the other. There were plenty of fish topping, but casting the light waggler he was using far enough "upstream" and across to trot back through on the right line was causing him some problems.  Handing him a 2 swan chubber, a quick retackle solved the problem, and it wasn't long before a chublet obliged and Mentalor added yet another new species to his list - first chub and on a chubber.
This wasnt the only bite Mentalor was to get, there were two sharp raps, an hour or so apart, on the legered worms, and there were a couple of missed bites on the float. We stuck at it until about 9pm, but it ended 1-0 to Mentalor, my rods had not had a touch, I was particularly disappointed with the performance of the lobworm, but regardless, it was a disappointing performance overall.