Friday the 13th

Marie was heading to the south coast to visit a friend, so I had a whole weekend free for fishing. I had decided to return to Melbourne pool in pursuit of the specimen tench I had failed to snare on my visit there last May. I packed the MG to the rafters with enough supplies to last all weekend and headed down the A453 towards east midlands airport. Calling in at Melbourne tackle and gun to buy my ticket and ask how it had been fishing. Neither of these enquiries had particularly favourable outcomes. The 3 day tickets needed to cover me for friday and saturday night would now be £21, prices went up to £7 a day on May 1st. The tench had aparrently also switched off for the during the last couple of weeks, thinking about spawning perhaps, though on the bright side a handful of carp had been caught to 18lb.

Arriving at he pool I bumped into Archie Braddock fishing near the road, first time i have seen him for years, We had a bit of a chinwag & he confirmed it had been hard going, with just one 4lb tench to show for 12 hours fishing. Apart from Archie there were two others fishing and one guy setting up. It also kept threatening to rain...

Three trips to and from the car ferried all my kit to a peg opposite the first island in the woods. The weather gave me just long enough to soft out the bivvie and get everything under shelter, before heavy drops of rain began to crash down... I cast out the rods as they came out of the bag, complete with week old washed out boilie... "worth a try..." i thought, whie I zipped down the bivvie, and with the rain splashing through the mosquito netting begain preparing some rigs for the session.

I wanted to fish a biggish and visually attractive bait to try and diffirentiate it from the mountains of bait whch had probably found its way into this end of the lake over the last few weeks. To achieve this I superglued about 20 maggots to the top half of a source popup in a "medusa" fashion. this was fished on a short hooklength to pop it up about 4 inches off the bottom. The other rod worked its way through spicy prawn and tutti-frutti boilies fished singly, paired and snowman style, whilst the rain stopped, started, stopped, hammered down and eventually dried up by about 8pm.

With no bites to the boilies i switched to running ledgers and size 10's. four maggots on one, fished towards a section i had earlier baited with 2 pints of deads, prior to a swan raid! The other was fished about 25 yards to my left and baited with 5 redworms Courtesy of Mentalors bait tub - which I had "borrowed" a week earlier), no groundbait or loosefeed. It was this rod that was first to go, at around 9:15 pm as line peeled off the clutch i tightened up the drag and was connected to a fish. It didnt do much at first, it just dithered around, then suddenly kited strongly to the right, running across the face of the swim with the unmistakable feeling of the line grating past a snag...

no sooner had the line popped off this weedbed, then the fish went charging through the cabbages to my right, rolling on the surface for the first time in response to the pressure i had put on to try and stop it. The dark green flank confirmed my First tinca of the season, and a few minutes later, once netted it turned out to be 4lb 12oz.

it was a couple of hours until I got my next run, this time on the maggots. I connected with a fish which meant business from the off, charging away from me with a powerful run, the first of four which would punctuate our tussle in the dark. It was a long specimen, and in the light of my headtorch I thought it would be a 6, but instead it was to weigh exactly 1lb more that the first one, at 5lb 12oz.

The night passed with only two solitary bleeps, I switched the worm rod back to medusa popup at about 2am. At first light I reeled in to check the baits to find the popup gone (very mysterious - source popups are more like corkballs than boilies!) and on the other rod, the maggots sucked, missed chances perhaps.
 After a couple of cups of tea, and just as Iwas thinking about getting some brekkie on the go I got a screaming run on maggots and connected with the fish for about 5 seconds before the hook pulled. That would be the only action for saturday morning, at at midday I switched the medusa maggots back to worm, this time accompanied with a groundbait feeder well laced with dead maggots.

The afternoon was to pass without incident, and the trangia was at work heating up my tea when the alarm on the worm baited feeder sounded the alarm, and a fish probably took 10 or more metres of line from the reel before i connected with it. After a short fight everything locked up, the fish had embedded itself deep in the cabbages, and after trying both a slack line and heavy pressure without seeing an indication there was still a fish on, concluded that the fish was gone, and I was snagged. After accepting defeat I was pulling for a break and making slow progress, as at the crucial moment ia few centimetres of line would give, and the terminal tackle edged its way back toward me. Suddenly the rod tip jabbed forward...There was still a fish on... and it kited left and defiantly stood its ground with my rod doubled over and the line singing. bit by bit I could haul the fish closer, though it felt more and more like I was trying to lift the Mary Rose.
Eventually the targe tench surfaced, Seven or eight pounds of gleaming emerald glistened in the evening sun, as it rolled on the line its red eye seemed to wink at me as it launched its escape plan. It got its head down and powered for the deeps, with my clutch still screwed tight I reacted by flicking the fighting draq fully to the left, but it was too little too late, the rod pinged straght and the line fell slack as the hook pulled.
  From the oddness of the fight and the behaviour of the fish as it surfaced, staying perpendicular to the line, I think that this was a false hooked fish, with the "fight" being mostly the effort of dragging the mass sideways through the water. I still cursed myself for not properly resetting the clutch once I had established the fish was still on.. a schoolboy error.

An hour or two of lamentation was interrupted when the maggots were taken, and few minutes later a 5lb 9oz tench flip flopped on the unhooking mat. Once this was returned I began settling down for the night, deciding to stick with the redworms on the left rod and maggots on the right. Day was dawning when nother run, this time to the feeder and worm, confirmed my tactic to be a wise choice, I played this fish carefully, mindful of my earlier errors, there would be no escape this time, and eventually my final tinca of the session was in the net. weighing in at 3lb 14oz, no monster, but it capped off a most enjoyable couple of days fishing.

I had been up since first light, the geese once more giving me little choice in the matter as the general noise and commotion from their quadrant of the pool was virtually incessant throughout the night. The cold wind kept the surface choppy throughout the day, and I remained biteless until I eventually called time. Packing up at about 2pm three trips refilled the MG, and I left the deserted pool to the swans, geese, coots and ducks. 44 hours and 4 fish - but my thoughts remain fixed upon the one that got away...

View from the peg towards Melbourne Church... It is a pretty place to fish!