Bars of silver.
Thankfully the weather has improved over the last week, well at least the temperatures have, so I was hoping that the fish would be back on the feed after last weeks chilly adventure!
I opted to fish my old favourite, Plantation lakes in Kingston Seymore. It was to be my first trip there of 2012 and it turned out to be my best session on the coarse lake ever!
After having plenty of time over the winter to read up and glean information of how to best fish in the winter months and of course some compulsory Christmas presents to try out I was eager to hit the bank.
As I mentioned the temperatures were much higher than of late and being the last day of half term I thought it would be busy, but with only another couple of cars in the car park I was pleasantly surprised to have a good choice of pegs. I opted for one of my favourites, 39 tucked away in a little corner of the coarse lake. I was targeting silvers, mainly roach and decided to chuck in a couple of balls of groundbait laced with casters, dead maggots and chopped worm to get the swim started as I set up.
I'm trying to improve my float fishing at the moment and set up a simple light waggler rig with a tiny size 20 hook and single red maggot to fish over my groundbait. I wasn't fishing far out and was more interested in improving my accuracy and creating a tight ball of feed and fish over that.
After a leisurely set up I baited up and already I could see the fish were interested with little knocks and shy bites. It wasn't long before my first roach came to the net, not huge but a good size and my tactics seemed to be working. In fact I caught for most of the day with some lovely skimmer bream adding to my net of roach. I kept feeding the bites and occasionally topping up with groundbait when things went quiet. In total I managed my biggest haul of silvers ever, 5 good sized skimmers and 16 roach. A great day and just goes to show winter fishing can be productive if you approach things in the right way.