News - January 2008
So, as the year drew to its close, the Pike Anglers made a few more trips to Colchester’s Ardleigh Reservoir in the hope that we would finally catch something special for Christmas. The first visit coincided with the second round of the Predator cup.
After a cold wet start to the day things had been rather slow. We began by using one of our favourite methods; trolling. Even with our reliable, favourite, lures we just couldn’t seem to find any pike. After a quick change from trolling, we began float fishing dead baits. This resulted in our first fish of the day, a long, lean pike of 13lb 8ozs which snapped up a whole sardine and which qualified as the predator cup’s biggest pike to date this season.
This
pike was, indeed, the biggest of the day but not the only one; we did
manage to boat another two more fish after going back to trolling some
time later with our larger lures. These two pike weighed around 10lb
apiece.
Our second trip brought us an inclement, cold westerly gale which really did make things hard for us. Even with our new, trusty echo sounder, we found it hard going. However, we did manage to avoid blanking after boating two Pike. The
first fish was caught using a super twin tail lure whilst trolling, and
the second fell to an 8” hot yellow tail replicant lure.
Fishing
the drains and rivers has taken a bit of a back seat recently; we
believe that the more we fish Ardleigh Reservoir, the greater the
chance of catching those twenty-pound pike we have been after for so
long. Maybe now the New Year has arrived, and the weather has settled,
we will go back to fishing some of the fenland drains, just to put more
numbers of pike on our scoreboard. We hope, too, that more pike anglers will want to join us on our expeditions in 2008. Some
suggested venues we are considering for future sport include Pitsford
Reservoir in Northamptonshire and Chew Valley in the west country, to
name but two.
March will see the pike anglers travel northwards to Scotland. We plan to fish Cobbinshaw Loch which is between Glasgow and Edinburgh. This particular venue has been booked with The Pike Anglers Club of Great Britain, a national association of which we are members. Eleven boats have been allocated to the club, with rules that only lures over 6” and sea dead baits only be used. Auchenreoch Loch is a venue I would also like to visit whilst we are travelling around in Scotland. This venue also has produced some big pike in the past so this must be well worth a visit. I shall also be planning a trip to fish Loch Ken once more and hopefully this time around I shall be lucky enough to land one of the big critters…until next time good fishing
Stuart