The Fishing Diaries: No big girls

Jonny Panto phoned me yesterday and the little rapscallion confessed that in my absence he'd sneaked on to my peg. I asked him how he'd done, and I have to confess that I did chuckle a bit when he told me that he'd blanked.. :)

This morning I headed back to the peg in question, and the fishing was indeed tough going. I used a Jig that Panto had passed on to me, he's been catching a lot of Perch on these of late and I tied one on and put one to the test. First cast and bang I was straight in to a Perch. Wow! This will do me I'm going to bag up on this method... Wrong! I must have cast around 200 times afterwards and nothing, not even a take, a classic case of beginners luck

One of my Pike rods was finally in, a very welcome Jack of around 7lb's was to be my blank saver.

Allan came down to test out some spinner baits that he'd picked up, which was handy as his photography skills were about to be needed.

6PM and dusk was approaching it was getting time to pack up, the nights are drawing in very quickly these days, limiting the time on the bank. I'd brought one rod in and I was having a couple of 'just one last casts' on the spinning rod, and catching my second Perch on the Jig in the process, when I caught sight of my float bobbing, it moved a couple of inches and then stopped, a Pike had picked up the bait and dropped it. I returned to the Jigging when the float was off again, but just as before it came to a stop. This went on for around 3 minutes, eventually the float had travelled far enough to convince me to wind down and strike. My timing was right, as the Pike was perfectly hooked, not a big Pike by any means probably around 4 to 5lb's, it did put up a good fight though tail walking all over the place in a deperate bid to shake the hooks and freedom. On closer inspection I noticed that it had a hole in it's side "Wait a minute" I recognise this fish. A few weeks ago Paddy had reported on his blog that he'd hooked into a Pike and while he was playing it, it had been grabbed by a bigger Pike. It's good to see that it survived it's ordeal and is still feeding - albeit cautiously.

A welcome Jack