Up against the clock

I absolutely love fishing in the evening as I often feel it is other than early morning, the time you're most likely to encounter something a bit special. Though this is dependant on me having time to get myself in position a ready for this wonderful magic hour and if not I often feel under pressure (from myself ) and end up rushing or making rash decisions that are detrimental to my fishing.

Sadly this was to be the case when I joined Keith down at the river avon lido outside stratford on Tuesday night. The swim I chose was the first bad choice I made. Opting to fish just down stream from Keith who was getting into a few fish. My quickly shallowing swim with several different sorts of weed growing randomly all over and decent snag at the tail end proved to be a poor choice for running a waggler through. And after finally locating the only decent area to run a float through I could not consistently hit it with float.

After and hour of fishing all I had to show for my efforts were a roach and perch and five missed bites. At this point I made my next poor decision of the evening and switched to a light lead rig on a quiver tip rod which turned out to be totally fruitless.

With the clock ticking I decided to up sticks and move up stream to a large weedy bay and target predators using a pack of hastily acquired dead baits I'd bought on the way to work that morning. Using a couple of heavier rods I managed to put a popped up roach right over the weed into a clear channel on the far side of the river, and with the other rod I fished a roach shallow under a float roaming over the top of the weed.

I spent the last hour and a half expecting a pike to come up and bang the roach as it swayed around over the weed, but that never happened. With the light fading my popped up roach started getting some attention and just as I was packing up the run finally came. As I struck into the fish I foolishly neglected to remember that the bait runner on my reel was on and line pored of the spool into one almighty birds nest. My only choice was to run back up the bank desperately trying to clear the tangle whilst keeping in touch with the fish. This tactic worked and after quick journey up and down the field again I was able to land a welcome Zander of 4-5lb

Keith on the other hand had fared much better, and in what I consider to be an amazing feat, had bagged the silver bream point from the river that as far as I have ever heard didn't even have any silver bream in it, to get point I will admit I thought to be virtually impossible.