17/12/06 - Sprat Bashing

Since the start of the season I had been planning on trying to catch myself some decent Roach. From a very early age I have been lucky enough to bank a silly amount of 2lb+ Rudd along with a few 3Lb'ers too, but I can't recall a Roach of over 1lb 8oz. After a conversation with mates Andy and Spencer, I soon had a venue in mind, and though it had no record of 2lb fish, it was producing a few 1lb+ fish, something which I thought would be a nice start for myself and Wink, who had never had a large Roach either. On arrival at our chosen venue, we discovered that we were to be welcomed by the first frost in a long time; something that always happens when I'm trying something new!

We tried to not let this put us off, but after fishing maggot feeders with no action for around 2 hours we were starting to wonder what we were doing there. Luckily, as motivation was starting to rapidly disappear, Spencer started making his way round to us and soon let us know we weren't fishing anywhere near the Roach shoals; Doh! We soon found ourselves moving to a nice deep bay, where Spencer assured us that the larger Roach were held up in. From the off we started to receive small knocks on the feeders, but not enough for us to connect to. Finally I hooked into a fish, this turning out to be Whitebait sized Roach.... hmmm, we thought, aren't we specimen hunting?

To cut a long story short, we caught around 50 Roach for about 2lb total, if only it had been one fish at that weight! As it turns out Spencer and Andy had not caught many small fish what-so-ever, and expected that the liquidized bread I had put in had drawn the small fish in or had simply spooked off the larger fish. Whatever happened though, next time I'll stick to simple maggot feeders!

         

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