10am to 11am local lake

What should I fish for? The carp, tench and bream are probably spawning, the roach are doubtless recovering from it. I decided to try for perch using prawn as bait. I've almost no experience of perch fishing at this time of year, but decided to get out for a couple of hours, hopefully dodging the forecast rain.

The first fish was a surprise. It looked breamish, but with no slime. Could it be a silver bream? I wish I'd taken the camera. I estimated it at about 12 oz. Since I've never caught a silver bream before, except possibly a very small one as a teenager, it would be a pb by definition, and a reasonable sized fish as well. Why on earth didn't I weigh it? On getting home I checked the web, and I'm confident it was indeed a silver bream! So I'll count it as a pb at 10 oz, a couple of oz less than my estimate. A good start! And I now strongly suspect a 1lb 7oz fish I caught about 3 weeks ago was a roach-silver bream hybrid. It looked exactly like one of those in one of Mark Wintle's books, though I'd been cautious in thus labelling it as I didn't know there were silver bream in the lake.

The next fish was an 8lb carp. Not really what I was wanting on 4lb line, though welcome enough. But I didn't want any more. Then the next one was a heftier carp, which broke the line - surprising, as I thought I was being gentle with it. At that point the light rain got heavier, and I decided to go home and play chess on the web against someone from some far flung country - and look up what a silver bream looks like!

No perch, but an interesting if very short session.