River Kennet, Speen Moors, Monday 14th March 2011

Sorry for the late entry but I’ve had a busy couple of weeks and the blog has had to take a back seat. No season, however, is complete without a last day account of events and so with day 5 spent recovering from the LIF outing here’s how the final day went.

Early and frosty are two words which immediately spring to mind. This was one of my few attempts at fishing for perch at the right time of day but scraping the car in the dark was not what I was expecting to do mid-March. Things weren’t much better when I arrived, frost everywhere and I was worried that the canal may have a thin coating of ice. An exploratory stone throw confirmed that wasn’t the case and a more scientific dip of the probe revealed a water temp of 45 degrees, clearly the canal at least had retained some of its temperature from the preceding warmer period.

Things were looking good as I lowered the first lob into a reedy area little more than a rod length out. Within five minutes the first fish was on the bank, a battered perch of 1lb 14oz

Heartened I unpacked and sorted all my gear in the way that you do when you’re likely to fish a spot for some time. Two hours later I packed it all up again having not caught any more fish, baffling is all I can say.

The wander round Speen started in my usual fashion and I think on this occasion I must’ve fished a good 80% of the venue throughout the day before returning to the canal. The weirpool session produced a gudgeon but was more memorable for an encounter with a chap fishing the far bank. I stopped for a chat and he noticed that I was using a centrepin. He’d bought a reel but couldn’t get on with casting so hadn’t used it much, I explained that reasonable distance could be achieved with the wallis cast but he’d never seen it done and was sceptical. We walked around to where I was going to fish, I cast out and he was gobsmacked. It was only 20 yards or so (good for me) but on the Kennet you rarely need more, once I’d explained the theory and cast a few more times he was convinced and made a note to give it a try in his back garden. If I bump into him again I suspect I know what he’ll be using.

The rest of my wander was pleasant but uneventful, I failed to locate perch, chub or silvers for that matter and so a little disappointed I resigned myself to a last session on the canal back where I’d started. I had a couple of hours of light left and plenty of lobs so there was no need to economise by tearing the worms in half.

What followed was a brilliant mini session, more bites than I could count and several perch landed. None were big but all were around 1 1/2lb with a few tiddlers thrown in, the final tally was about 15 but I really did lose count towards the end. I was quite pleased when the final lob met his maker, I’d been fishing for a solid 12 hours and was plumb tuckered out by the time I packed up and walked back to the car.

Another great end to the season. A break now for me but I do have plans to target tench on some NAA stillwaters during the spring.