Stillwater piking
Entry posted by Rusty
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Knotts, Wednesday 21st December 2011
Hoorah!! Today is the shortest day and we can now look forward to increasingly light evenings….ok by about 30 seconds a day to begin with but it’s a start…Summer is here!
To celebrate the coming of light we went piking on a stillwater that sees little predator pressure and one that we’ve never seen a pike caught from. Our combined experience of this lake is three visits by me tenching earlier in the year. We had, however, received helpful guidance on where to fish so buoyed with expectation (as ever) off we went. We’d be fishing near the car park so that meant we could load up chairs, cooking stuff and all the bits we needed without having to hire several porters to get it to our swim, barrows are so last year.
Steve arrived earlier than I did and phoned for the lock combination, I revealed the crucial numbers but still found him fumbling with the padlock in frustration when I arrived some five minutes later. For someone who can add up a customer’s bill in milliseconds I found it strange that getting four digits in the right order should be so tricky. On closer inspection it seemed that the padlock had been sprayed with some sort of lubricant and this was hindering its mechanical operation, that’s Steve’s theory.
Security dealt with we started unloading and setting up at the chosen the swim, kettle on and then back through the locked gates to buy the teabags that I’d left at home. Thatcham Village is a quaint little place but not when there are no parking spaces and you don’t want to be there. Ever noticed how local shoppers always strike up a conversation with their friend on the checkout just when you’re next in the queue? They then pay their £2.86 bill with a debit card and smile at the queue when they forget their PIN. After what seemed like an age I was back at the lake and the mobile catering facility was complete. Note the posh table;
Tactics were two deadbait rods and a couple more ledgering lobs. The latter were targeting anything that had an appetite and although we felt that pike were an outside bet the chance of a perch or even a carp taking the lobs provided alternatives. The reed lined swim looked to have potential with plenty of places for a hungry predator to hide from its prey;
It was a slow day to be honest, I’ll cut to the chase….we blanked, we didn’t even get a bite so after a couple of hours we decided to experiment with Steve’s Desert Storm camo gear. It looked similar to the colour of the reeds so firstly we did a ‘before’ shot with Steve making no attempt to hide, see how obvious he is;
The ‘after’ shot is incredible. Once Steve had hidden in the reeds it became almost impossible to tell he was there, had it not been for his face I wouldn’t have known. Only the smell of sausages cooking tempted him out again.
The day ended without so much as a bleep of an alarm or the twitch of a float but it was good to pitch up for a change and have a ‘social’…and not a can of Stella in sight.
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