I went out yesterday walking the canal bank with a spinning rod in my hand looking for perch swims. Just one small perch to a spinner, but then it wasn't in the water that much. I found some likely swims, but it involved walking about a mile and a half which is too much for my back really.

Today I felt I needed to rest the back, so went to my most reliable roach swim on the canalised river armed with bread, plus a few maggots and worms left over from last week. With water temperature a respectable 8 degC I thought the roach would oblige, but not so - just one small one. A chap in a nearby swim was fishing maggot feeder with worm/maggot, but all I saw him catch was a couple of small perch, so I wondered what the problem was.

Nevertheless, I decided to switch to lobworm attack, moving one swim and casting to a tree on the far bank. At least it was a chance to try out my PVA string idea (see last week) for accurate casting. It worked OK, and when I landed my bait right up in the branches of the tree I was able to jerk it out, which I probably wouldn't have managed if the hook was hanging free! But on balance spending 5 minutes doing practice casting was more valuable than the PVA. I wasted a couple of my worms experimenting like this, so was left with only two. I managed to cast a couple of feet from the far bank (the canal is quite wide at this point) and to my surprise the float went down very quickly each time. A couple of perch, about 8oz and 1.25lbs. Nothing fantastic, but it was still great to feel the tug-tug on the end of the line after waiting for Mrs Roach to no avail. I wished I'd been more careful with the worms!