5pm to 8pm at local commercial fishery WT 10.5degC. Aim - to catch some reasonable roach

When I came to this fishery 3 years ago (also at this time of year) it was easy fishing with plenty of bites, and I had roach up to 13oz. It started well this time, too. Within seconds of my first cast I had a nice roach of about 9oz, and I was expecting bite-a-chuck, but it turned out to be much slower.

My initial strategy was to fish caster, and loose-feed caster, but not to use ground-bait so as not to attract the carp. But bites were very tricky and not very frequent. I had one or two more roach, and then the perch moved in - nothing too big, but hardly an encouragement to the redfins. So I switched to bread and, since the carp weren't showing, I decided to use groundbait after all. But I caught zilch on bread, possibly because the only size 12 hook I had was a great heavy thing that must have made the enticing piece of breadflake sink far too fast.

As the magic last hour arrived I decided to go back to caster, and fished fine - a size 20 hook to 1.5lb nylon, and pushed the hook into the caster. Not the kind of fishing I normally do, but for once it seemed to work and I started getting confident bites. The trouble was the carp had moved in by this time....

Ah well, I ended up with 4 very nice roach of about 9oz (and they looked much bigger!) plus a couple of perch, a small tench and a small carp and various small roach.

On reflection an important issue for me is what you do when you get very tricky, unhittable bites. Too often I have seen it as a test of my reflexes, and spent a long time striking faster, slower, etc. But today I think the answer was that my 18 hook to 2.5lb line wasn't fine enough. I must try a bit more fishing really fine (size 20 is fine in my book!) when the conditions require it.