Hmm...

[Steve Walker]

Fished an over night session on one of the tench pits on Saturday night. The plan was to fish a short evening session from about 7pm to get the swim baited up, get a couple of hours kip and then bag up at dawn.

 

There wasn't much sign of activity when we got there, with no bubbling going on. Not a good sign on these lakes. When it went dark, we fished on with starlites until about 1am when Iain went to get his head down. I decided to fish straight through; I've never done well with tench much after dark, but we'd not had a fish yet.

 

At about 3am I started getting bites, which soon turned into a couple of 1/2 pound tench. Iain emerged about 5, and between us we managed to catch another ten or so tench, not one of them over 4oz. Again, not a sign of a decent fish.

 

I'm not sure whether the recent cooler weather has put the larger fish down, or whether the swim I picked is always like that, but I must confess to being pretty disappointed. I've never caught so many tiny tench in one session.

 

There were some highlights, though; the perfect peace and quiet of a lake in the early hours, turning round and catching a very surprised looking fox in my headlight beam, and a nice 1 3/4 pound perch for Iain. I wish my first ever perch had been that size! I netted it and unhooked it, warning casually that as well as the spikes on the fin you must be careful of the gill cover because it's very... at which point the fish convulsed and gave me a nasty inch-long slash on the hand. I suppose I could have claimed I was giving a demonstration...

 

Still, a poor night's fishing is immeasurably better than a Saturday night watching TV, and from the sound of my snoring that my dear wife thought it terribly amusing to record, I made up for the loss of sleep on Sunday afternoon.

[kendo]

happens to us all matey,but as you said there are bonus's like being at the waterside at that special time of the day.