First session after Christmas, and back on my favourite drain. This time with a very good friend of mine and up and coming pike and zander expert Jamie Martin.
We started off on a remote location, and did some roving. The day started off slow, but picked up just before lunch time.
We arrived at the first location and this looked very promising. Prey fish everywhere and even the odd bream or tench fizzing. Looked perfect, but we didn’t catch. We tried other swims in the area, but no joy. Either the pike were just stuffed with roach or simply not on the feed at the time. We then started to head back to the car and found a nice spot between a reed bed and a land drain outfall.
Within minutes of setting up. Jamie had a jack on a lamprey, which was almost the size of the jack itself, then about twenty minutes later, my float fished roach slid beneath the surface. I struck into the fish and it kept low, so had a feeling it was a good sized specimen. After quite a fight, a beautiful 12ib’er slid into the landing net. On closer inspection, it dawned to us why the pike may of been slow to respond. Both fish had leaches on them, so looks like they were simply lying on the bottom, and just waiting for the food to come to them, definitely a possibility.
After a couple of photos. the young lady was returned, back to the depths.
After returning this fish, we slowly packed our gear up and walked back to the car, and headed to our zander spot.
We got to our swim, and again looked perfect. Plenty of features for zander and lots of prey fish about. Whilst Jamie was setting up he hooked into a good sized jack. We also had a couple of missed runs. It was only a short session into the night, so no zeds on this occasion. However looking at coming back for a proper evening session after the Christmas break. Looking forward to it and keep an eye on my blog!