Tuesday was due to be fourteen degrees Celsius during the day and raining, with night-time temperatures staying at fourteen until ten o’clock Wednesday when the sun was due to shine and the temperature was due to raise to fifteen. That was the forecast, anyway.
Tuesday morning may well have been warm but it was raining and blowy. Gardeners welcomed the long-awaited-for rain but we had mixed feelings. The idea of putting up and later taking down a wet tent in a wind did not appeal, but on the other hand, because it was the half-term school holidays, maybe the rain would keep a lot of families away and we might have a good choice of pegs at our twelve-noon arrival. Yes, we were fishing twelve noon Tuesday to twelve noon Wednesday.
On arriving at Hazel Court at noon, after a hearty drive-through lunch to keep us going, we looked over the lakes while standing in drizzle. One angling family on Reed Lake and another on the Pleasure Lake but nearest the cars. This meant that our favourite peg was free and away from everyone else but it was at the far end of the lake so the lugging of equipment started.
We pitched the tent first, at right angles to the lake and in front of some dense undergrowth that we figured would afford some protection from the wind that was picking up. Blow up mattresses and sleeping bags were thrown into the tent to be sorted out later and then the umbrella and chairs were erected alongside the tent, again at right angles to the water. Our two rod-pods were set up quite close to each other and the new alarms were fitted. Wil had red for his red, ten-foot, bass spinning rod and blue for the eight-footer, which left me with green and yellow for the method feeder rods.
The rods were already set up from last week and in their individual cases with my pole taking a well-earned rest at home in the garage. Wil had his usual ten-millimetre pink wafters, covered in sticky pellets on method feeders, laced with a pink haze over the top, while I had both rods on Spam sandwiches.
A Spam sandwich is made using my Preston bread punching kit with the eight-millimetre punch. Bread and Spam are punched and then the hair below the hook receives punched bread, then Spam and then bread again.
With Wil volunteering to blow up the mattresses in the tent and to unroll the sleeping bags, I sat under the umbrella looking at nature, the wind behind me, confident that I would hear an alarm, and anyway, Wil had the receiver in the tent with him. It soon became clear that our close-in rods, Wil’s near the lily pads and mine in my margin, were fine, but both rods that had been cast a fair way out were suffering in the wind so they were brought in, rebaited and underarm-cast to around twelve metres.
Again, I sat and watched nature again and the Canada Geese, that had fought recently with the white farmyard geese, now had four chicks, were parading them, and the white geese were more confident and started to herd them away from the best grass. Our guess was that the Canada geese could not start a fight with their chicks being so close. I didn’t even have to get up out of my chair when the alarms went off because Wil with the receiver was exiting the tent to catch a five-pound common carp, two bream of around three pound, and another common carp but this time around four pound. All of these were on his lucky red rod with the apparently lucky red alarm. After a lull of around an hour Wil caught a bigger bream that was weighed at three pounds eight ounces and I caught my first fish, in the margin, which was a two-pound bream.
At nine o’clock, with the wind getting worse, we had a meeting in the tent and decided that if the rods were out all night in the wind, they would be beeping all night and we would get no sleep. A decision was made to get the four rods in, to hunker down in the sleeping bags, to try and get some sleep with the backdrop of gusting wind trying to uproot the trees that surrounded us, and to start fishing again in the morning.
The wind was not kind to us. We both had broken sleep and on three occasions the fly-sheet slipped one of its pegs and Wil volunteered to go out and refix it. With the wind getting worse and flapping the tent material I think I dropped off, only to be woken by the honking of a goose that felt that it was only inches away from my ears.
Waking at six in the morning, we put the rods back out and noted that the wind had dropped slightly and the rain had stopped. Checking all the equipment for wind damage I found that two slices of bread, ready for punching, that were in a sealed plastic bag, had been partially burgled. Something had bitten through the plastic to get at the bread and half was now missing.
In the half-light, sitting under my umbrella again, I noticed slight movement in the grass. Walking to it carefully I discovered a frog, about five-millimetres across, so tiny, and showed it to Wil. From then on Wil became a frog hunter and found another three. Probably coming from the mass of tadpoles we’d witnessed on this peg some weeks back, we wondered if the frogs were a small variety or whether they would grow to a larger size.
Fishing here at six in the morning means that you have the place to yourself until the gates open at eight. It was a lovely time and the fish came in steadily. I started off with a bream of around two pound, then a common of three and a half pound and then another two pound bream. Wil’s patch then lit up as the bream shoal moved over to him and he brought out another two fish of around two pounds.
The final spree before packing up, saw the shoal of bream come back to my rods and I hooked three two pounders in quick succession, one of which even seemed to attack my bait on its way to the bottom.
It wasn’t until we started to dismantle our camp site and to pack up that we both realises how tired we were. It was an effort to get everything back to the car. Eventually we managed to be packed just before twelve, sat in the car and reflected. Apart from the fishing, we’d watched the geese and the habits of tame and wild geese inter-mixing, we’d seen and caught frogs, Wil had played with the farm dogs on three occasions and we’d survived what was Wil’s first ever night of camping. I asked if he’d do it again, maybe mid-summer, and his encouraging replay was that he’d do it again mid-winter, in the snow.
Totting things up we worked out that between us we’d caught nothing large but totalled three common carp and eleven bream, so a good time fishing. We didn’t plan to fish twenty-four hours every time, and maybe camp-out back at Hazel Court in mid-June.
I wondered if our tent could be set up somewhere on the causeway between the Pleasure Lake and the Specimen Lake and over-night, we could maybe alternate between the two. We will have to see.